Situating Global Art: Topologies - Temporalities - Trajectories 9783839433973

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
Contents
Introduction
Situating Global Art. An Introduction
Epistemological Frameworks
Spectres of 1989: On some Misconceptions of the ‘Globality’ in and of Contemporary Art
The Scrim, The Pistol, and the Lectern: Dis-Situating the Global Contemporary
The Aesthetics of Irony as a Form of Resistance: Zhang Peili in “Harmonious Society, 天下無事”
“A Collage of Globalization” in Documenta11’s Exhibition Catalogue
Institutional Politics
Lacing Places: Situationist Practices and Socio-Political Strategies in Korean Urban Art Projects
Gulf Labor: The Boycott as Political Activism and Institutional Critique
You Can’t Always Curate Your Way Out! Reflections on the Ghetto Biennale
Generation 00: The Artist as Citizen
Museological Narratives
How Far How Near: A Global Assemblage in the Modern Art Museum
Of Maps, Nodes and Trajectories: Changing Topologies in Transcultural Curating
Curating as Transcultural Practice. documenta 12 and the “Migration of Form”
Exhibiting Contemporary Moroccan Art: Situated Curatorial Narratives and Institutional Frames of Globalization
Practices of Self-Cultivation
The Art of Globalization / The Globalization of Art: Creating Trans-national, Interethnic, Cross- Gender and Interspecies Identities in the 3D Work of Miao Xiaochun
Transculturally Entangled – Qiu Zhijie’s Concept of Total Art
Globalization as an Artistic Strategy: The Case of Takashi Murakami
The Blind Spot of Global Art? Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Ways of Curating
Biographies

Citation preview

Situating Global Art /

Sarah Dornhof, Nanne Buurman, Birgit Hopfener, Barbara Lutz (eds.)

Situating Global Art

| Volume 89

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Birgit Mersmann /

Situating Global Art /

Sarah Dornhof, Nanne Buurman, Birgit Hopfener, Barbara Lutz (eds.) Situating Global Art Topologies – Temporalities – Trajectories

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Birgit Mersmann / This publication developed out of the conference Situating Global Art that took place in Berlin on 12–14 February 2015 in the context of the International Research Training Group InterArt Studies (Freie Universität Berlin) and was generously supported by the DFG (German Research Foundation).

© 2018 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de Layout: Julia Boehme / juliaboehme.net Proofread: Katherine Vanovitch Copy Edit: Andrea Popelka Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-3397-9 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-3397-3

Situating Global Art /

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Acknowledgements

This publication developed out of the conference Situating Global Art that took place in Berlin on 12–14 February 2015 in the context of the International Research Training Group InterArt Studies (Freie Universität Berlin) and was generously supported by the DFG (German Research Foundation). We would like to thank the members of the research group, particularly director Erika Fischer-Lichte and coordinator Regine Strätling, for their support. Our thanks also go to the Literaturwerkstatt (Kulturbrauerei) for hosting us, to Bernhard Thome (Kunst & Kochen Berlin), to the InterArt student assistants Carolin Beutel and Anna Meier for hospitality and service and to Jens Ludewig (Studio Bens) for the graphic design.    Moreover, we thank all the speakers and audience members for their contributions to lively and productive discussions. The production of this volume owes much to the skills of Katherine Vanovitch (English proof reading), Andrea Popelka (copy editing) and Julia Boehme (graphic design) – for which we are very grateful – and not least to the generosity of the contributing authors, whom we would like to thank not only for their intellectual input but also for their time and patience during the editing process.

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Birgit Mersmann /

Contents Situating Global Art An Introduction by the Editors  11 Epistemological Frameworks

Institutional Politics

Jacob Birken Spectres of 1989: On some Misconceptions of the ‘Globality’ in and of Contemporary Art  35   

Birgit Mersmann Lacing Places: Situationist Practices and Socio-Political Strategies in Korean Urban Art Projects   91

Andrew Stefan Weiner The Scrim, the Pistol, and the Lectern: DisSituating the Global Contemporary  53 Voon Pow Bartlett The Aesthetics of Irony as a Form of Resistance: Zhang Peili in “Harmonious Society, 天下無事”  63 Antigoni Memou “A Collage of Globalization” in Documenta11 ’s Exhibition Catalogue   75

Janna-Mirl Redmann Gulf Labor: The Boycott as Political Activism and Institutional Critique   111 Leah Gordon You Can’t Always Curate Your Way Out! Reflections on the Ghetto Biennale 129 Abdellah Karroum Generation 00: The Artist as Citizen   155

Introduction

Museological Narratives

Practices of Self-Cultivation

Jelle Bouwhuis How Far How Near : A Global Assemblage in the Modern Art Museum  167

Isabel Seliger The Art of Globalization /  The Globalization of Art: Creating Transnational, Interethnic and Cross-Gender Identities in the 3D Work of Miao Xiaochun   255

Annette Bhagwati Of Maps, Nodes and Trajectories: Changing Topologies in Transcultural Curating  191 Barbara Lutz Curating as Transcultural Practice. documenta 12 and the “Migration of Form”  213 Sarah Dornhof Exhibiting Contemporary Moroccan Art: Situated Curatorial Narratives and Institutional Frames of Globalization  231

Birgit Hopfener Transculturally Entangled – Qiu Zhijie’s Concept of Total Art  275 Ronit Milano Globalization as an Artistic Strategy: The Case of Takashi Murakami   289 Nanne Buurman The Blind Spot of Global Art? Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Ways of Curating  301 Biographies  327

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Introduction

Introduction

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INTRODUCTION

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An Introduction /

Introduction

Nanne Buurman, Sarah Dornhof, Birgit Hopfener, Barbara Lutz

Situating Global Art. An Introduction In recent years, ‘global art’ has become a catchphrase in contemporary art discourses. Having gained momentum over the last third of the twentieth century, the Euro-American expansion in scope from an engagement primarily with ‘Western’ art to a broader geographical frame of reference has often been associated with an emancipatory project that challenges racist, sexist and classist exclusions by revising the canon to integrate cultural production from hitherto marginalized regions, groups of people or fields of activity. While the ‘world art studies’ or ‘global art history’ approaches affiliated with earlier traditions of world art history have generally taken a more additive stance,1 other perspectives on art in a global context – particularly those informed by postcolonial and feminist theory – have also made an effort to deconstruct prevailing ‘Western’ categories of art and the disciplinary hierarchizations inscribed into their institutions.2 Apart from simply including art by non-Westerners and non-males, or pop cultural practices and visual cultures as worthy of analysis, the latter have shifted attention to the systemic discriminations caused by the logic of national and regional canons, art history’s ‘colonial unconscious’ and other structural conditions of exclusion.3 1  On ‘world art history’ or ‘world art studies’, see for instance Onians (1996), Summers (2003), Elkins (2007) and Elkins / Kim / Valiavicharska (2010), Carrier (2008), Zijlmans / Van Damme (2008). World art discourses have been critically historicized, for instance, by Pfisterer (2008) and by Leeb (2015). 2  For a critique of art historical canon-building from a feminist perspective, see for instance Pollock (1987). She argues that adding women to the canon is not feminist because it leaves the underlying structures unchallenged. Another feminist art historian, Nochlin, was among the first to draw on postcolonial studies, more precisely Said’s concept of orientalism, in her study “The Imaginary Orient” (1983). See also Shohat (1998). Other early art historical work indebted to postcolonial theory includes Coombes (1992), Craven (1991), and Karentzos /Reuter (2012). See also Brzyski (2007)

and the programme Kanon-Fragen: Die Ressourcen der Moderne (2016–2019) at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. 3  See Schmidt-Linsenhoff (2005). Like other contributors to von Bismarck and Below (2005), she criticizes the neocolonial implications of postcolonialism while at the same time acknowledging its historical importance. Likewise, Araeen, founding editor of Third Text (launched in 1987 as the first academic journal dedicated to decentring Eurocentric perspectives), became a critic of postcolonial approaches because in his view they upheld the modern ‘Western’ logic of Othering (Araeen 2000). See also Mercer (2005–2008), Schmidt-Linsenhoff (2010) and Juneja (2012).

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12 Drawing on these insights, our introduction seeks to give a broad overview of the discourses and practices that today constitute the phenomenon of ‘global art’ in the widest sense, while also making a case for the need to situate global art by critically elaborating on its temporalities, topologies and trajectories. In this endeavour, we are indebted to a number of theoretical, curatorial and artistic perspectives that are currently working towards decolonizing art historical knowledge and replacing binary epistemological models (such as art vs. craft, occident vs. orient, progressive historical time vs. timeless traditions, theory vs. practice) with more relational approaches focusing on contacts, flows and circulations, as well as global relations of production.4 In their critical accounts of the complex entanglements of arts in a global context, many of these projects not only seek to dismantle North American and Western European hegemonies, but also revise postcolonial traditions to avoid once again reproducing colonial categories of thought. Importantly, this also means factoring in post- and neo-colonial realities, inequalities and power relations, which are increasingly addressed by the notions of the ‘Global North’ and the ‘Global South’.5 This introduction documents our joint effort to come to terms with the concept of global art from different angles and disciplinary backgrounds, in the course of which a number of aspects came to the fore that pose significant challenges in critically dealing with ‘global art’: among them the tensions between historiography and contemporaneity, between universality and particularity, and between situated knowledges, identity politics and commodifications of difference. 4  Note, for example, attempts to construct a critical geography of art as an ‘expanded field’ (Rogoff 2000), a ‘horizontal art history’ (Piotrowski 2008), an ‘art history of contact’ (Kravagna 2013a), a ‘materialist history of circulations’ (DaCosta Kaufmann / Dossin / Joyeux-Prunel 2015), a ‘transcultural arthistory’ (Juneja 2015b), or a ‘history of flows and counterflows’ (Verhagen 2017).

5  The term Global South is generally used not as a geographical category of location, but of geo-economic relations and developments, a “working concept”, a “mode of inquiry” (Gardner / Green 2014) or a “state of mind”, as suggested by the journal South as a State of Mind founded in Athens in 2012. See also Gardner (2013) and de Sousa Santos (2014).

Introduction Temporalities The relatively recent (academic) mainstreaming of ‘global art’ as an object and a field of study 6 has to be seen in the context of an intensified economic and cultural globalization since the 1990s,7 reflected, for example, in the booming international art market with its art fairs and auction houses, the multiplication of museums of contemporary art (MoCAs) and the proliferation of biennials worldwide.8 Due to the geopolitical shifts caused by the end of the Cold War as well as technological developments around the World Wide Web, the year 1989 has often been identified as a historical watershed, not least because other events like the Tiananmen Square massacre in China and political caesurae in South America took place that year.9 The expansion in international trade after the ‘victory’ of capitalism, together with new means of communication and cheap travel, gave rise to a heightened degree of connectivity, which has prompted both optimism about the opportunities of global exchange and critique of globalization as 6  The institutionalization of global art can, for instance, be observed in the foundation of study programmes. After pioneering programmes such as the DFG project Das Subjekt und die Anderen. Interkulturalität und Geschlechterdifferenz von der Frühen Neuzeit bis zur Gegenwart, the graduate school Identität und Differenz. Geschlechterkonstruktionen und Interkulturalität im 18.–20. Jahrhundert (2000–2006) and the Centre for Postcolonial and Gender Studies at the University of Trier (2005–2013), German higher education has recently seen the establishment of a number of departments and research initiatives, such as the Chair of Global Art History (since 2009) and the cluster of excellency Asia and Europe in a Global Context in Heidelberg, the research unit 1703 on Transcultural Negotiations in the Ambits of Art: Comparative Perspectives on Historical Contexts and Current Constellations at the Freie Universität Berlin (2011–2017), the MA programme Transcultural Studies at the University of Bremen (since 2008) and the Relocating Modernism: Global Metropolises, Modern Art and Exile programme in Munich (2017–2022). International programmes include the study programme Art of the Contemporary World and World Art Studies at the University of Leiden (since 2003), the research group Art, Globalization, Interculturality at the University of Barcelona (2008-2016), the MA course Global Arts at Goldsmith College, University of London (2011-2016), The Global Art Studies Program at the University of California (since 2016), the MFA Global Art Practice at Tokyo University (since 2016), the MA Art History in the Global Context at the University of Zurich (since

2013), and the PhD Program Cultural Mediations, Carleton University, Ottawa (since 2000). Research programmes in museums dedicated to revisions of collection policies include the Guggenheim Global Arts Initiative (2012–2017), Global Art and the Museum at ZKM Karlsruhe (2006–2016) and Global Museum, a programme by the German Federal Cultural Foundation (since 2015), which is funding projects by a variety of German institutions. The authors of this text are founding members of the Research Network for Transcultural Practices in the Arts and Humanities (RNTP) (since 2015). 7  For a discussion of diverging understandings and periodizations of globalization, see Khan (2009: 11-20). See also Anderson (2005) for a discussion of nationalism, globalization, capitalism and US hegemony. In an interview with Nasar, Rogoff (2012: 102–103) criticizes the primacy of economic frameworks in thinking about the globalization of art and suggests thinking of it in terms of “cultural globalization” and affective registers to avoid conceptualizing art as merely reactive to the economy. 8  On the nexus of ‘Biennalization’ and ‘Globalization’ of art, see for instance Filipovic / van Hal / Øvstebø (2010), Eilat et al. (2014), Green / Gardner (2016) and Vogel (2010). 9  See for instance Belting (2009: 40) and Scheps (1999: 16ff.) For a critique of the Eurocentrism of this date, see for instance Kravagna (2013b) and Simbao (2015). For a problematization of 1989 as prioritizing Western-centric Cold War narratives, see Piotrowski, who points out that the ‘East’ has remained a blind spot in post-colonial and global art historiography (2015: 119). See also Hlavajova / Sheikh (2017).

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14 the installation of a never-ending, all-inclusive capitalist now.10 Therefore, it comes as no surprise that the posthistoire thesis has been adopted by art history and theory, which frequently equate ‘global art’ with contemporary art.11 Nevertheless, the Eurocentric, linear, teleological historiography of progress, with its chronological periodization of modern, postmodern, and contemporary art, has been criticized for failing to take into account not only the multiplicity of modernities, 12 but also the heterogeneity of coexisting contemporary art practices. This is perhaps one of the reasons why the exhibition format – with its capacity for synchronically displaying a variety of things with different status, and thus literally presenting objects and people from diverse contexts as co-present – is sometimes seen as a critical corrective of linear historiography and as a counter-model to diachronic narratives of progress.13 In fact, exhibitions such as Magiciens de La Terre and the Third Havana Biennial (both 1989), but also documenta X (1997) and Documenta11 (2002), as well as the process that has been dubbed biennialization, are often considered as crucial for the formation of ‘global art’.14 10  Bydler (2004), for instance, discusses the ambivalent effects of the globalization and biennialization of contemporary art, with particular attention to the labour market for art professionals as well as the potential for questioning given concepts of art and historiography. Lee (2012) argues that contemporary globalization is so all-encompassing that it is impossible to speak of a separate art world, which is why all artworks, regardless of their subject matter, are not only objects of globalization but also its agents. 11  Belting (2009), for instance, equates global art with contemporary art, which he posits as post-historical with respect to Western art history’s periodization (into modern, postmodern and contemporary art) and post-ethnic with regard to local traditions. He builds here on his earlier work (1996; 2003). See also Belting / Buddensieg / Weibel (2013) and Harris (2011). 12  Discourses concerned with multiple modernities question the assumption that modernism is an exclusively ‘Western’ phenomenon or one that originated exclusively in Paris and was then copied by the rest of the world. See Eisenstadt (2000) for a deconstruction of the underlying binaries of the Western centre and ‘non-Western’ peripheries. See also Mitter (2008), Araeen (2007), Kapur (2000), and the documenta 12 Magazine No. 1, Modernity? (2007). While the notion of multiple modernities tends to focus on separate alternative modernisms, the notion of global modernism was introduced to emphasize that even European modernism cannot be studied without situating it in the larger global context of colonial entanglements. See for instance the Global Modernisms programme at the HKW, Berlin, in 2015.

13  Exhibitions with their colonial and imperial history of nineteenth-century great exhibitions, colonial collections and human zoos as well as their role in nation-building can, of course, also stage linear narratives of progress, imperial “world pictures” (Mitchell 1989; Mitchell 2007) or serve as “The Preserves of Colonialism” (Kravagna 2008). See also Rogoff/Sherman (1994), Bennett (1995), Duncan (1995), Meister/von Hantelmann (2010). Nevertheless, the format as such allows for more variation and modes of relating things than the linearity of written language in a book. For reflections on historically shifting display conventions and their varying effects on subjectivation, see Buurman (2016). For post-colonial museology, see, for instance Kazeem/ Martinz-Turek/Sternfeld (2009) and Chambers et al. (2014). Discourses around ‘the curatorial’ have worked towards a transcultural and transdisciplinary revision of curatorial practice beyond the format of the exhibition, see von Bismarck et al. (2012; 2014; 2016) and Martinon (2013). 14  See the Afterall Book Series Making Art Global (Weiss et al. 2011; Steeds at al. 2013). Belting (2009), Juneja (2011: 280) and Piotrowski (2015: 116) also draw attention to this. For further discussion of the relationship between the exhibition form and globalization, see Enwezor (2010 [2002]), Groys (2009), Dimitrakaki (2012) and Osborne (2014).

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Introduction Yet, curatorial tendencies seeking to overcome discriminatory classifications – such as the modern segregation between ‘ethnic objects’ and ‘high art’ – by integrating practices and artefacts formerly excluded from notions of modern and contemporary art are nevertheless frequently criticized: either for staging spectacles of exoticism or for the homogenizing and universalizing effects of decontextualizing displays.15 While the ‘denial of coevalness’ is problematic for its Othering of ‘non-Western’ practices as backward, the shift from a ‘museal’ to a ‘biennial’ temporal regime focused on the current state of the arts16 in some cases suggests a shared global experience of reality with little room to account for heterochronicity.17 To circumvent this totalizing assumption of spatio-temporal simultaneity and the dangers of conceiving ‘global art’ as a universal and ahistorical phenomenon where colonial inequalities and power hierarchies have been resolved, some scholars have sought to highlight the temporal and geo-political heterogeneity of art in a global context by conceiving of contemporaneity as a “disjunctive unity of present times”.18 This critical understanding of contemporaneity significantly acknowledges the co-presence and interrelation 15  As a response to anthropological critiques, particularly to Fabian’s problematization of the “denial of coevalness” (2002: 25f), differentiation between ethnographic artefacts and art works has been politicized along the lines of critiquing exclusionary exoticization on the one hand and undifferentiated universalization on the other. The Othering of non-European art practices as crafts has also been problematized, for instance, by Oguibe (2003), in critiques of the exhibitions Magiciens de la Terre (for instance Chandler 2009), documenta 12 (for instance Kravagna 2007), and exhibitions of Outsider Art that took place in 2013 at the Barbican in London and the Venice Biennale. See also Clifford (1988; 1997a). For the politics of classification, the recent trend to rename ethnographic museums into museums of ‘world cultures’ and to commission contemporary artists to devise critical interventions in colonial collections, see Leeb (2013). 16  See Osborne (2014). The perennial exhibition documenta, for instance, one of the first recurring large scale exhibitions for modern and contemporary art, was founded in 1955 with the aim of re-establishing modern art, formerly ostracized by the Nazis as ‘degenerate’. The internationalist approach of arguing for art’s universality was emphasized at the first documenta by including photographs of all kinds of European and nonEuropean arts and artefacts to provide genealogical backing for what Werner Haftmann would, during the second edition, term “Abstraktion als Weltsprache” (see Grasskamp 2017). This Eurocentric universalization of abstraction as the end point of teleological progress in art was followed in later documenta editions by a remark-

ably slow integration of ‘non-Western’ contemporary art. Participation of non-European /non-USAmerican contemporary artists only occurred in significant numbers starting with documenta X in 1997. For documenta as an example of a ‘local history of globalization’, see also Eichel (2015). 17  In his chapter “Is Modernity Multiple?” Moxey (2013) questions the idea that there is such a thing as a multiple modernity or multiple contemporaneity, arguing that the ‘Western’ colonial concept of avant-garde necessarily precludes an acceptance of practices as modern that have been produced under socio-economic conditions other than Western modernity. Belting (1999: 325) argues that ‘Western’ exhibition practice subjects other cultures to a ‘Western’ understanding of art by means of decontextualization, a process that Weibel (1997) describes as the colonialism of the White Cube with its universalization of ‘Western’ display conventions. Wuggenig / Buchholz (2005) use statistics to provide sociological proof that participation of artists from “non-northwestern” countries in the global art world has only risen insignificantly since the 1970s, which they believe speaks for unbroken hegemonies of ‘Western’ centres and their institutional structures. 18  See Osborne (2013: 22) for this notion of ‘contemporaneity’ that seeks to leave behind the conventional meaning of ‘contemporary’ as a concept of a linear historiography. For the controversial debates on contemporaneity, see also Smith (2008; 2015), Foster et al. (2009), Asia Art Archive (2012), Cox / Lund (2016), Belting / Buddensieg (2013).  

16 of radically varying social conditions of art production, distribution and reception worldwide. Building on existing critiques of the totalizing presentism of ‘the global contemporary’ 19 and on critiques of the ways in which identitarian thinking is reproduced in some postcolonial and multicultural theorization,20 in this publication we attempt to avoid the false alternative between globalist universalism and localist particularism. Rather, our aim is to problematize reductive notions of global art and encourage a more differentiated inquiry into the diverse aesthetic, cultural, historical, political, epistemological and socio-economic conditions, possibilities and effects of both the term ‘global art’ itself and the practices and institutions it subsumes. By inviting authors to consider how practices of art production, curating, historiography and criticism relate to past and present processes of globalization, transnational circulation and transcultural exchange, our goal was not only to demonstrate the multiplicity of meanings which the notion of global art can acquire as an (artistic) genre, an (art historical) discourse, an (epistemological) dispositif or a (social) field of interconnected institutions and agencies, but also to situate specific phenomena of art historically, geo-politically, and socio-economically. Topologies Looking at diverse art forms, actors and institutions in increasingly globalized art fields, we hope the texts assembled here can help to counter (new) simplifying universalisms and nationalisms by analysing specific practices and discourses in their transnational and transdisciplinary entanglements.21 Situating Global Art should thus not be misunderstood as a call for a simple return to area studies, or – worse – a reactionist grounding of agency in fixed regional identities and phantasies of cultural homogeneity.22 We rather aim to problematize art historical and anthropological, academic and artistic border politics by paying attention to the convergences of the ways 19  The Global Contemporary: Art Worlds After 1989 (2011) was an exhibition at the Centre for Arts and Media (ZKM) Karlsruhe that has become a central reference point in discourses of global art and contemporaneity. 20  See for instance Juneja (2011), who draws on Mercer’s “Black Art and the Burden of Representation” (1990) in her call to leave behind additive, expansive or inclusive approaches in favour of a change of paradigm from politics of representation to a scrutiny of the conditions of visibility. 21  For the concept of ‘entangled histories’ coined in the context of global history to analyse transnational, -cultural and -regional exchanges, see Conrad /  Randeria (2002). See also Werner / Zimmerman (2002; 2006) for the concept of ‘histoire croisée’

that entails a self-reflexive dimension. For a transnational approach to art history, see Kippenberg / Mersmann (2016). For a problematization of ‘trans’ terminology and the insight that the problems caused by ‘transified’ terms cannot be transcended by simply coining new ones, see Weichhart (2010). 22  According to Juneja (2015a: n.p.) it is necessary to “make the concept of the region itself a subject of reflection” as “a product of spatial and cultural displacement, to define it as a participant in and as contingent upon the historical relationships in which it is implicated”. She problematizes the “congealing of regions as area studies” as a negative effect of the otherwise important call to “provincialize Europe”, formulated by Chakrabarty (2000).

Introduction in which cartographies of art production and reception, the different genres and media of art as well as the research concerned with them perform complex processes of de-bordering (and re-bordering).23 Transnational and inter-art studies of Entgrenzungen (German for de-bordering) contribute to challenging essentialist notions of purity and counter the naturalization of boundaries between countries or art forms,24 without subscribing to the fantasy that a world without borders is within reach just because capital moves freely. In fact, whether we like it or not, the nation, which has played an important role in anti-colonial struggles against empires of the past, is currently regaining its significance in world politics, with left and right movements appealing to ideas of sovereign statehood or national identity as reactions to the hegemonies of neoliberal capitalist globalization.25 Against this backdrop, Situating Global Art proposes to look at (global) art from a transcultural perspective that acknowledges the inherent transculturality of artistic practices and artefacts,26 whose dynamic cross-cultural constellations, migrations and transformations, locations and dislocations we would like to account for. Rather than subscribing to an abstract ideology of globalism, we therefore suggest looking at particular topologies made up of institutions, actors and more specific practices of art, historiography or curation as nodal points in networks that transcend bounded (geographical) categories of nation, region or city. These transcultural topologies become the sites of research, encounter or conflict within which commodities, knowledges and affects potentially circulate worldwide, thereby generating a kind of excess or “surplus” that cannot be captured entirely by global capitalism.27 With artefacts, people, practices, theories and capital crossing 23  For border crossings and shifting boundaries, see also Randeria (2016). 24  For a problematization of the mutually conditioning, complicated and contradictory transformations of contemporary art as post-conceptual art and its relations to the dynamics of global capitalism, see for instance Osborne (2013: 28). See also Kravagna (2013b: 50). For parallels in the transcultural and intermedial dissolution of boundaries (Entgrenzungen) and the performativity of their reciprocal mediation in installation art, see Hopfener (2012). 25  It is important, however, to differentiate between the nation as an “imagined community” (Anderson 1983), the idea of a Kulturnation defined by a shared culture that pertains to cultural identity, and the idea of the nation state as a political, administrative entity, linked to citizenship and contingent territoriality. See Hühn et al. (2010: 19-21). 26  In her writing on transcultural art history, Juneja reflects not only the multidirectional reciprocity of empirical transcultural exchanges but also

the epistemological implications of a transcultural perspective, critically expanding on the genealogy of the concept from Ortiz’ notion of ‘transculturation’ to Welsch’s idea of ‘transculturality’. See, for instance, Juneja /Kravagna (2013). 27  In a conversation with von Osten, Maharaj (2013) describes ‘the global’ as something that “is not simply the connectedness of the world”, but “what is secreted out of that connectedness”, while von Osten demands “a focus on the surplus that transnational lives, economies as well as transcultural encounters are generating”, which they also link to Glissant’s notion of opacity. Moreover, Meskimmon (2010) argues that art plays an important role in the formation of a cosmopolitan imagination and Papastergiadis (2012), likewise, scrutinizes how art has turned to cosmopolitanist hospitality that counters the problematic linking of the figure of the terrorist and the migrant in the post 9 / 11 political imaginary by constituting an aesthetic cosmopolitanism, that is, a world-making activity.

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18 and connecting different regions and social milieus, the local – therefore – should not be considered as disconnected from or in opposition to the global.28 Instead, their mutual entwinement may be understood as a translocal condition of globality where cultural and economic globalization interact, raising the important question whether ‘global art’ is a political claim or an economic structure, or – in fact – both.29 The potential of the proposed transcultural perspective on global art that takes into account not only the global (and globalizing) conditions of production but also specific localities is that it allows scholars to grasp cross-cultural connections, interactions as well as marginalized forms of knowledge and agency that are otherwise often overlooked or underestimated in their critical force. Focusing on the transcultural topologies of global art thus permits the study of relational processes of circulation and exchange while also calling into question the idea of ethno-cultural locality as a nostalgic marker of authenticity as well as celebrations of multicultural plurality that disregard ongoing inequalities in capitalist and (neo-)colonial power relations.30 Indeed, acknowledging diversity and mobilizing local specificities may not only prompt emancipatory frictions and antagonisms in the face of cultural homogenization on the national or global scale, but must remain mindful of the risk of contributing to naturalize difference and otherness along with their commodification as local flavours in cultural industries and markets.31 This volume therefore attempts to trace the potentials and pitfalls of art practices and discourses confronted with an ever accelerating 28  See Appadurai (1990) for an account of the fusion of the local and the global and the concept of disjunctive scapes. His theory of flows rejects bounded limits without, however, taking into account the reterritorializations that Robertson (1995) describes. Following Robertson’s terminology of “glocalization”, Vogel (2013) suggests speaking of “glocal art”. For an art history perspective, see Preziosi / Farago (2012: 94–120) 29  This question is raised in the preface of Texte zur Kunst’s special issue Globalismus / Globalism (2013). Similar issues have been addressed in the alterglobalization movement since the turn of the millennium. Hardt and Negri’s Empire (2000), which is both an analysis of the new world order and a manifesto setting out the emancipatory potential of a decentralized constitution of empire, has served as a central reference for critics of globalization who insist that ‘another world is possible’. Explicitly drawing on Empire, Enwezor speaks of “strategic globality” (2010: 441) to insist on the emancipatory potential of large-scale exhibitions.

See also Bourriaud’s publication The Radicant (2009), which was developed out of his 2009 show The Altermodern at Tate London. 30  See Davis (1996) for a critique of neoliberal deployment of multiculturalism as “a veneer” to “create the illusion of victory over racism”. In her view, “diversity management” covers over “persisting economic inequalities” and “power relations”, turning pluralism into “a spectacle” (ibid. 40–45). 31  Hall had problematized this dialectic in “The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity” (1997), where he also cites the phenomenon of the “ethnic artist” (38). For a mobilization of aspects of subjectivity such as race, class and gender in global capitalism’s biopolitics and its global divisions of labour, see for instance Dimitrakaki (2013). She sees a shift of art from postmodernism to globalization, from cultural to economic subjects, or from identity to labour in the first decade of the 21th century and warns that linking identity with representation risks resulting in tokenism (ibid. 55).

Introduction process of neoliberal globalization and its flipside, the rise of neo-nationalist movements worldwide. Despite best intentions to keep in mind the ways in which discriminations always operate at the intersection of multiple social categories (such as race, class and gender),32 it seems that the analytical focus on geography, ethnicity and cultural identity in global art discourses often leads to a disregard for the effects of gender and class, which is why earlier feminist or intersectional initiatives to break with Eurocentric narratives of art only rarely appear in the references. Likewise, the focus on cultural difference often tends to leave economic conditions of inequality unobserved, which is perhaps one reason why none of the contributions made it their prime concern to analyse gender issues or the workings of markets, even if dealers, auction houses and art fairs are perhaps the most powerful drivers of global art as a success story.33 Trajectories Situating Global Art, then, significantly also means acknowledging and defining the position from which one speaks, situating one’s own discourse in order to prevent the naturalization of the perspectives and methods in use. In this sense, this publication and the contributions it assembles have to be considered as ‘situated knowl­edges’ in themselves,34 for they assess the phenomenon of global art from a multiplicity of partial perspectives shaped by a variety of professional and disciplinary affiliations as well as social backgrounds.35 Transdisciplinary dialogue between art history, anthropology, cultural and curatorial studies, for instance, is – as our collaboration as editors has enabled us to realize – particularly useful in identifying some of the blind spots in our respective axioms and thought systems by turning the disciplinary assumptions and methodological habits into objects of scientific reflexivity.36 Moreover, it has allowed us to broaden our horizons by 32  Intersectional Feminism calls attention to the overlaps between racism, classism and sexism and the ways in which systems of exploitation and oppression intersect. The term was coined in 1989 by Crenshaw, although the ideas existed before and were promoted particularly by black feminists, such as hooks, Davis or Morrison. See Salem (2016) for a genealogy of intersectionality theories, in which she criticizes liberal white feminism’s disregard for race and the neoliberal co-option of diversity as a governmental tool. 33  Vogel (2013) remarks that the art world is no longer a small exclusive elite ‘Western’ circle but a world-spanning economy worth millions. She points out that since 1991 the art market has grown by 575% (ibid. 44–45). 34  For the concept of ‘situated knowledge’ see Haraway (1988). Self-situating has also been important in the ‚writing culture’ debates in anthropology“, see for instance Clifford (1986: 22;

1997b: 11). For art history as an ethical practice of self-positioning, see also Seth (2007) and Farago (forthcoming). 35  It should be noted that the majority of authors write from a German or ‘Middle European’ point of view drawing on ‘Euro-American’ traditions in art history, cultural studies and anthropology that inform their thinking as much as the use of English as a foreign language, which perhaps unavoidably entails reproducing dominant tropes from the so-called ‘Anglosphere’. On the need to provincialize the European perspective, see Chakrabarty (2000). 36  On the need for an interdisciplinary global art history as a transcultural history that decentres ‘Western’ modes of historiography, calling into question their imperial claim to universality, see for instance Mersmann (2016) and Preziosi (1998).

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20 learning from each other. Being aware of the specificity of our viewpoints and their limitations,37 the book nevertheless also seeks to contribute to decentring and decolonizing Euro­centric knowledge and power structures.38 This also calls for a critical investigation into the neoliberal co-optation of emancipatory politics of inclusion and diversification as capitalist assets.39 Consequently, a critique of the epistemological foundations which underlie institutions of art production, distribution and reception, particularly of those analytical tools of art history that are still very much rooted in Euro-American worldviews,40 must be complemented by critical reflections on the governmental effects of canon expansion, the naturalization of difference in identitarian policies of cultural or national representation, and the ideology of inescapable capitalist global contemporaneity. To acknowledge both the structural constraints and the potentialities for agency, we suggest replacing theories of (fixed) identity with the notion of (changeable) positionality in relationship to a number of intersecting and potentially shifting social affiliations (race, class, gender, age, location). In other words, we would like to encourage casting aside the obsession with origins and who one is in favour of a perspective of practice and what one does, from being to doing, without forgetting that the options for agency are sometimes heavily confined and policed by outright violence, not to mention subtler mechanisms of discursive, social or biopolitical control.41 Taking into account the intersectionality of different entangled factors that define the complex and shifting relationships of actors and institutions in the arena of global art, we would like to call attention to the ethical effects of ‘Western’ modernity’s binary thinking structures, its accompanying hierarchical spatio-temporal order, into which difference can be incorporated seamlessly unless it challenges the underlying 37  As scholars, who happen to be ‘white’, ‘female’, middle-class German citizens, we are aware that we speak from a specific position, which entails certain privileges as well as blind spots. See Greve (2013) for theorization of ‘critical whiteness studies’ and its kinship with ‘critical masculinity studies’ as reflexive approaches that seek to raise consciousness about structural privileges arising from constructions of race and gender. She also provides an overview on the adoption of concepts of ‘critical whiteness’ and ‘critical Occidentalism’ in Germany and German art history, particularly in feminist art history. 38  For a problematization of ‘epistemic violence’, see Spivak (1988). For more recent theories dedicated to decolonizing thinking, see for instance Mohanty (2003), Mignolo (2009; 2012 [1999]), Mignolo/Tolstanova (2012) and de Sousa Santos (2014).

39  For problematizations of the commodification of difference in the arts, see for instance Kwon (1997), Shohat (1998), Jones (2010), Osborne (2014), and Barbisan/Bremer/Marguin (2015). 40  See for instance Jones (2012), who analyses the history of the modern Western binary structure of thinking and being in the world and its effects on notions of art and identity. 41  In “Necropolitics” (2003) Mbembe, for instance, expands on the Foucauldian concept of biopolitics, drawing attention to its risk of neglecting the role of bodily violence and politics of death, legitimizations of murder and the right to kill in contemporary politics. See also his Critique of Black Reason (2017) for the entanglement of colonial and capitalist racist politics of objectivation / desubjectivation.

Introduction ideological (and epistemological) regimes.42 Both the extended application of traditional European art historical categories – such as artistry, autonomy, intentionality, style and mastery – and placing an emphasis on ethnic difference, with all its exoticizing effects, often turn a blind eye to the persistent hierarchies, exclusions and violence that are glossed over in sometimes all too optimistic accounts of global connectivity and exchange, where the contemporary ‘itinerant artist’ has come to epitomize mobility, migration and cosmopolitan sophistication.43 Embracing (cultural) plurality while leaving problematic inherited disciplinary categories and narratives intact risks reinforcing and extending their validity as well as keeping racialized, gendered and classed hierarchies, exclusions and inequalities hidden from view. Against this backdrop, our insistence on differentiation should not be misunderstood as a naturalization of differences, but read as an attempt to acknowledge the multiple ways in which delineations, identifications and discriminations play their part in constructing particular understandings of reality and history, which has ethical implications because these imaginaries have social and political real world effects. Section Summaries With the triad Topologies – Temporalities – Trajectories, we hope to provide a framework that accommodates not only the ways in which particular positions, situations and situatings have been reached but also to open up space for their future contingency. The book is conceived as a discursive arena to negotiate the potentials and pitfalls of global art’s discourses and practices. From a wide range of different entry points, contributors interrogate the ways in which art and its theorizations are affected by (infra-)structural changes in the art field and the shifting conditions of transcultural art production, distribution and reception. They concern themselves not only with critical reflections of the status quo but also with potentials for agency in the context of an ever globalizing world, raising the following questions: What are the epistemological and socio-economic frameworks for global art dispositifs and what possibilities for political action do they engender? How can artists and curators intervene in given institutional structures and how can the latter be hijacked or reinvented for critical purposes? What 42  See Davis (1996) for her critique of the position that “difference doesn’t make any difference, if only we acquire knowledge about it” (ibid. 46). “Yet, although you are permitted to be an ‘other,’ you must work ‘as if’ you were not a member of a marginalized group.” (ibid.) See also the conference Difference that makes no Difference (2015) in Frankfurt am Main, organized by Dhawan: http:// www.frcps.uni-frankfurt.de/?page_id=2739.

43  For a problematization of the itinerant artist as a role model, see for instance Kwon (1997: 100–101) and Foster (1994). On migration as a topos of art works, see for example Demos (2013). See also Karentzos / Kittner / Reuter (2010), Dogramaci (2013), Mersmann et al. (2015) and Texte zur Kunst Wir sind Ihr / They Are Us (2017).

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22 kinds of (hi)stories are told in museums and how can curators stimulate alternative museological narratives? What kinds of subjects are constituted in the context of globalization and to what extent are practices of selfcultivation, informed by transcultural conceptions of art, reproducing or subverting dominant norms of subjectivity and identity? The first section in this volume addresses the epistemological frameworks of global art discourses and the shifts occurring within them. Responding to exhibitions such as The Global Contemporary: Art Worlds after 1989 (Karlsruhe), Documenta11 (Kassel), and Harmonious Society: 天下無事 (Manchester), as well as to individual artistic positions, their shared motive is to investigate the ideological conditions behind global art practices. Problematizing the totalizing capacity of contemporary capitalism, where the notion of global art functions like a brand, the dialectics of situatedness, and the need to negotiate the repressive tolerance of neoliberal regimes (including contemporary China), the contributions here offer a historical perspective on how art history (Jacob Birken) and art criticism (Andrew Weiner) as well as large-scale exhibitions (Antigoni Memou) and Biennial participants (Voon Pow Bartlett) have engaged with ‘global art’ as a tool of both critique and propaganda. They negotiate the ambivalence of emancipation from modernity and modernist ideologies (of progress), with liberal post-historical diversification making it difficult, if not impossible, to differentiate between the critical and the complicit. Insisting on such ambivalence, these contributions demonstrate how established binaries can no longer provide suitable epistemological frameworks and are obliged to remain indecisive, so that each individual example needs to be considered in the light of its specific critical potentials. The contributions in the second section of the book address artistic and curatorial practices that intervene in or reinvent institutional politics. They discuss artistic collectives, generations or projects that seek to critique the exclusionary and violent effects of the neo-colonial conditions of globalization, in particular the economic and social inequalities that are reinforced by the expansion of capitalist production, financial markets and neoliberal politics. Case studies of Gulf Labor’s protest against the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi (Janna-Mirl Redmann) and interventionist urban redevelopment projects in Seoul (Birgit Mersmann), as well as curatorial reflections on the contradictory agendas within the Ghetto Biennale in Port-au-Prince (Leah Gordon) and on art as civil engagement in Morocco (Abdellah Karroum), trace the scope for alternative responses to more or less authoritarian regimes and to an expanding capitalist domination of global social relations. The papers in this chapter also draw attention to relationships between state politics and critical artistic engagement, and to tensions between institutional policies and institutional critique.

Introduction This concern to critique and reinvent institutional politics is shared by the authors of the third section, who scrutinize curatorial strategies with regard to their creation of museological narratives. Focusing on a variety of institutions, collections and exhibitions, such as the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (Jelle Bouwhuis), documenta 12 in Kassel (Barbara Lutz), or exhibitions of Moroccan contemporary art in Rabat and Paris (Sarah Dornhof), as well as the challenges curators of group exhibitions encounter when mediating between different cultural contexts, for instance in the House of World Cultures in Berlin (Annette Bhagwati), these scholarly analyses and curatorial reflections examine how museological conventions construct particular Eurocentric or universalist worldviews. Taking into account the conflictual history of differentiating between ethnographic artefacts and works of fine art (arts and crafts) in theory as well as in display, the texts in this section reflect on alternative exhibition practices that explore an adequate response to colonial histories, postcolonial structures and more recent neo-colonial global power relations. They shed light on different modes and strategies of transcultural curating and on recent conceptual shifts in the making of exhibitions of so-called global or world art. A final complex relates to processes of subjectivation framed by art’s globalization and the multiplication of art (historical) knowledges. These papers interrogate artistic and curatorial practices concerned less with identity politics than with performances of transcultural subjectivity. Beyond critical engagement with processes of cultural appropriation and mimicry, the contributors trace contemporary practices of self-cultivation in response to multiple historical notions of art and artisthood, the demands of globalizing art markets and widespread imperatives of self-branding. Analyzing strategies as diverse as queering, self-exoticizing or self-orientalizing, literary practices of self-positioning and disembodiment, the texts in this section consider the inter-ethnic, cross-gender performances in Miao Xiaochun’s 3D works (Isabel Seliger), the self-marketing of Takashi Murakami as a global brand (Ronit Milano), transcultural mapping in Qiu Zhijie’s Total Art Maps (Birgit Hopfener), and the ambivalences of deterritorialization in Hans Ulrich Obrist’s autobiographical publication Ways of Curating (Nanne Buurman). In so doing, they highlight the diverse ways in which questions of identity and subjecthood are mobilized cross-culturally in an ever globalizing late capitalist art world. •

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Introduction Maharaj, Sarat and von Osten, Marion (2013): “The Surplus of the Global.” (A conversation) In: Texte zur Kunst, No. 91, pp. 133–152. Martinon, Jean-Paul (2013): The Curatorial. A Philosophy of Curating. London: Bloomsbury. Mbembe, Achille (2003): “Necropolitics.” In: Public Culture, 15, No. 1, pp. 11–40. Mbembe, Achille (2017): Critique of Black Reason. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Meister, Carolin and von Hantelmann, Dorothea (2010): Die Ausstellung. Politik eines Rituals. Zürich: Diaphanes. Mercer, Kobena (1990): “Black Art and the Burden of Representation.” In: Third Text, No. 10, pp. 61–78. Mercer, Kobena (2005): Cosmopolitan Modernisms. (Annotating Art’s Histories. Cross-Cultural Perspectives in the Visual Arts). Cambridge, MA and London: MIT. Mercer, Kobena (2007): Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures. (Annotating Art’s Histories. Cross-Cultural Perspectives in the Visual Arts). Cambridge, MA and London: MIT. Mercer, Kobena (2008): Exiles, Diasporas and Strangers. (Annotating Art’s Histories. Cross-Cultural Perspectives in the Visual Arts). Cambridge, MA and London: MIT. Mersmann, Birgit et al., eds. (2015): Kunsttopographien globaler Migration. Kritische Berichte, No. 2, Vol. 43.

Mersmann, Birgit (2016): “Art History and the Culture of the Image: A Manifesto for Global Art History.” In: Hans G. Kippenberg and Birgit Mersmann (eds.), The Humanities between Global Integration and Cultural Diversity. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 70–76. Meskimmon, Marsha (2010): Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination. London and New York: Routledge. Mignolo, Walter D. (2009): “Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and De-Colonial Freedom.” In: Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 26 (7–8), pp. 1–23. Mignolo, Walter D. (2012 [1999]): Local Histories / Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mignolo, Walter D. and Tolstanova, Madina V. (2012): Learning to Unlearn. Decolonial Reflections from Eurasia and the Americas. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Mitchell, Timothy (1989): “The World as Exhibition.” In: Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Apr.), pp. 217–236. Mitchell, W.J.T. (2007): “World Pictures: Globalization and Visual Culture.” In: Neohelicon, 34, no. 2, pp. 49–59. Mitter, Partha (2008): “Interventions – Decentering Modernisms: Art History and Avant-Garde Art from the Periphery.” In: The Art Bulletin, 90, No. 4, pp. 531. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade (2003): Feminism without Borders. Decolonizing Theory – Practicing Solidarity. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

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Culture. Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity. Durham and London: Duke University Press, pp. 1–19. Smith, Terry (2015): “Defining Contemporaneity: Imagining Planetarity.” In: The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 24/No. 49-50, pp. 156–174. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1988): Can the Subaltern Speak? Basingstoke: Macmillan. Steeds, Lucy et al., eds. (2013): Making Art Global (Part 2): Magiciens de la Terre 1989. London: Afterall Books. Summers, David (2003): Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism. New York: Phaidon. Texte zur Kunst (2013): “Globalismus / Globalism”, No. 91, September.  

Texte zur Kunst (2017): “Wir sind ihr / They are us”, No. 105, March. Verhagen, Marcus (2017): Flows and Counterflows. Globalization and Contemporary Art. Berlin: Sternberg. Vogel, Sabine B. (2010): Biennials – Art on a Global Scale. Wien and New York: Springer. Vogel, Sabine B., ed. (2013): Globalkunst – Eine neue Weltordnung. Kunstforum International, Vol. 220. von Bismarck, Beatrice and Below, Irene, eds. (2005): Globalisierung /  Hierarchisierung. Kulturelle Dominanzen in Kunst und Kunstgeschichte. Marburg: Jonas Verlag. von Bismarck, Beatrice, Schafaff, Jörn and Weski, Thomas, eds. (2012): Cultures of the Curatorial. Berlin: Sternberg.

32 von Bismarck, Beatrice et al., eds. (2014): Timing: On the Temporal Dimension of Exhibiting. Berlin: Sternberg. von Bismarck, Beatrice and MeyerKrahmer, Benjamin, eds. (2016): Hospitality: Hosting Relations in Exhibitions. Berlin: Sternberg. Weibel, Peter (1997): “Jenseits des weißen Würfels. Kunst zwischen Kolonialismus und Kosmopolitismus.” In: idem (ed.), Inklusion: Exklusion. Versuch einer neuen Kartografie der Kunst im Zeitalter von Postkolonialismus und globaler Migration. Köln: DuMont, pp. 8–36. Weichhart, Peter (2010): “Das ‘TransSyndrom’. Wenn die Welt durch das Netz unserer Begriffe fällt.” In: Melanie Hühn et al. (eds.), Transkulturalität, Transnationalität, Transstaatlichkeit, Translokalität. Theoretische und Empirische Begriffsbestimmungen. Berlin: Lit, pp. 47–70. Weiss, Rachel et al., eds. (2011): Making Art Global (Part 1): The Third Havana Biennial 1989. London: Afterall Books. Werner, Michael and Zimmermann, Bénédicte (2002): “Vergleich, Transfer, Verflechtung. Der Ansatz der Histoire croisée und die Herausforderung des Transnationalen.” In: Geschichte und Gesellschaft, Vol. 28, pp. 607–636. Werner, Michael and Zimmermann, Bénédicte (2006): “Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexitivity.” In: History & Theory, Vol. 45, Issue 1, pp. 30–50. Wuggenig, Ulf and Buchholz, Larissa (2005): “Cultural Globalization between Myth and Reality: The Case of the

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34 Jacob Birken /

Spectres of 1989

Jacob Birken

Spectres of 1989: On some Misconceptions of the ‘Globality’ in and of Contemporary Art ‘Situating’ as Practice and Paradigm The easiest attempt to situate ‘global art’ would, surely, be a map of the objects that it designates: institutions like museums or research departments; galleries and private collections; conferences and exhibitions; books, magazines, websites and mailing lists. Many of these are, at least for a time, easy to locate. Others would need to be tracked down or approximated (online catalogues as worldcat.org already provide the distance to the nearest library copy of listed books).    This somehow indexical approach has its obvious drawbacks. One might have to discuss if the map should only allow occurrences of the exact term, or possible substitutes (‘world art’) or translations; we would need to decide if the entries are weighted or treated in an egalitarian way, simply registering every instance of ‘global art’ across the globe. This would, then, become an issue of representation on a very abstract level: Does ‘global art’ accumulate, do its instances blur or overlap? Do we need to zoom in on a local level to be able to distinguish on our ‘global art’ map between a museum and a copy of Situating Global Art on someone’s bookshelf? Obviously, even a brazenly simplistic approach to situating global art will replicate the various issues that its discourses have tried to tackle in the last decades. This little thought experiment might thus be read as a parody on the ubiquitous attempts of ‘mapping’ that constitute large parts of the global art discourse. In this sense, this chapter will be less concerned with ‘finding’ global art at specific sites, but rather with discussing the reasoning behind this designation, and its appearances within institutional(ized) contemporary art. A rather snide interpretation of ‘global art’ as no more than a network of actors and objects engaged in its naming echoes Hito Steyerl’s description of ‘contemporary art’ as “a brand name without a brand” (Steyerl 2010), a highly relevant semiotic proposal to which I will return later. Of course, even describing ‘global art’ as a network inscribes it with specific meanings. A network consists not only of its nodes – the Situating Global Art book you are currently reading, the ‘global art’ sites described

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Jacob Birken / in its different chapters, the authors and their institutional affiliations – but also of the relations and respective distances between these nodes. In writing this chapter, I am similarly engaging in specific relations with ‘global art’, mostly concerning my involvement as a co-curator of the 2011 exhibition The Global Contemporary. Art Worlds After 1989 at the ZKM | Center for Arts and Media Karlsruhe – a large-scale show that presented over a hundred existing or commissioned art works illustrating the various entanglements of contemporary art and globalization. This relation between author and topic can, also, be measured as a distance: not only in time, but, for example, with regard to academic affiliation; the present text has an obviously different function than previous texts on the same topic by the same author, for example a catalogue essay for The Global Contemporary (Birken 2012) or a conference paper and subsequently published book chapter on the exhibition within the context of the ‘critical museum’ (Birken 2015). Why is this important? Acts of (an author’s own expressed) affiliation as rhetorical means are seldom addressed within the global art discourse, even though they are constitutive for its ideological structure. In a 2002 book, David Simpson discusses “situatedness” as a core concept of modern and contemporary society – the condition of being “embedded in impersonal systems but not to the point where agency is redundant [emphasis in the original]” (Simpson 2002: 202), with the exact “point” remaining up for constant, occasionally strategic re-definition. One paradigm of situatedness is what Simpson cheekily calls the “azza sentence”, the act of introducing one’s argument as “coming from” a specific situatedness, e.g. in my case, as a critical art historian and curator, as an immigrant from the so-called ‘former East’, or – this not so co-incidentally being Simpson’s ‘own’ example too – “as a middle-aged white male” (Simpson 2002: 41). Or, evidently, as a cocurator of the 2011 Global Contemporary exhibition and thus involved in the institutionalization of ‘global art’. As Simpson writes, situatedness allows us “the temporary performance of gestures of identity and attributions that can always be reserved under pressure”; stating my involvement in a previous, large-scale global art project thus introduces this text as written by someone knowledgeable about the topic, but also someone aware of the various criticisms targeting The Global Contemporary. Given the roots of the global art discourse in post-colonial and emancipatory thought, writers’ azza sentences can be read as a pre-emptive answer to the question of ‘who’s speaking’, and accusations of mis-representing the ‘Other’. A second issue concerns the (perceived) situatedness of artists, and thus their framing within both academic discourse, history and exhibition practice. Compared to the mainstream model of art as the manifestation of an artist’s intent in a specific work, situatedness undermines individual authorship (and the corresponding ideology of artistic ‘genius’), overwriting

Spectres of 1989

Fig. 1           

Exhibition Views: The Global Contemporary. Art Worlds after 1989, ZKM | Center for Arts and Media Karlsruhe 2012

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or modifying artists’ agencies through references to their ‘culture’, ‘heritage’, or any other context. Art history has undertaken multiple attempts to address situatedness. Even (or specifically) the modernist concepts of an ‘art history without names’ as proposed by Heinrich Wölfflin or Wilhelm Worringer’s psychology of style might be understood as such attempts: here, artistic production is described as the expression of a general style dictated by historical currents, or, in Worringer’s case, a culture’s general attitude towards the environment. Global art discourses mostly retain the artist’s agency in its aporetic relation to situatedness; the equivalent to the writer’s azza sentence is the ‘burden of representation’ of the artist (cp. Juneja 2011), the implicit request to stand in for whatever culture or scene they are located in, while, at the same time, transcending it in order to participate within the ‘global’ – a model enforced through a constant stream of international exhibitions and publications devoted to art from a certain region, nation, or a combination of specific contexts (e.g. Contemporary Female Artists from the Arabian Mediterranean Region, as in a 2013 group exhibition at ZKM). Simpson writes neither about art nor global art, his main topics being law, sociology, and 18th and 19th century literature. The discussion of situatedness is inextricable from modern understandings of justice, as the precarious oscillation between the subject’s agency and its context-bound passivity is of utmost importance for defining – or fixing – responsibility. These ethics of situatedness are of some relevance for global art once it comes to questions of inclusion and exclusion, and the re-writing of the artistic canon as ‘affirmative action’. In an interview that first appeared in 2012, former Fluxus artist Bazon Brock was asked by artist Johannes M. Hedinger to comment on The Global Contemporary, in which Hedinger had exhibited as part of the duo Com & Com; Brock seems barely able to restrain his anger against ‘affirmative’ global art and the malicious agents responsible for its proliferation. Very obviously, there are people today who want to destroy the principle of art itself. Under the seemingly humanist, uninhibited title of Globalization they accumulate everything that is designed somewhere in the world under the title of ‘Global Art’. A bit of batik, a bit of crocheting, a bit of painting – all of this is discussed as art today […] ‘Global Art’ exhibitions are relentlessly opportunistic events by people who entirely switched off their historical comprehension and act as if you, just per humanist declaration, could equalize every people’s civilizing achievements, even beyond the cultural. This leads to disturbing forms of allegedly humanist attempts to upgrade Chinese, Indian or any other creative work.  (Brock 2013: 95) 1

Spectres of 1989 Unsurprisingly, Brock’s ideal of art and science is built upon absolute agency, the “principle of authority through authorship”, which – again, unsurprisingly – is announced as a solitary development of the ‘West’ (ibid.). Brock’s reactionary embracement of the early modern mirage of a ‘contextlessness’ of knowledge denies situatedness any relevance, and thus any possibility to use it as a foundation for ethical judgement. It is an inevitable effect of the ideology Brock follows that a reverse argument has to be attributed to its antagonists: hence, global art is the “attempt […] to upgrade Chinese, Indian or any other creative work”. Brock’s use of the German word “Aufwertung”, also translatable in the economic sense of an “upward revaluation”, makes clear that the process he sees at work is a (illegitimate) manipulation of ‘values’, i.e. an act of injustice. While phrased as cultural criticism, Brock’s statements on autonomy are indistinguishable from libertarian agitation. The argument that “Only by virtue of the fact that a work’s creator is taken seriously as an authority due to his authorship – and not due to anything else, neither the market, success or selling, nor due to authorities of other kind – this system became meaningful” (Brock 2013: 96) echoes the pronouncements of Howard Roark, the protagonist of Ayn Rand’s 1943 novel The Fountainhead, during his trial for dynamiting a social housing complex he designed but found subsequently altered by his employer: “The basic need of the creator is independence. The reasoning mind cannot work under any form of compulsion. It cannot be curbed, sacrificed or subordinated to any consideration whatsoever. It demands total independence in function and in motive. To a creator, all relations with men are secondary” (Rand 1943: 259). Brock’s indignation at The Global Contemporary compromising the autonomy of individual authorship through affirmative action – the suspicion that something is “upgraded” to art simply because it is ‘coming from’ somewhere else than the traditionally acknowledged (western) sites of art – can be contrasted with other critics’ indignations at the exhibition being insufficiently affirmative. In their 2011 review, Pat Binder and Gerhard Haupt from the Website Universes in Universe found it “incomprehensible why the curators have only marginally perceived entire regions, although extremely important contributions to contemporary art have come from them over the last 20 years” (Binder / Haupt 2011). Again, ‘global art’ becomes a site of injustice, this time for its incomplete acknowledgement 1   Translation by J.B. The original quote goes as follows: “Es gibt aber gegenwärtig ganz offensichlich Leute, die auch das Prinzip Kunst selbst zerstören wollen, indem sie unter dem scheinbar humanistischen, vorurteilsfreien Titel von Globalisierung alles, was auf der Welt irgendwie gestaltet wird, unter dem Titel ‘Global Art’ versammeln. Also ein bisschen herum-zu-batiken, ein bisschen zu häkeln, ein bisschen zu malen – das wird heute alles unter Kunst verhandelt. […] ,Global Art’-Ausstellungen sind gna-

denlos opportunistische Veranstaltungen von Leuten, die ihr eigenes historisches Bewusstsein völlig abgeschaltet haben und so tun, als ob man heute per humanistische Deklaration behaupten könnte, alle Leute seien auch auf der Ebene der zivilisatorischen Errungenschaften gleich – nicht nur der der kulturellen. Das führt zu verstörenden Formen der angeblich humanistischen Bemühungen um die Aufwertung des chinesischen, indischen und sonstigen gestalterischen Schaffens.”

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Jacob Birken / of situatedness as a paradigm for justice in a postcolonial world. Writing on ‘diversity’ for the Documenta11 in 2002, Boris Groys diagnoses this as both a political project and a reaction to the impossibility of realizing “perfect, absolute democracy”. Rather than pursuing the “infinite future” of universal democracy, Groys writes, “it is better to appreciate diversity and difference, to be more interested in where the subject is coming from than in where he or she is going to. So we can say that the present strong interest in diversity and difference is dictated in the first place by certain moral and political considerations – namely, by the defense of the so-called underdeveloped cultures against their marginalization and suppression by the dominating modern states in the name of progress” (Groys 2008: 150). The logics of ‘inclusion’ in the art world can be thus understood as the most abstract and refined form of situatedness: The premise that ‘contributions’ have to be considered solely due to them ‘coming from’ somewhere; the suspicion that not providing everyone the possibility to perform their respective azza sentences is in itself an act of violence. These concerns cannot be offhandedly dismissed – nevertheless, on a possibly broader and deeper structural level, this first attempt to situate global art results in acknowledging that the latter is primarily situated within the aporetic logics of ‘situatedness’ itself.

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When Art became Global So far, this text does not yet provide any definition of ‘global art’ beyond some references to its rhetorical or logical structure. In recent years, the term has become ubiquitous both for describing the condition of art in a global context – that is, art as being not restricted to a specific, usually ‘western’ canon – and as a designation for various institutions, events and academic programmes; it is, in fact, established enough to merit its own historiography and corresponding founding myths. The Global Contemporary included a large informative section devoted to this history, presenting visitors with displays on the expanding art market, the proliferation of ‘Biennales’ and similar international mega-events. Other exhibits discussed specific discursive platforms and exhibitions that can be understood as steps taken towards a pluralist and globalized art system – steps that have, eventually, led to the state of art on display in the gallery section of The Global Contemporary. In their series on “Exhibition Histories”, Afterall have recently included two books in their publication programme Making Art Global which discuss the 1989 exhibition Magiciens de la Terre in Paris and the Third Havana Biennial of the same year. The series’ title makes clear that the globality of art is procedural – art has to be made global. The Third Havana Biennial “extended the global territory of contemporary art”, while Magiciens “radically challenged the Western art system from within”, as

Spectres of 1989 one may learn from the respective blurbs (Weiss et al. 2011; Steeds et al. 2013). Art ‘becoming’ global thus implies a pre-history of global art, or rather a time in which art was art, yet not ‘global’. To properly analyse this development, it will be necessary to delve deep into the fabric of this discourse, possibly beyond its mythical origins, to which I will come shortly. Still, what is ‘global art’? For Hans Belting, the initiator and main advisor of The Global Contemporary project, it “is by definition contemporary, not just in a chronological but also […] in a symbolic or even ideological sense” (Belting 2009: 39); it “no longer follows a master narrative and contradicts modernity’s claim to be or to offer a universal model” (ibid.: 69). This, of course, makes any attempt to describe global art futile, as “it does not imply an inherent aesthetic quality, which could be identified as such, nor a global concept of what has to be regarded as art. Rather than representing a new context, it indicates the loss of context or focus, and includes its own contradiction by implying the counter movement of regionalism and tribalization, whether national, cultural or religious.” (ibid.: 40). It is easy to re-discover the aporias of situatedness in such “contradictions” and ambiguities. What, nevertheless, remains as a positive assertion, is that global art “is by definition contemporary”. This assertion concerns both history (global art being ‘contemporary’ art due to a relation to globalism or globalization) and art history (global art being ‘contemporary art’, as it dismisses the paradigms of earlier ‘modern art’), even though global art’s contemporaneity makes it less accessible to an art history that has been traditionally configured by modernism (ibid.: 45-48). Given the year of the two exhibitions discussed in the Making Art Global series and the reoccurrence of “1989” in the subtitle of the ZKM exhibition, there seems to be some academic consensus about the emergence of global art; programmatic texts for the Former West project by Cosmin Costinas, Charles Esche and Maria Hlavajova propose “the year 1989 as the defining moment of recent history” (Costinas / Hlavajova 2010) and go to great lengths to compile the various events around this year within and without the art world. In 2009, “the meaning of the year 1989 remains strikingly unacknowledged in most of what we intuitively refer to as the ‘West’” (Esche / Hlavajova 2009); by now, the meaning of ‘1989’ for global art and contemporary culture in general seems firmly established – and suspiciously similar to other (‘western’) master narratives of yore.2 To discuss 1989 as a ‘mythical origin’ of global art is, thus, less a polemic than a reaction to the narratives that infuse this date with meaning. Without doubt, many 1989 events have both changed geopolitics – the fall of the Berlin wall, the Tiananmen Square massacre – and initiated 2  See Buchholz / Wuggenig 2005 for a broader discourse analysis regarding an ‘emergent’ global art.

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Jacob Birken / an opening-up of a mainstream art scene in Europe and North America towards ‘non-western’ artists and their works. And, without doubt, the latter was influenced by the former to certain degrees: be it through new possibilities to travel between (and exhibit in) countries hitherto divided into antagonistic ‘blocks’, be it through the (however motivated) interest in the world as an entity rather than in securing the integrity of said ‘blocks’. In 1989, a former Congress Hall in the Berliner Tiergarten that had been built as “a present from the US government to the City of Berlin” in 1957 is re-opened as the House of World Cultures, “in recognition of the growing role played by culture in international relations” (HKW 2015); in 1989, the ZKM is founded “to perpetuate classical arts in the digital age” (ZKM 2015), a reaction to the changes brought upon the arts by mass media and digital technology, which, in turn, play their share in globalization. Accordingly, Hans Belting draws a formal analogy between contemporary art and technology: “In short, new art today is global, much the same way the World Wide Web is global” (Belting 2009: 40). These changes, however, have often been described as not only historical changes, but fundamental changes to history as a narrative itself; the most popular and, by now, surely most ridiculed being Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man. In this 1992 elaboration of a 1989 essay, Fukuyama posits that societal progress has reached its apex with liberal democracy, invalidating other political models and, effectively, the necessity for (or possibility of) progress in itself. There is no need for a future after the “End of History”; as Francis Fukuyama writes, “we cannot picture ourselves a world that is essentially different from the present one, and at the same time better” (Fukuyama 1992: 46). Fukuyama is aware of his privileged vantage point and of the necessity to improve the living conditions of many, even in the liberal democracies of the late 20th century. Nevertheless, this is not a question of projecting a better future, but much rather of retrieving the less well-situated from their (self-chosen) exile in the past to the eternal nowness of capitalist democracy. 1989 is the year from which on it is always 1989, apart from the places in which it simply is not 1989 yet. Fukuyama popularized this concept within geopolitical discourse, at a moment in which geopolitical events seemed to validate his claims: liberal democracy had ‘won’, or at least remained the sole survivor of the so-called Cold War. Nevertheless, the concept of the End of History had been discussed much earlier in the humanities and has been an integral part of post-modernist discourse since at least the 1970s. In 1983, Belting had tackled this question in the End of Art History, a lecture extended to book length in 1995, and further extended for an English translation titled Art History after Modernism in 2003. His analysis shares some points with Fukuyama’s text, and differs on other, substantial points. Again, the

Spectres of 1989 central argument revolves around the inadequacy of history (as a linear narrative of progress) to tackle the conditions of pluralist contemporaneity; yet, this critique can vary in the degree it describes history’s ‘master narrative’ as obsolete or much rather compromised. Anticipating his much later remarks on global and contemporary art, Belting diagnoses that the “alleged universalism of art history is a western misconception”; a critique that encapsulates both the insights that this misconception happened in the west, and that it was erroneously understood as universal, i.e. as not restricted solely to its western origins (Belting 1995: 7) 3. This problem is an effect of art history’s history and its quasi-dialectic progression from an early modern Art History of Paragons (i.e. the re-telling of art’s history around artistic geniuses) to a modernist Art History of Progress concerned with an avant-garde refining of art’s definition, which usually results in a history of style (ibid.: 121). As the former is concerned with defining an artistic ‘canon’ from past achievements and the latter with defining it via an appropriation to future ideals, none is particularly suited to describing the present as the present, and not simply something to be compared with what once was or what should be. Additionally, the canon as a master narrative is a tool of power. As this is not the main concern of Belting’s book, it is useful to look into a decidedly political text on art history from the years around 1989. In Vision and Difference, Griselda Pollock launches a structurally similar, yet differently motivated assault on modernism: If modernist art history supplies the paradigm which feminist art history of the modern period must contest, modernist criticism and modernist practice are the targets of contemporary practice. Modernist thought has been defined as functioning on three basic tenets: the specificity of aesthetic experience; the self-sufficiency of the visual; the teleological evolution of art autonomous from any other causation or pressure. Modernist protocols prescribe what is validated as ‘modern art’, i.e. what is relevant, progressing, and in the lead. Art which engages with the social world is political, sociological, narrative, demeaning the proper concerns of the artist with the nature of the medium or with human experiences embodied in painted or hewn gestures.  (Pollock 1988: 14) It is an easy task to re-read these arguments in the context of the preceding discussion of situatedness; it is likewise easy to imagine what position Ayn Rand’s ego-terrorist Roark would assume on the ‘modern’ and the ‘contemporary’. For the purpose of the general question here, Belting’s and 3    My translation. I refer to the preface of the 1995 German edition rather than to the one of the 2003 English edition for historiographical reasons.

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Jacob Birken / Pollock’s arguments offer the framework for a ‘global art’ that is a logical conclusion of ‘contemporary art’ as a critique of modernism. Indeed, this conclusion seems inevitable: in his introductory essay to the 1996 exhibition Inclusion / Exclusion, curator and – since 1999 – director of the ZKM Peter Weibel correlates the logics of the ‘white cube’, the paradigmatic modernist gallery space, with the modernist underpinnings of Imperialism and Colonialism (Weibel 1997). Again, the answer is (global) contemporaneity. In a later programmatic text for the ZKM’s Global Art project, Weibel writes that “[g]lobal art attempts to dissolve the contradictions and dichotomies in the international and universal no less than in the regional, national, and local” (Weibel 2009: 81). It is crucial to contrast this with Belting’s observation about global art including “its own contradiction”. Compared to contemporaneity as a dissenting consequence of (Belting) and antagonistic intervention in (Pollock) modernism’s paradigms, for Weibel it has become the solution to the issues brought upon the world through modernist or particularist ideologies. Regardless of these differences for now, tracing back today’s academic understanding of ‘global art’ to the discussion of its precursor ‘contemporary art’ in the 1980s and 1990s – especially against the backdrop of modernism’s master narratives – helps to eliminate certain misconceptions about the mechanisms and requirements of global art. Seen as a general project of emancipation, the discourse of global art cannot simply replicate previous modes of art history; it cannot – to borrow Pollock’s phrases reserved for feminist art history – see itself “just as a novel art historical perspective, aiming to improve existing, but inadequate art history”. This can, for example, mean altogether disposing of the idea of the ‘canon’, which would invalidate the above criticisms expressed by both Brock and Binder / Haupt: Placing “a bit of batik, a bit of crocheting, a bit of painting” within the museum gallery is only an irreverent act of ‘inclusion’, “marginally perceiv[ing] entire regions” is only an ignorant act of ‘exclusion’ as long as the display of an art work is understood as an addition or subtraction of value. But is a different situation, an art beyond canonical justice thinkable? The answer needs to be sought in this most ambiguous of places – in the discursive vortex of ‘1989’, where the ‘globality’ of contemporary art forever merges into, and is again torn away from the geopolitics of globalization. Universals in Universe In 2013, curators Hans Ulrich Obrist and Simon Castets initiated the project 89plus, “investigating the generation of innovators born in or after 1989” (89plus 2015). 89plus might be the purest iteration of 1989 as a mythical origin, as it introduces a generation of humans with no first-hand

Spectres of 1989 recollection of the moment itself. For those born sufficiently earlier, 1989 remains a haunting experience. In the recent book The Age of Earthquakes: A Guide to the Extreme Present by Shumon Basar, Douglas Coupland and Hans Ulrich Obrist, the “89plus” generation is re-introduced in a manner symptomatic for the undead status of 1989 and / or History: “The ‘89plus’ generation – born after the Berlin Wall came down and the Tiananmen Square protests erupted – have grown up entirely within a world of failing economics and politics.” On the next page, their attitude is pinned down in three words, written in capitals across the entire page: “They sentimentalize nothing” (Basar et al. 2015: 158-159). As history has taught, there was never a single generation before 1989 that did not grow up “within a world of failing economics and politics”; the only difference is the very moment of ‘1989’ and its unfulfilled promise for immediate – not future – change. In this sense, the dry assertion that “they sentimentalize nothing” might simply be a sentimental regret about the younger generation not being able to remember 1989’s collective imagination of the ‘best of worlds’ – the confidence that the end of the so-called Cold War would usher in a period of world-wide peace and progress. An ongoing art project by Stephanie Syjuco, The Berlin Wall (started in 2008), captures this eternalized loss and presence of 1989 – a growing collection of concrete and stone fragments, meticulously presented like artefacts in a museum, each of them labelled “The Berlin Wall”, with the exact location and date of finding written beneath. None of these “faux souvenirs” were part of the actual wall, but found “in backyards, urban street corners, suburbs, and wilderness areas all over the world”; they are imbibed with its “aura” through formal similarity, display and context. One of these contexts is the travelling lifestyle of a contemporary artist like Syjuco herself, “the objects reflecting and documenting [her] own movements through the world and becoming a personalization of an event far removed and abstracted” (Syjuco 2015). Works like Syjuco’s propose a somewhat different view on global art: an art that addresses globality as a condition structured by contradictions; and possibly an art that discusses situatedness much rather than performing it. From today’s perspective, there is an ominous quality to 1989 and the End of History: the realization that the ‘victory’ of the so-called West neither dispelled authoritarian claims for hegemony, nor proved their incompatibility with a thoroughly capitalist world-system.4 Neo-liberalism, despite its rhetorical fervour in debunking any kind of (emancipatory) critique as ‘ideology’, turns out to be one of the most aggressively entrenched ideological constructs of our time – meaning, also, that this End of History 4  As Fukuyama – in his 1992 book – acknowledged that capitalism might be actually more ‘efficient’ in an authoritarian society (Fukuyama 1992: 124–125), his main error seems to be having assumed that

mankind would prefer democratic, liberal capitalism to any other alternatives due to its dual allure of progress and peace.

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Jacob Birken / has to be understood as nothing other than a western ‘master narrative’ itself. Like any other ideology, this one is concerned with concealing its contradictions and actively creating blind spots. Boris Groys points out that although “extremely critical of the homogeneous space of the modern state and its institutions, [postmodern critical discourse] tends to be uncritical of contemporary heterogeneous market practices – at least, by not taking them seriously enough into consideration” (Groys 2008: 151). This is of particular relevance to the idea of global art as affirmative action directed against the hegemonial canon of modernity:

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There is no real choice between universality and diversity. Rather, there is a choice between two different types of universality: between the universal validity of a certain political idea and the universal accessibility obtained through the contemporary market. […] The universal accessibility of heterogeneous cultural products which is guaranteed by the globalization of contemporary information markets has replaced the universal and homogeneous political projects of the European past – from the Enlightenment to Communism.  (ibid.: 152) Being aware of such ideological complications, Griselda Pollock already argued against a feminist art history being “content to incorporate women’s names in the chronologies and to include work by women in the inventories of style and movements” as an “unthreatening, ‘additive’ feminism” allowed by liberal policies within the art history establishment (Pollock 1988: 22). For global art, this issue becomes even more contentious in its obfuscated connections to the ideology of globalism – Fukuyama’s End of History as, to quote Groys, “the final victory of the market over every possible universal political project” (Groys 2008: 154). Via the corresponding practices of globalization, neo-liberal ideology remains defining for the immediate living conditions of humans (and non-humans) worldwide and thus for large parts of artistic practice. The ideological gloss of a ‘free world’ makes it far too easy to overlook unfortunate ‘local’ circumstances. In 2015, several artists and scholars including Walid Raad were denied entry to the United Arab Emirates after openly criticizing the – occasionally fatal – treatment of immigrant labourers hired for building sites like the local branches of the Guggenheim or Louvre. If global art was made possible through the new freedom of movement after the end of the so-called Cold War, it is puzzling to see it restricted due to the “security risk” (official UAE wording) of artists exercising their right to freedom of speech. Citing a Guggenheim statement on its Abu Dhabi branch as “an opportunity for a dynamic cultural exchange”, Walid Raad wonders “how the Guggenheim will be able to be ‘inclusive and expansive’

Spectres of 1989 when the very artists who are meant to be included in the expansive view of art history are systematically excluded, banned and deported” (Vartanian 2015). Hito Steyerl is blunt about the role of art within globalization; referring to the global ‘franchises’ of art sites even before the scandal surrounding Raad’s expulsion, she writes that “[t]he Global Guggenheim is a cultural refinery for a set of post-democratic oligarchies, as are the countless international biennials tasked with upgrading and reeducating the surplus population” (Steyerl 2010). Returning to her description of ‘contemporary art’ being “a brand name without a brand”, it becomes clear that this is not only about the strategic use of a floating signifier; the designation of this signifier itself as a “brand” places it within the context of consumer capitalism – and thus globalization. While Belting’s argument that global art is not “representing a new context” remains valid, it does not preclude that this non-representation might be of some strategic use for a context beyond art’s representative realm. This, of course, leads to a rather pessimistic re-assessment of the modernist narrative of art’s liberation from the shackles of political representation (i.e. art’s ‘traditional’ subservience to the powers of state and church) and aesthetic representation (i.e. realism) – in the globalized present of neo-liberal hegemony, art indeed represents the powers-that-be exactly through creating a sphere within which any kind of representation can be performed without questioning actual power relations. Pluralism can be tolerated. What is refused and cannot coexist is […] that which fundamentally challenges the image of the world art history strives to create, offering a very different set of explanations of how history operates, what structures society, how art is produced, what kind of social beings artists are. (Pollock 1988: 23)

Indeed, “what kind of social beings artists are” remains a contested issue with regard to global culture, labour and situatedness. In a 2014 interview, Nobel prize judge Horace Engdahl openly advocates not supporting writers financially, as they are “cut off from society” unless they “work … to make a living”. This, Engdahl continues, is a ‘western’ problem, “because when reading many writers from Asia and Africa, one finds a certain liberty again”. Accordingly, he expresses the hope that “the literary riches which we are seeing arise in Asia and Africa will not be lessened by the assimilation and the westernisation of these authors” (quoted in Flood 2014). It is interesting to compare these assumptions about the creation of value with those in the previous arguments by Brock and Binder / Haupt. Engdahl attributes value (“literary riches”) to literature; yet, these “riches” themselves

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Jacob Birken / are not the product of work, as the writer should be required to “work … to make a living” (i.e. not get paid for their writing). “Liberty”, in the meantime, is maintained by actual disenfranchisement, and – Engdahl does not feel the need to mention this – upheld by the continuous subjugation of entire continents to corporate exploitation and authoritarian corruption. It is tempting to read his remarks as an involuntary neoliberal assertion of Immanuel Wallerstein’s bleak deconstruction of culture as a symptom, or rather tool, of the capitalist world-system, for which “[…] a universalist message of cultural multiplicity could serve as a justification of educating various groups in their separate ‘culture’ and hence preparing them for different tasks in the single economy” (Wallerstein 1990: 45). Like Binder / Haupt, Engdahl ascribes value to artists’ situatedness itself. For him, it is the non-western writers’ state of not being “cut off from society” that makes their work relevant (for the western audience, at least). Furthermore, Engdahl also subscribes to an ‘absolute agency’ of the author, as the work itself has to be produced in complete independence of the literature market; Howard Roark might not even object. This contradiction within Engdahl’s argument, and the antagonistic positions of Brock and Binder / Haupt, are parts of a conflict contained within a larger structure. The ‘beneficially disenfranchised author’ Engdahl describes is, in the end, a positive re-writing of the estranged worker in capitalist society, whose self is split into an only purportedly active I and a me passively defined by its situatedness. As Simpson writes,

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the exploratory, nervous relation of I and me, remaining open and unstable, is in fact the necessarily prescribed norm for a bourgeois-democratic culture in which the constant attentiveness to and renegotiation of one’s position is fundamental to both economic progress (by way of entrepreneurial invention) and social harmony (by way of respect for the positions of others). In other words some measure of uncertainty about one’s affiliations must remain part of the rhetoric of such cultures.  (Simpson 2002: 106) This norm of the unstable self recalls ‘global’ artists pressured to perform “strategic operations which fuse notions of ‘authenticity’ with a consumerist commoditization of cultural difference”, as Monica Juneja writes when describing the ‘burden of representation’. For such artists, the quandary of being modern could be a double bind; where living up to the demands of being avant-garde and transgressive goes hand in hand with the compulsion to be recognizably other or national. The need to establish such credentials is as powerfully sustained from within: by the anxiety to reaffirm

Spectres of 1989 national identity in relation to the colonial past as well as to the homogenizing fictions of contemporary globalism.  (Juneja 2011: 284).

Where does this leave us in regards to global art, and its situation? Considering the aporias of situatedness, its role within the logic of liberal capitalism and the very real power relations the latter constitutes, it becomes more and more evident that global art attempting to “dissolve the contradictions and dichotomies” (Weibel) of our world might not solve anything – just make it easier to swallow. Most likely, we will need to look beyond the vortex of 1989 and search for a history (of art) that is not just engaged with an endless re-enactment of its own burial. •

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Jacob Birken / References Basar, Shumon, Coupland, Douglas and Obrist, Hans Ulrich (2015): The Age of Earthquakes – A Guide the Extreme Present. New York: Blue Rider Press. Belting, Hans (1995): Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte. Eine Revision nach zehn Jahren. München: C. H. Beck. Belting, Hans (2009): “Contemporary Art as Global Art.” In: Hans Belting and Andrea Buddensieg (eds.), The Global Art World, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, pp. 38-73. Binder, Pat and Haupt, Gerhard (2011): “The Global Contemporary: Art Worlds After 1989.” In: Universes in Universe, http://universes-in-universe.org/eng/ spec-ials/2011/global_contemporary/, last accessed 7 December 2015.

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Birken, Jacob (2013): “Capture the Flag: Contemporaneity as an Artistic Project.” In: Hans Belting, Andrea Buddensieg and Peter Weibel (eds.), The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 298-302. Birken, Jacob (2015): “‘Is the Contemporary Already too Late?’ (Re-)producing Criticality within the Art Museum.” In: Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius and Piotr Piotrowski (eds.), From Museum Critique to the Critical Museum, Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 215-227. Brock, Bazon (2013): “Das Problem ist nicht die Lösung.” Interview by Johannes M. Hedinger. In: Johannes M. Hedinger and Torsten Meyer, What’s Next? Kunst nach der Krise, Berlin: Kadmos, pp. 95-98.

Buchholz, Larissa and Wuggenig, Ulf (2005): “Cultural Globalization between Myth and Reality: The Case of the Contemporary Visual Arts”. In: Art-e-Fact 4 http://artefact.mi2.hr/_a04/lang_en/ theory_buchholz_en.htm, last accessed 7 December 2015. Costinas, Cosmin and Hlavajoya, Maria (2010): “Thinking ‘Former West’.” http://www.afterall.org/online/thinkingformer-west#.VmNqdeL3SjM, last accessed 7 December 2015. Esche, Charles and Hlavajoya, Maria (2009): “Former West: Introductory Notes.” http://www.formerwest.org/ ResearchCongresses/1stFormerWest Congress/ Text/IntroductoryNotes, last accessed 7 December, 2015. Flood, Alison (2014): “Nobel judge fears for the future of western literature.” In: The Guardian, 7 October 2014, http:// www.theguardian.com/books/2014/ oct/07/creative-writing-killing-westernliterature-nobel-judge-horace-engdahl, last accessed 9 June 2015. Fukuyama, Francis (1992): The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Simon and Schuster. Groys, Boris (2008): “Beyond Diversity: Cultural Studies and Its Post-Communist Other.” In: (idem), Art Power. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 150-163. Haus der Kulturen der Welt (2015): “The Site and its History.” http://hkw. de/en/hkw/ge-schichte/ort_geschichte/ ort.php, last accessed 9 June 2015.

Spectres of 1989 Juneja, Monica (2011): “Global Art History and the ‘Burden of Representation’.” In: Hans Belting, Jacob Birken, Andrea Buddensieg and Peter Weibel (eds.), Global Studies: Mapping Contemporary Art and Culture, Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz, pp. 274-297. Simpson, David (2002): Situatedness, or, Why We Keep Saying Where We’re Coming From. Durham/London: Duke University Press. Steeds, Lucy et al. (2013): Making Art Global (Part 2): ‘Magiciens de la Terre’ 1989. London: Afterall Books. Steyerl, Hito (2010): “Politics of Art: Contemporary Art and the Transition to Post-Democracy.” In: e-flux journal #21, December 2010, http://www.e-flux.com/ journal/poli-tics-of-art-contemporary-artand-the-transition-to-post-democracy/, last accessed 4 December 2015. Syjuco, Stephanie (2015): “The Berlin Wall.” http://www.stephaniesyjuco.com/ p_theberlinwall.html, last accessed 9 June, 2015. Vartanian, Hrag (2015): “Artist Walid Raad Denied Entry into UAE, Becoming Third Gulf Labor Member Turned Away.” In: Hyperallergic, May 2014, http:// hyperallergic. com/207176/artist-walidraad-denied-entry-into-uae-becomingthird-gulf-labor-member-turned-away, last accessed 7 December 2015. Wallerstein, Immanuel (1990): “Culture as the Ideological Battleground of the Modern World-System.” In: Mike Featherstone (ed.), Global Culture. Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity, London: Sage, pp. 31-56.

Weibel, Peter (1997): “Jenseits des weißen Würfels. Kunst zwischen Kolonialismus und Kosmopolitismus.” In: Peter Weibel (ed.): Inklusion: Exklusion, Köln: Dumont. Weibel, Peter (2009): “Global Art: Rewritings, Transformations, and Translations.” In: Hans Belting and Andrea Buddensieg (eds.): The Global Art World. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, pp. 74-85. Weiss, Rachel et al. (2011): Making Art Global (Part 1): The Third Havana Biennial 1989. London: Afterall Books. ZKM (2015): “About us.” http://zkm.de/ en/about-us, last accessed 9 June 2015. 89plus (2015): “About.” http://www.89 plus.com/about/, last acessed 9 June 2015.

Copyrights Fig. 1 

ZKM | Karlsruhe, Photos: Steffen Harms

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52 Jacob Birken /

The Scrim, the Pistol, and the Lectern

Andrew Stefan Weiner

The Scrim, The Pistol, and the Lectern: Dis-Situating the Global Contemporary In 2011 the ZKM – Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (Center for Art and Media) in Karlsruhe, Germany organized a comprehensive exhibition dedicated to the theme of “the global contemporary”. This show comprised part of an extended research initiative undertaken in conjunction with the Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe, and was accompanied by artists’ residencies, lectures, performances, an online research platform, and a major publication (Belting / Buddensieg / Weibel 2013). It is arguably the most prominent example to date of an emergent discourse centred around the topic of global contemporaneity. So pervasive and extensive is this discourse that we might easily take its existence to be a kind of self-evident fact. Yet if the ubiquity of “the global contemporary” makes it impossible to ignore, it would seem harder still to reflect critically on its conditions of possibility, its political and economic determinations, and what we might call its structural function. In part this is because “the global contemporary” lacks a basic conceptual precision – is there any meaningful difference between “global contemporaneity” and “contemporary globality”? Not only is each of these constituent terms underdefined; they actually rely on each other for their definitions, since our common-sense understanding is that “the global” is contemporary and vice versa. However, this tautological aspect of the discourse has done little to impede its proliferation. It may even in fact have enabled such growth, whether by disguising contradictions or by enabling different kinds of productive misreading or mistranslation. On this view, “the global contemporary” does not function as a theoretical concept so much as a kind of rubric or heading, even something akin to a corporate brand. So rather than view it as a historical or cultural condition, as the ZKM show proposed, we might do better to think of it as a rhetoric: an ensemble of assumptions, values, tropes, technologies, and institutional prerogatives that are mobilized for contingent persuasive purposes. Indeed, when we survey the many contexts in which this rhetoric of the global contemporary is used, we find a distinctly heterogeneous array of actors. Speaking schematically, we might position the ZKM project at the intersection of two pronounced tendencies within this larger discourse.

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Andrew Stefan Weiner / The first of these is academic, and includes tenure-line faculty at universities and art schools along with adjunct instructors, graduate students, and critics working independently. Whether explicitly or implicitly, any number of conferences, publications, and research projects have been dedicated to problems that are framed as “global” and “contemporary”; this publication is of course no exception. These initiatives have been paralleled by the recent reorientation of academic art history, which has sought to revise its still largely Eurocentric account of modernism in line with the more decentralized paradigm of what is now typically called “world art history”.1 The second tendency concerns exhibition-making. While the ZKM show stands out for the directness with which it named its subject, a great many exhibitions have adopted quite similar strategies. Though there are important exceptions, it is now virtually axiomatic that the primary purpose of biennials is to showcase global contemporary art. One sees this in the titles that biennial curators have used to thematize their selections. Many gesture broadly toward an epochal, immediate, and planetary scale of thinking: Zones of Contact, Beyond Borders, Optimism in the Age of Global War.2 Some seem to wink at the increasingly stage-managed and institutional or even corporate elements of biennial culture; one thinks here of examples like Rehearsal and Annual Report, which respectively brought the exhibition into provocative alignment with the Broadway show and the shareholder’s conference. Others adopt an unabashedly utopian position, gesturing poetically toward a horizon of potential transformation: The Past, The Future, The Possible; If the World Changed. 3 Largely because of their periodic nature and cosmopolitan aspirations, biennials are highly sensitive to fluctuations in the rapidly evolving global culture they aim to represent. This self-consciousness reaches a nearparodic degree in the World Biennial Forum – a biennial conference about biennials, held at biennials. (This is not at all to say that such exhibitions categorically lack a critical relation to their own conditions of possibility; such self-reflexivity in fact tends to be greater on the biennial circuit than in most other sectors of the contemporary art world. Rather, my point is that the discursive frame that structures most reception of biennials is one in which globality and contemporaneity are taken as self-evident and desirable values, rather than as sites of normativity and possible contestation.) 1  Among the more prominent English-language examples of this tendency are Carrier (2008); Elkins (2007) and Summers (2003). 2  These titles correspond respectively to the 2006 Biennale of Sydney, curated by Charles Merewether; the 2015 Beaufort Triennial, curated by Lorenzo Benedetti, Patrick Ronse, Hilde Teerlinck, and Phillip Van den Bossche; and the 2007 Istanbul Biennial, curated by Hou Hanru.

3  These titles were used by the 2010 Shanghai Biennale, curated by Fan Di’an and Gao Shiming; the 2008 Gwangju Biennale, curated by Okwui Enwezor; the 2015 Sharjah Biennial, curated by Eungie Joo; and the 2013 Singapore Biennale, curated by a team of 27 local professionals.

The Scrim, the Pistol, and the Lectern Perhaps the most obvious objection to the ZKM exhibition and others like it is that it seems to make little sense to group together works of “global contemporary art” as if this were a cohesive genre – what sort of art wouldn’t fit under this heading? All the same, many of us are quite familiar with the dominant strains of “global contemporary” production that were shown in Karlsruhe. One thematic approach consists of depicting sites like international airports and hotels, which evoke the banality of contemporary experience, at least among a privileged few; or locations like electronics factories, container terminals, financial exchanges, and petrochemical plants, which highlight its sublime or dystopian aspects. This viewpoint is common in contemporary art photography; apart from familiar examples like Andreas Gursky and Edward Burtynsky, we might cite others who were shown at ZKM, like Ho-Yeol Ryu. A second approach uses time-based media to engage in a more abstract reflection on contemporaneity, whether as a historical condition, a temporality, or an ideology. Several artists in the Karlsruhe show took this tack, including Raqs Media Collective, Hito Steyerl, and Chto Delat? A third merges the formal vocabularies of documentary and post-conceptual art with the agenda of social-democratic humanitarianism, critically evaluating the politics of internment, migration, and international aid; the work of Ursula Biemann is paradigmatic in this respect. By hybridizing aesthetics and politics, such work does not oppose conventional artistic criteria so much as it sidesteps or ignores them. This is a trait that characterizes many working in the field of “social practice”, as it is called in the United States – a field that is itself undergoing a kind of global consolidation through such forums as the Creative Time Summit, which has held its last two annual meetings in Stockholm and Venice. Yet no matter how compelling or sympathetic some of these practices may be, they are indisputably shadowed by a much more pervasive and powerful type of global contemporary art: namely, the countless circuits of exchange and speculation that comprise the semi-mythified entity we usually call “the market”. It could be that this quasi-concept functions in art discourse as an instance of what the Marxian theorist Alfred Sohn-Rethel termed “real abstraction” – an abstract entity that exerts concrete effects, like money or ideology. 4 Instead, I want to suggest that the rhetoric of the global contemporary is so ubiquitous, powerful, and amorphous that it ultimately effaces (or even subsumes) any determinate difference between art markets and their ostensible antagonists. After all, the markets have their own well-elaborated versions of the “global contemporary”. Some of these cases are laughable, as with Planet Art, an app recently launched by the financial services giant UBS, which uses purpose-built algorithms to sift valuable information from what it calls 4  For a recent critical discussion of Sohn-Rethel, see Lütticken (2012).

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Andrew Stefan Weiner / “the vast and often confusing system of contemporary art news sources and trends”. 5 (The nature of this presumably proprietary information is not disclosed in the bank’s publicity campaign for the app.) Others can be ignored, if with some effort; one thinks here of the bubble surrounding the “zombie formalism” of Oscar Murillo and other young painters who are beloved by art investors, if not by all critics. 6 However, there remain other cases that are more vexing: the graduate degree programmes run by Christie’s and Sotheby’s and administered by accomplished art historians; or projects like the Guggenheim’s UBS MAP Global Art Initiative, in which mid-career curators with biennial experience use funds from a Swiss investment bank to assemble collections of non-Western contemporary art for the Guggenheim’s new franchises in sites like Abu Dhabi. Perhaps what is troubling about these examples is the sort of compromised horizon they suggest, in which we cannot decisively sever the quasi-utopianism of the biennial or the putative autonomy of the academy from the unapologetically wanton capitalism of the art fair. In other words, for every Art Basel Miami, with cameos by the likes of Miley Cyrus and James Franco, there are art fairs like Frieze London, which sell just as much high-dollar art but also feature talks by blue-chip critical theorists like Jacques Rancière. My point is not that the global contemporary is purely “symptomatic”, or subject to some other sort of fatal compromise. Were that so, we could condemn it, congratulate ourselves, and retreat to a place of comfortable moral superiority. Instead, we are left with the more arduous task of trying to disentangle its useful or critical aspects from its complicit ones, even as we acknowledge that these distinctions don’t always hold up in practice. In this essay I want to suggest a few forms that this sort of critical labour might take, with the important proviso that such work can only be heuristic, contingent, and immanent. To telegraph my argument, I think that while the category of the “global contemporary” might be necessary for thinking strategically about politics and aesthetics, it is also necessarily compromised, in that it can’t be decisively severed from what we might call the cultural logic of neoliberalism. No matter how hard we might work to mark distinctions between the critical and ideological aspects of the “global contemporary”, it might well be that such judgments can only be hypothetical, provisional, and in some sense undecidable. In what follows, I will explore certain ways in which the rhetoric of the “global contemporary” is both subtended by and instrumental to the hegemony of neoliberalism. 5  See the UBS Planet Art website: https://www.ubs.com/microsites/planet-art/home. html, last accessed 9 June 2015. 6  I refer here to the debates that took place in the USA in 2014 around abstract painting and the market. For one representative contribution see

Jerry Saltz: “Zombies on the Walls: Why Does So Much Abstraction Look the Same?”, 14 June 2015, http://www.vulture.com/2014/06/why-new-abstractpaintings-look-the-same.html, last accessed 29 October 2015.

The Scrim, the Pistol, and the Lectern I will close by considering three examples of practices that problematize this relation, raising the possibility of “dis-situating” it and thereby opening spaces to re-situate our own thinking. In defining contemporaneity as “global”, the ZKM exhibition sought to reinflect what was even at that point a long-running series of debates over the problem of “the contemporary”: a notion that has attained the same sort of dominance and notoriety in art discourse that the idea of the postmodern once did. These discussions became so inescapable that many now express resistance to the idea of continuing them. It would seem that we are now over or past the contemporary, even if this begs the question of what could possibly come after the contemporary – the post-contemporary? With apologies for reanimating this tedious or unfashionable topic, I want to revisit one of the most visible moments in this debate: the 2009 publication of a questionnaire concerning “the contemporary” by the American journal October (Foster et al. 2009: 3-124). The 32 respondents were primarily art theorists and historians, mixed with a small group of curators and journalists. (The only artist was Anton Vidokle, who is better known as one of the editors of e-flux journal.) The majority of this group had a pre-existing connection with October, having published in the journal or been affiliated with one of the university departments associated with the journal’s editorial board. Though some respondents, like Okwui Enwezor and Chika Okeke-Agulu, have been pivotal in working to counter the Eurocentrism of contemporary art discourse, all of them – in fact, all 70 who were asked to reply – were based in the United States or Europe. The central premise of the questionnaire, authored by Hal Foster, was to contest what it characterized as the absence of criticality regarding contemporary practices. As Foster claimed, the perceived obsolescence of prior critical paradigms like “the neo-avant-garde” and “postmodernism” had created a kind of vacuum, such that art now operated free of historicization, understanding, and judgment (ibid: 3). If this position conceded that October was no longer the gatekeeper that it once prided itself on being – the critical models of neo-avant-gardism and postmodernism were largely developed in its pages during the 1980s – it nevertheless placed the journal in a position to serve as the arbiter of this legacy, as if choosing its own successor. Not surprisingly, a number of responses reiterated arguments that had been made previously by members of October’s editorial board. One common claim was that the overriding characteristic of contemporary art is a pluralistic indifference to questions of medium or content. While this is hardly a new diagnosis – such a claim structures Rosalind Krauss’s 1999 book A Voyage on the North Sea – several respondents usefully updated this critique by considering emergent phenomena like customized mass production or the repressive tolerance of neoliberal governmentality.

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Andrew Stefan Weiner / However, none questioned the relation between Krauss’ critique of pluralism and her attachment to aspects of the high modernist doxa formulated by Clement Greenberg: one thinks here of the equation of self-reflexivity, medium-specificity, and quality; the proscription of ostensibly “literary” content; or the opposition between rigour and eclecticism. In a similar vein, several questionnaire respondents argued for an art-historical categorization of “the contemporary” as an era beginning in 1989, and thus following neatly from the periodizations proposed in the October-authored textbook Art Since 1900. This is not to say that the questionnaire didn’t also yield thoughtful, generative responses; it did, as for example the contributions by Miwon Kwon, T.J. Demos, and Yates McKee. However, the potential impact of these interventions was blunted by their failure to engage certain problems. Respondents largely neglected to question the extent to which the category of the contemporary is inherently presentist – as if the art of earlier eras has somehow been unable to reflect on its own historicity. Neither did they consider the massive discrepancy between the modes of avant-gardism venerated by October and the popular neo-academic formats that are sold in shopping malls and vacation towns, which comprise the overwhelming majority of the global trade in contemporary art. While these issues are relatively widespread in art criticism, it was particularly troubling to find that a journal so closely identified with the cause of critical conceptual art seemed to have little faith in artists’ own ability to theorize their own practice. In not inviting artists to respond to the questionnaire – whether with texts or artworks – Foster and his colleagues reinforced the fallacy that art can only speak in what Lacan called the discourse of the hysteric. This decision to reserve interpretative authority for the master discourse of the professional academic or curator speaks much more to the anxieties of critics than it does to the analytic or speculative capacities of actual artists. In a moment of technological change, disciplinary reconfigurations, and university defunding, it is understandable that the ever-marginal field of critical art history would worry about its own potential obsolescence. Yet one wonders whether this preoccupation has created a kind of blind spot, diverting attention away from the more pressing question of the relation between critical discourse, institutional priorities, and the booming trade in contemporary art. Contemporaneity is not only a concept; it is also a specific form of value, linking art, fashion, advertising, and other sectors of the so-called “creative economy”. When we write essays for exhibition catalogues or commercial magazines, we don’t only judge value, we produce it, and are then typically compensated, whether in cash or cachet. Of the 32 respondents to the October questionnaire, only one (Pamela Lee) commented on this potential conflict of interest – perhaps a sign that the journal still

The Scrim, the Pistol, and the Lectern indulges the modernist fantasy of autonomy, if not its calls for rigorous self-reflexivity. My intention is not to single out October for criticism, but rather to suggest that such misconceptions and oversights represent problematic tendencies in the larger discourse around “the contemporary”, and that the subsidiary category of “the global contemporary” risks reinforcing or even compounding these. Partly because “the global” and “the contemporary” are such common, seemingly transparent notions, we often tend to ignore the specific spatial and temporal relations they presuppose. We all too easily glide past a complex mass of problems when we speak of “the global contemporary” as a condition that is singular, uniform, and present. Though I lack the space here to properly develop this argument, I want to advance the hypothesis that the global contemporary functions as what philosophers call a false universal. That is to say, it fuses together two deceptively simple or common-sensical notions – the unitary totality of the globe and the immediate simultaneity of the present – such that they reinforce each other. In doing so, it forecloses any number of urgent questions. For example, in what ways is the putatively shared experience of contemporaneity shadowed by the enclosure of common resources, including those as basic as space and time? And how might the universal horizon of the global contemporary resemble the allegedly post-historical status of market capitalism, so neatly encapsulated in the Thatcherite motto “there is no alternative”? We might say that the global contemporary simply is the ideology of neoliberalism, but this would obscure the mediating function of art while assuming a number of problematic separations: between base and superstructure, between theory and practice, and, perhaps most crucially, between ourselves and the problem. Within such straitened circumstances, how can we conceive and actualize possible modes of response? In lieu of a definitive answer to such questions, I want to provide a brief overview of three practices that might help us beginto think otherwise about the global contemporary. The artworks I will use as test cases were all produced in the last five years by emerging artists, each with ties to the Middle East but showing internationally, each working in a neo-conceptual, post-medium mode. These works thus meet the basic criteria of “the global contemporary”; while none of them were shown at ZKM, any of them easily could have been. However, they reframe or “dis-situate” that category by intensively addressing episodes drawn from the complex history of pan-Arab socialism. As I hope to show, these works do not simply replace the global with the regional or the contemporary with the historic. Rather, they hollow out a space behind the seemingly uniform surface of the global contemporary to reveal the ways in which it is con-tingent, internally differentiated, and thus potentially contestable.

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Andrew Stefan Weiner / My first example is Céline Condorelli’s 2012 installation White Gold, whose title refers to its subject: the Egyptian cotton industry. Cotton was Egypt’s cash crop under colonial rule; the industry was nationalized under Gamal Abdel Nasser in reforms that would become the basis for Nasser’s vision of pan-Arabism, a regionally and ethnically unified socialist movement. Condorelli exhibited documents pertaining to this history in purposebuilt archival display units; these were partially concealed behind a large cotton curtain, which was printed with a composite image of Egyptian cotton fields circa 1930. If this historical reference might have seemed oddly untimely at that moment, coming scarcely a year after the Tahrir Square uprising swept the Mubarak regime from power, that was precisely the point. Against overheated talk of “Twitter activism” and “the Facebook revolution”, Condorelli’s installation quietly signalled the continuing relevance of long-standing economic and social conflicts, including the internal contradictions that led to the demise of the pan-Arab movement in the 1970s. It positioned itself within the ambiguous legacy of these conflicts, marking this position in its very facture, having been produced with Egyptian cotton. Lastly, the installation positioned this history at a certain level of remove, placing its fragmentary archive behind the semi-opaque scrim of the curtain. Together, these displacements refigured contemporaneity as a condition of immanence, overdetermination, undecidability, and incomplete accessibility. A second case is Marwa Arsanios’s Have You Ever Killed A Bear, Or Becoming Jamila (2013), a research project that Arsanios has recently realized as a lecture performance and a video. Rather than try to summarize the work’s complex, self-imbricating narrative, which is better experienced directly, I want to highlight some of the references that it uses to effectively create its own polytemporal context – a process that is pivotal to the work’s critical function. Part of the piece was informed by Arsanios’s research in the archive of the Egyptian magazine Al-Hilal (The Crescent), which was one of the leading advocates of pan-Arabist cultural politics. Its other key reference point is the Algerian militant Jamila Bouhired, who was charged with a bomb attack on French soldiers – an incident that was dramatized in Gilles Pontecorvo’s 1966 film The Battle of Algiers. Working in the selfreflexive, associative mode of essay film developed by Harun Farocki and more recently Hito Steyerl, Arsanios portrays Bouhired as the object of a powerful but strongly ambivalent appeal. Even as Bouhired’s image seems to conjure the possibility of a specifically feminist pan-Arabism, which largely failed to materialize in practice, it speaks from within a present split between the recuperative power of radical chic, the foreclosed aspirations of militant cinema, and the troubling allure of political violence. My last example is Where are the Arabs? (2009), a work that was staged in Jordan, Palestine, and the United Arab Emirates by the Jordanian artist

The Scrim, the Pistol, and the Lectern Samah Hijawi. The piece was a kind of modified re-enactment of a set of speeches given by Nasser during the 1960s in his efforts to build a coalition of non-aligned socialist Arab nations. Hijawi began by excerpting extracts from various speeches on the topic of Arab unity. She compiled these into a new, rather repetitive text, which she then used as a script for speeches she herself gave from a podium in a range of public locations, including city streets and a vegetable market; a version of the speech was also taped for closed-circuit broadcast in local bars and cafes. On some occasions Hijawi delivered the speech neutrally; on others she spoke enthusiastically or ironically, or invited audience members to recite the speech themselves – a premise she has explored further in a subsequent piece entitled Arab Unity Chorale. For our purposes, the key feature of Where are the Arabs? is its versatile approach to articulating new relations between the contemporary, the historical, and the para-historical or virtual. If Hijawi summons the precedent of pan-Arabism, she does so through the mediation of a flawed, unstable text, through the alteration of gender roles, and from a standpoint that invites but does not prejudge the participation of a non-art audience. In doing so, she conjures the conflicted history of a regional universalism from a thoroughly contingent position. By way of closing, I want to venture the speculation that these more nuanced or circumspect modes of intervention retain a particular potential in the current moment of retrenchment across the Middle East, when attention has turned to the failures and contradictions of the Arab Spring. It is not that works like these could somehow close these gaps, but rather that they could shift our understanding of their etiology and their potential – as well as their relation to our senses of the contemporary and the global. At their limit, such practices might even harbour the power to effectively reframe these disjunctures, allowing us to see them instead as spaces of potential contestation, even if the form and outcome of such action remains to be decided. •

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Andrew Stefan Weiner / References Belting, Hans, Buddensieg, Andrea and Weibel, Peter, eds. (2013): The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Carrier, David (2008): A World Art History and its Objects. University Park, PA: Penn State Press. Elkins, James (2007): Is Art History Global? New York: Routledge. Foster, Hal et al., eds. (2009): “Questionnaire on ‘The Contemporary’”. In: October/130, pp. 3-124. Lütticken, Sven (2012): “Inside Abstraction.” In: e-flux journal #38, October 2012, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/ inside-abstraction/, last accessed 9 June 2015.

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Summers, David (2003): Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism. London: Phaidon.

The Aesthetics of Irony as a Form of Resistance

Voon Pow Bartlett

The Aesthetics of Irony as a Form of Resistance: Zhang Peili in “Harmonious Society, 天下無事” “Harmonious Society, 天下無事” is an exhibition of contemporary art by Chinese artists from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan which was part of the Asia Triennial in Manchester (ATM14, October-November 2014). ATM14 itself included 54 artists from 12 countries across 14 venues and was a collaboration with a range of sites and partners in Manchester, focusing on three main clusters in Northern England at The Quays in Manchester city centre, Bury and Rochdale.1 According to ATM director Alnoor Mitha, ATM14 aims to challenge perceptions about Asia, and recent challenging global events make its theme of Conflict and Compassion a timely one. “Harmonious Society, 天下無事” is the first collaboration between Alnoor Mitha and curator Joshua Jiang Jiehong. Artworks were on display not just at the Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art (CFCCA), which is the only art centre in the whole of the United Kingdom dedicated to Chinese contemporary art, but throughout the city of Manchester: at the National Football Museum, Manchester Cathedral, John Rylands Library, and ArtWork, an empty warehouse constructed from the remnants of Manchester’s glorious industrial past. I will begin with how the title of the exhibition has influenced the way I viewed the works. I will draw upon Michel de Certeau’s contribution in The Practice of Everyday Life (1984) to discuss tactics available to ordinary citizens, and use this to gain a better understanding of such empowerment in reclaiming and expressing a sense of identity and autonomy within the specificities of a presiding regime and the global forces brought on by modernity. Timothy James Clark’s The Painting of Modern Life (1984) serves as a historical model in the critique of modernity. Finally but crucially, Zhang Peili’s installation at the exhibition Elegant Semicircles (2014) provides a particular example of the aesthetics of irony as a form of resistance. (Fig. 1) For the curatorial team led by Jiang, the choice of the title “Harmonious Society, 天下無事” was a response to ATM14’s theme of Conflict 1  ATM was launched in 2008 as a partnership between Castlefield Gallery, the Chinese Arts Centre, Cornerhouse, Manchester Art Gallery and Manchester Metropolitan University, and featured

a new long-term programme of contemporary arts and crafts by artists from Asia, the UK and the Asian diaspora (http://www.asiatriennialmanchester.com).

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Voon Pow Bartlett /

Fig. 1  Zhang Peili, Elegant Semicircles, 2014

The Aesthetics of Irony as a Form of Resistance and Compassion. It aimed to project an apparent ‘no conflict’ situation, ostensibly starting with a literal reading of the two terms. For the curatorial team “harmonious” connoted the “current socio-economic vision and the political proposition of China’s regime” and “天下無事” (pronounced tianxia wu shi) literally means “There is nothing happening under the sun or sky”. Besides, we learn that for the curatorial team the Chinese segment of the title served to expand on the English and was intended as a reference to “cultural and philosophical connections to be perceived in the global context” (CFCCA leaflet 2014: 1). In my understanding, the way the title has been structured as “Harmonious Society, 天下無事” challenges us to go beyond a literal or poetic translation or even to read it as a ubiquitous slogan. To me, it has inscribed within its very construct, in the way the English and Chinese terms have been coupled, a state of conflict rather than a ‘no conflict’ situation, as Jiang would like us to believe. Combining an English phrase, “Harmonious Society” with the Chinese “天下無事” challenges the audience to deliberate on the endless set of possibilities, its multiple meanings and potential for various interpretations. For example, does one phrase support the other, is one an exposition of the other, a follow-on sentence as part of a narrative, an addendum or a rejoinder? My reading of it is that it is an ironic rejoinder where the literal meaning of harmony and the utopic narrative are suggesting exactly the opposite of what they seem to be suggesting. The inbuilt contradiction sets up a dialectic relationship. Residing in the phrase there is an ironic tone, a self-conscious rhetoric of playing with surface meaning to obfuscate any straightforward interpretations. I am suggesting not only that the terms “Harmonious Society” and “天下無事” can themselves be contextualized against the current political and social landscape of conflict and contradiction. In addition to this, the Chinese proverb 天下無事 is ostensibly the Chinese translation of its English companion, or vice versa, and yet it produces a whole that is more than the sum of the parts. Indeed, it seems to sit defiantly and provocatively after its English counterpart, challenging verification. This serves in my view to predicate an aesthetic of ironic discourse, or at least lends itself to an ironic and irreverent reading. “Harmonious Society” is a loaded term in recent Chinese history, not just in the political arena but also because of its Internet presence. Geremie Barmé and Jeremy Goldkorn’s publication on “Civilizing China” (Barmé/ Goldkorn: 2013) gives some interesting examples. The Communist Party of China (CPC) announced the goal of constructing a “Harmonious Society” in 2004 at the Fourth Plenum of the 16th Central Committee, envisioning a country where everyone had equal opportunities and the chance to make a living (http://www.china.org.cn/english/2005/Mar/121746.htm). Chinese netizens then began to use the word for “river crab”, 河蟹, hexie,

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Voon Pow Bartlett / to double up for “harmonious”, 和諧, as these two Chinese terms are homonyms. Hexie (river crab written in Chinese) is now used as ironic slang for censoring or deleting items from the Internet and elsewhere, indicating scepticism among the Chinese about the so-called “harmonious society” extolled by their government. A renowned example is Ai Weiwei’s infamous use of this pun in protest against the demolition of his Shanghai studio by the government. He served 10.000 river crabs to the visitors who were there during the demolition, making a farce out of the government’s choice of “harmony” as a synonym for its socio-economic and political vision. After this, the word “harmonious”, 和谐, began to be censored, and even became a euphemism for censorship, 网禁. (This has now actually led to Internet censorship, and the term 河蟹 is being blocked by the Great Wall of China). Using the Chinese proverb 天下无事 (tianxia wushi) is at once an avowal of the rich discourse of China’s social historicity and an estrangement. It insinuates another layer of meaning perhaps only accessible to the Chinese reader. Chengyu, or proverbs, are the heritage of thousands of years of China’s primarily illiterate, oral, peasant-based culture, where different combinations of words are prone to puns and innuendo. “天下 無事” has a deep historical reference and is probably an abbreviation of “天下本无事, 庸人自扰之”, which literally means: “Though peace reigns over the land, the stupid people create trouble for themselves. There is nothing wrong with the world, and if there is trouble, it is because some foolish people ask or look for it.” This may point to a hidden message in the title which says: “Staying out of trouble will lead to a harmonious society”! The cryptic title sets an impressive introduction to the exhibition. Not only does it establish the immeasurable weight embedded in China’s rich cultural potential for multiple meanings in words and terminologies, it further alludes to the conflicting and pluralist possibilities of buzzwords in our globalized arena. The sardonic tone effectively provides a glimpse into the exhibition itself, which seems at first glance to be disadvantaged by the seemingly chaotic array of artworks, in scope, scale and styles. Observers of Chinese contemporary art such as Paul Gladston and Geremie Barmé have acknowledged this sentiment of excess that has facilitated the production of works of unmitigated, uncensored expression, of mockery, derision and irony. Included in the exhibition are 30 artworks from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan; a truck full of steel scaffoldings, four double-sided two-metre panels mimicking the length of a real football pitch, a large steel Eiffel Tower (model), a huge mirror, a huge wooden box stamped with customs and excise paperwork, a straw-covered bed, neon lights installed on a gigantic structure, books that breathe, even Tiananmen Square, albeit a maquette of the real thing.

The Aesthetics of Irony as a Form of Resistance Zhang Peili’s Elegant Semicircles (2014) is, in my view, particularly ironic in its tone. I share critic Francesca Dal Lago’s view in describing Zhang’s oeuvre as having a “formal neutrality (that) verges on the excessive, using metaphors, irony, and coded references as its tools” (Peckham/Lau 2011: 11-13). Contrary to Gladston’s view that the multifariously coded works of Zhang Peili carry a tendency that does not appear to be tied to ideology or form, I am of the opinion that Elegant Semicircles shows a strong satirical tendency in an attempt to unmask the injustices of the times with an adroitness of knowing “a certain art of placing one’s blows” (ibid.). Irony of Patriotism and Protests Elegant Semicircles is an installation composed of a set of six flags in the ArtWork space. The flags are blank in the sense that they do not contain any images, only colours, each flag being coloured in one of six different hues: yellow, red, green, blue, white and black. Although colours are the basic constituents of many national flags, they do not overtly identify with any one nation. The flags each hang from a heavy flagpole attached to one of the walls of the warehouse and programmed electronically to a repetitive spool, based on a sweep of semicircles. According to the CFCCA catalogue, “slowly the flagpoles move from side to side […] in a final gesture […] they raise as if standing to attention, is this a mark of respect or a declaration?” (CFCCA catalogue 2014: 22). Zhang Peili’s deliberate choice of standard flag colours devoid of texts and symbols, whilst acting as a representation of the universality of empire and a symbol of nationalist strength, also functions in its manner of presentation as a critique. I have coined a term “irony of patriotism” to describe how Zhang uses this strategy to mock the romantic, fervent loyalty to China displayed by some. Examples from the revolutionary fervour of the 1960s and 1970s come to mind. Flags serve as potent patriotic symbols during peacetime and as signalling devices in wartime. National flags are used as a symbol of political hegemony. Zhang’s flags however, are not flying triumphantly, thrashing and whipping against the elements. They are not held in national celebrations, in front of embassies, or even hoisted half-mast at state funerals. Neither are they waved in defiance, as an expression of an individual demand, entitlement or right. Instead, they are attached mechanically and electrically to the concrete wall of a warehouse. They are oversized: when raised, they are higher than an average human, just scraping the low rolled steel joist holding up the ceiling of the warehouse, hung perpendicular rather than upright. The heavy and cumbersome steel poles from which they are suspended have made them inaccessible, physically and metaphorically.

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Voon Pow Bartlett / There is, however, majesty in their movements with the precision and regularity of an army march. By deliberately slowing down the flags’ tempo, Zhang managed to attract further attention to the purpose and meaning of these flags in particular and flags in general. At first glance, they resemble the pomp and circumstance of a military parade, the slowed movements appearing to mimic the way soldiers raise their legs or their guns, or mock them as the flags sway and teeter provocatively. By destabilizing any intrinsic respect inscribed in flags and their ceremonial role, Zhang seems to be mocking the Chinese establishment. The manifestation of patriotism, of vigorous and enthusiastic support for one’s country by flag waving, is circumnavigated by the clunky mechanical device powering this awkward motion. The audience is kept at a wilful distance, barred from any contemplative interaction or solidarity and relegated to perceiving the work in silent awe. Allegiance is held in check. A sense of irony is imbued in the flags’ coordination and repetition, like a form of “organized fervour”, a collective effervescence captured as a moment of communal spectacle, as when Mao ascended Tiananmen in the summer of 1966, where the Red Guard youths were shouting Mao slogans and waving their Little Red Books (Jiang 2007: 24). For me, Zhang’s flags and their purposeful movements seem to be derisive, and might even be denouncing the as yet unfaded memory of the fanatical energy behind these momentous, national and historic events. The awkward movements written into the mechanization of the flags resonate a self-deprecating ambivalence, concealing, condemning or even succumbing to the temptation to yield. Zhang may be expressing the irony of patriotism as the Chinese government takes advantage of its citizens’ proclivity to revel in any occasion to protest or to celebrate. He may be expressing his contempt for the conformity of their behaviour, or for such outward displays of emotion or simply for the prospect of sharing something emotionally, whether it is an incident or a national celebration (ibid.). The flags, however, hold a sense of calculated restraint. Their coordinated movements recollect the solemnity and conformity of the recent past with a satirical nod. Supplanting a system of universal signification, Zhang’s flags suggest a whole system of fabrication, of movement, pace, dance, colour, scale, repetition. It is Zhang’s own “song of resistance”, a useful term coined by Michel de Certeau to describe a language developed into almost a chant or incantation, conceived for the particular purpose of subverting an externally imposed frame of reference (De Certeau 1984: 18). The flags, chained to a life of restrained, regulated and monitored, if not repetitive ennui, seem to mock the use of flags as a political tool. Instead of being “a mark of respect or a declaration”, they are reduced to a charade, no climax, no beginning, no end, thus consequently leading to neither success nor failure (CFCCA catalogue 2014: 22). This may be a métier of Chinese political power.

The Aesthetics of Irony as a Form of Resistance Waving flags also recall the situation in which the iconic image of the Tankman was captured. The protester standing alone against the tanks on Tiananmen Square in 1989 was waving for them to stop. This famous image attracted worldwide attention and remains a powerful icon of protest. It is regarded as a form of “freedom fighters discourse” with its visual correlates of military symbols, flags etc. (Powers 1987 (1991): 5-6, 50). The man waved his shirt as a flag, and although it lacked the pomposity of the material, he was nonetheless petitioning to a flag’s symbolism. Xi Chen’s book Social Protest and Contentious Authoritarianism in China describes interesting localized collectives in China which engage in various forms of protest with a range of “troublemaking” tactics aimed at government departments (Xi 2005: 4). By striking a balance between defiance and obedience, such as through “disruption, persuasion, publicity, elite advocacy”, this form of relatively peaceful activity allows the Chinese government not only to tolerate, but even to promote its manifestation. The author finds it quite remarkable that the Reform Era government can make use of this form of “troublemaking” by adopting a kind of “contentious authoritarianism” (ibid.:12, 164). The activities tolerated by the state authorities include peaceful demonstrations, sit-ins, traffic blockades, even self-inflicted suffering, so long as there is no risk of radical public disruption (ibid.: 161). In theory, social protests provide a means for relatively powerless people to advance their interests in the political system. However, it seems that along with “revolutionary utilitarianism”, “protests” can also undergo amelioration and destabilisation. A protest may seem to be the prerogative of the protestors, but it can also be turned in the Chinese government’s favour, forming part of their toolbox, their mediating mechanism. The Chinese government believe that if they facilitate social protests, then these protests can become routinized and hence lose their power of impact (ibid.: 13, 164). Although, to complicate matters, if routinisation or turning a blind eye to protests fails, then the Chinese government, often capable of caprice, as numerous precedents have demonstrated, can trigger violent consequences. The appalling historical precedents include the persecution of the Falungong 2 movement in 1999 and the student crackdown of 1989. The final irony is that if people use troublemaking tactics without aspiring to any solutions, not only is it counterproductive for the government to turn it into a useful tool, but worse still, conformity is further entrenched, making a mockery of protests. Zhang has always been interested in social dimensions, in the meaning and efficacy of different forms of protests and the absurdity of how easily they can be made redundant. The erratic movements of his flags may indeed be trying to galvanize the unexpected 2  法轮功, Chinese spiritual movement founded in 1992, regarded as a cult by the government of the People’s Republic of China.

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Voon Pow Bartlett / ways in which protests can take opportunistic advantage of political structures and their inherent contradictions and ambiguities.

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Irony of Modernity China’s modernity, its meaning and impact are popular topics amongst critics, writers and artists. One recurrent theme for artists is the urbanisation of Chinese cities. We may gain an insight into their work by studying the modernization of Paris, albeit a hundred years ago, and in particular T.J. Clark’s writing on the subject. In The Painting of Modern Life, Clark was tempted to see the connection between paintings of the time, notably the art of Édouard Manet, and the modernization of Paris in the late 19th century (Clark 1989 (1984)). Clark describes how Manet aimed to show not only the transformation and growth of the Industrial Age but also how it affected society (ibid.: 23). Clark quotes Arthur Rimbaud’s description of Manet’s sentiment towards the modernity that confronted Paris where “all trace of previous good taste has been evaded in the furnishings and exteriors of the houses as well as the plan of the city” (ibid.: 273). Many Chinese artists, including Zhang, I can imagine, will identify with this discontent and similarly believe that China’s modernity has not necessarily led to a better life. The principle on which the modernity of Beijing was built has attracted deleterious critique. On a social and humanitarian scale, Chinese cities, like Paris in the 19th century, were built by evicting the working classes from city centres. Detractors of urban planning in China have doubts about the long term and the local viability of such cities, and consider their efficacy to be artificial and fabricated, and worse still, a quick fix to the lack of an intrinsic art system in China. In the specific late 20thcentury Chinese scenario, biennials (and triennials) were facilitated, with artists being created as global brands, simply as new criteria for achieving city status. This instrumentalization of exhibitions was nothing more than a giant public relations exercise for propaganda and commercial purposes (Papastergiadis and Martin 2011). In The Rue Mosnier with Flags (1878), Manet also used the motif of the flag to depict fervour and zeal, to critique political propaganda. (Fig. 2) He painted the flag-waving town consumed by its national pride and new-found prosperity with a sensitivity to the associated costs and sacrifices. In a patriotic harmo-ny of reds, whites and blues, French flags sprouted from the windows of many homes, projecting the spectacle of a national holiday. A similar senseof collective effervescence is evidenced in China: the colourful flags in National Day Celebration in Tiananmen Square, 1 October, 1952 (Wu 2005: 77), or the little red books waved instead in The Hearts of the Revolutionary People are turned to the Great Leader Chairman Mao, 1967 (Jiang 2007: 128). Such scenes are described by Jiang as “liveliness and boisterousness

The Aesthetics of Irony as a Form of Resistance

Fig. 2   Éduard Manet, The Rue Mosnier with       Flags, 1878  

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Voon Pow Bartlett / consistent with Chinese traditional festivities” or “carnivals with nationalistic excitement liberated or transformed from conformity but at the same time, within conformity” (ibid.: 25). Jiang cautions that this delicate balance between control and euphoria, contained excitement and unrestrained anguish has the potential to “lead to outlandish behaviour whilst people’s passions unleashed, are so torrential that nothing can hold them” (ibid.: 24). Using the shocking image of a forlorn cripple with one leg, Manet turned the ebullience of flags and festivities in The Rue Mosnier with Flags into an emotionally enervating image, into a stark reminder of war, and a wretched face of modernity. He depicted society’s castaways with a dissymmetry of content that plays with the unexpected and the startling. Whereas the nondescript perspective of Manet’s street was energized by the buildings proudly brandishing national flags, the solemnity of Zhang’s flags critiques China’s modernity in the late 20th century in a different way. It is a form of introspected self-expression, described by critic Huang Zhuan as “cold expressionism”. Zhang’s flags allude to resistance and defiance in the harsh way they are presented: chained, undecorated, raw, as if resisting any temptation to lose control or to give in to extreme behaviour. The flags are made with frugal fabrics, presented without frills, and the marks of folding have not been steamed away. They resist the traditional aestheticization one is accustomed to on occasions of pomp and splendour, debunking the commercialization of “cosmetics of reality”, resisting the temptation to serve economic and political purposes (Jin 2005: 111). The flags have their own inexorable invisibility, traces of labouring hands and technologies, telling a story of their attribution. De Certeau eloquently recounted a visit to a museum, a reconstructed village where he found that each item, from cooking utensil to familiar household detritus, displayed the marks of “daily circuits”, revealing the “fascinating presence of absences”. With Zhang’s man-made flags, one can likewise hear hundreds of murmurs of villagers, stories of endurance and a sense of discontent. The flags embrace the signs of folding, packaging, transportation – operations which are relative to situations and locations, mass production, customization, factories. Ultimately, they embrace the lives of millions of workers, revealing to us a mode of operation that is about survival, about a culture, one which is coming to terms with industrialization on a massive scale. Conclusion “Harmonious Society, 天下無事”, inserted itself into the very structure of Manchester society, of the British Empire. Just as Manet was successful at evoking a poignant reminder of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871, and T.J. Clark satirized the modernization of Paris with all its attendant

The Aesthetics of Irony as a Form of Resistance costs, so this exhibition has the potential to be interpreted as expressing a sense of irony about what “success” and “progress” have brought to China. For all the show of solidarity and sophistication, this exhibition exudes a sense of dissatisfaction and resistance. Like the “discontented citizens” in 19th century Paris, who believed modernity had arrived, this exhibition has expressed, perhaps with a sense of pride, an ambivalent yet defiant sentiment about a loss of history and sense of identity. In particular, Zhang Peili’s Elegant Semicircles confirmed his reputation as a Chinese artist known for his use of irony and satire about the Chinese government. This in itself is ironic, as he has attracted mixed reviews and seems to be equivocal when interviewed. Although seemingly cold and impassive, his style, coupled with his apparently laissez-faire, open-ended attitude towards interpretations of his work, creates the impression that his work is devoid of ideology or form. He has said during an interview with critic Paul Gladston that “all interpretations, no matter what kind of theories have been used, are reasonable” (Peckham/Lau 2011: 40). He is known for his “refusal to be characterized as a Chinese artist” (ibid.: 9), as well as for having “a highly simplified and expressionless style that departed radically from the academic realism and rural sentimentality of the officially accepted Chinese art of that time” (ibid.: 17, 37). For me, Elegant Semicircles (2014) is infused with meanings, displaying a departure from previous styles and a clear sign of communication. It has been made with a self-conscious strategy. Zhang does this by playing with everyday signs and codes in a tension between control and excess. His aesthetic of irony towards the idea of patriotism and the culture of protest features among significant strategies employed by Chinese artists confronted with monumental economic and social change in a short period of time, and which ultimately encapsulate their ambivalence about the idea of progress. Zhang’s flags hang in suspended provocation, between patriotic fervour and meaninglessness. The principle of protest as an individual right, even in China, is ridiculed for being turned into a government tool. Modernity – presumed by many, including Deng Xiaoping, to bring greater opportunities − is unmasked as the source of inequities. Elegant Semicircles is offered in an unmistakable sentiment of resistance, protest and defiance with an underlying sense of irony and satire. •

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Voon Pow Bartlett / References Barmé, Geremie and Goldkorn, Jeremy, eds. (2013): Civilizing China. Canberra: The Australia National University. CFCCA Leaflet (2014): Harmonious Society, 天下無事. Manchester: CFCCA. Clark, T.J. (1989) [1984]: The Painting of Modern Life. Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. De Certeau, Michel (1984): The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Jiang, Jiehong, ed. (2014): Harmonious Society, 天下無事. Manchester: CFCCA. Jiang, Jiehong, ed. (2007): Burden or Legacy. From the Chinese Cultural Revolution to Contemporary Art. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

EPISTEMOLOGICAL FRAMEWORKS

Jin, Yuanpu (2005): Cultural Studies in China. London: Marshall Cavendish Academic. Papastergiadis, Nikos and Martin, Meredith (2011): “Art biennales and cities as platforms for global dialogue”. In: Liana Giorgi, Monica Sassatelli and Gerard Delanty, eds.: Festivals and the Cultural Public Sphere. London/ New York: Routledge. Peckham, Robin and Lau, Venus (2011): Zhang Peili: Certain Pleasures. Hong Kong: Blue Kingfisher Ltd. Powers, Martin J. (1991) [1987]: Art and Political Expression in Early China. New Haven / London: Yale University Press.

Wu Hung (2005): Remaking Beijing: Tiananmen Square and the Creation of a Political Space. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Xi Chen (2005): Social protest and contentious authoritarianism in China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Copyrights Fig. 1  Fig. 2             

Zhang Peili, Elegant Semicircles, 2014 Éduard, Manet, The Rue Mosnier with Flags, 1878, The J. Paul Getty Museum. Digital image courtesy of the Getty‘s Open Content Program.

A Collage of Globalization

Antigoni Memou

“A Collage of Globalization” in Documenta11 ’s Exhibition Catalogue The 11th issue of documenta – the recurring international exhibition of contemporary art that has been held in Kassel, Germany since 1955 – was conceived as a critical space, within which contemporary art and its relationship to postcolonialism and globalization could be problematized. Its sheer scale preceded any previous issues of documenta: it took place over eighteen months from March 2001 to September 2002, was curated by Okwui Enwezor and five co-curators – Carlos Basualdo, Ute Meta Bauer, Susanne Ghez, Sarat Maharaj and Octavio Zaya – and consisted of five platforms staged in different world cities. The first four platforms were devised as community-based public discussions and workshops with film and video programmes in Vienna, Berlin, New Delhi, St Lucia, and Lagos, while the fifth one – the exhibition – took place in Kassel. These five themed platforms allowed eighty international contributors across many different disciplines to debate the challenges of contemporary democracy, issues of truth, reconciliation and justice, postcolonial cultural formations and global megacities.1 The primary aims underpinning all five platforms – despite the diversity and complexity of discourses and the range of artistic practices included – were to challenge documenta’s Western-centrism, both in the spatial and in the cultural-historical sense, and to question universalizing conceptions of cultural and artistic modernity. Enwezor took the 9 / 11 events in New York as a starting point for rethinking an alternative postcolonial world, positing ‘Ground Zero’ as a symbolic site of resistance to Western hegemony and adopting Hardt and Negri’s concept of the ‘multitude’ (Hardt / Negri 2000) as the main opposition to the globalized ‘Empire’ (Enwezor 2002: 45, 47). It is this commitment to radical art and politics, as well as the proliferation of art in the documentary form, which caused considerable controversies over whether the documentary mode was prioritizing politics at the expense of the art or whether Documenta11 was not radical enough due 1  These discursive loci that preceded the exhibition in Kassel brought together a great number of collaborators, institutions and foundations, and were perceived as an integral part of the exhibition, rather than as supplementary or complimentary to it.

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Antigoni Memou / to its overreliance on Western models.2 While the artistic and theoretical contributions (as well as the interrelationship between them) have been afforded adequate attention in the existing literature, the photojournalistic images taken from renowned agencies and printed in the opening pages of Platform 5’s catalogue have not been the subject of any criticism to my knowing. Given that the discussions about Documenta11 have revolved mostly around the documentary character of most of the diverse imagemaking practices included in the exhibition, this is a surprising omission. This essay, therefore, examines the political implications of the curatorial recontextualization of these images, that is, their transition from reportage to art and from the institution of the newspaper to that of an exhibition catalogue. It asks to what extent the decision to start the catalogue with photographs of recent political upheavals and social issues may be related to an increasingly privatized and fragmented public sphere that has led to a demise of politically committed photojournalism. The essay also examines the constructed nature of this collage of globalization and the ways in which the combination of news images and their relocation into the art context may shed light on the unseen, overlooked and marginalized processes of globalization. A Photo-Story of Globalization

EPISTEMOLOGICAL FRAMEWORKS

The opening pages of Documenta11’s catalogue feature an assemblage of 77 colour photographs depicting events which took place around the globe in the years immediately preceding the opening of the show. The majority of the photographs date from the years 2000-2001, but a number reach back to 1997. Sourced from renowned press agencies such as The Associated Press, Reuters, DPA, Corbis and Getty Images, all the photographs were taken and destined to function as photojournalistic images. For the purposes of the exhibition catalogue, they were compiled by the editor Nadja Rottner and collaged together in grids of two to six photographs on each page. The seamless presentation of the photographs side by side did not 2  In reactionary art criticism, Documenta11 was perceived as undermining the aesthetic value of the artworks and prioritizing their politics, by promoting documentary work that fitted perfectly within a left-wing curatorial agenda (Kimmelman 2002). One critic claimed that “faith in art has been lost”, with artists being replaced by documentary makers or simply presented “as poor sociologists and poor anthropologists” (Ammann 2002). On the other hand, critics on the left pointed to its spectacularism, its lack of radicalism and criticality despite its explicit commitment to diversity. For Rasheed Araeen, the main issue has been the lack of radical ideas on how a show of contemporary

art might be able to reveal and subvert the epistemological and institutional structures that underpin the Western-centric art world and are responsible for the marginalization and negligence of artists who are non-white, non-European or non-American (Araeen 2005: 57; see also Downey 2003: 89). According to Stewart Martin, documenta was caught in the paradoxes of the radical avant-garde: on the one hand, it aspired to the transformation of social relations and as such it was tied, in keeping with a radical project of globalized postcolonialism, and on the other, it remained heavily reliant on the art institutions it criticized and on unforeseeable future political struggles (Martin 2003: 18).

A Collage of Globalization leave space for commentary or text. Hence, merely the dates of the individual photographs as well as short descriptions are given at the bottom of the page, which is essential in providing the context for images that are not self-explanatory. Sometimes accreditations to the photographers and the agencies are added as well, but the crediting is not consistently carried out, and quite often either the photographer or the agency is not mentioned. The grid format is reminiscent of the socially critical photo-stories published in illustrated magazines during their heyday, from the 1930s through to the 1960s. Illustrated magazines such as Life, Picture Post and Berliner Illustrierte – facilitated by the technological advances in the 1930s, including the emergence of portable cameras and printing innovations – reproduced high quality pictures, which they combined with other pictures in developing a story. The editors of these mass-circulated magazines amassed a great number of photographs, which they cropped, combined and published in ways that would suggest particular readings. Photo-essays by recognized photojournalists, such as Eugene W. Smith’s stories promoting pressing social issues and particularly the struggle against racism, had a great impact on the readers of American Life Magazine.3 The editorial assemblage of the images from a wide range of sources in the Documenta11 catalogue resembles the way editors of the illustrated magazines took control over arranging and presenting photographs together. It is unclear whether the captions in the catalogue follow the agencies’ instructions, but the way these images are collaged together may be read as a photo-story about the social and political conditions in the years preceding the opening of Documenta11. In terms of subject matter, all the photographs depict contemporary socio-political issues. Pictures of Chinese immigrants in a cargo container in California, illegal Kurdish immigrants in Greece, Albanian refugees in Italy and asylum seekers in South Australia are set alongside photographs of 9 / 11, the Israel-Palestine conflict, the Algerian civil war, clashes between ethnic Albanian rebels and Macedonian troops, as well as of the poor in Zimbabwe, the homeless in Los Angeles, Muslim prayers in Pakistan and industrial workers in Vietnam and Korea. There is a great emphasis on photographs of refugees and asylum seekers (covering cases from Australia, the US and Mexico to Greece, Spain and China), the Israel-Palestine conflict, the anti-globalization movement and other protest movements across the globe, and not least the terrorist attacks in New York in 2001.4 3  Nevertheless, influential photojournalists of the time grew highly dissatisfied with editorial control over the subject-matter, style, presentation and captioning of the photographs in the magazines. Because the photographers felt these practices

distorted their intentions, they moved on to found agencies such as Magnum (established in 1947) in order to protect their copyrights by prescribing the ways that photographs were to be reproduced.

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Antigoni Memou / Considering that all these photographs are produced by professional photojournalists and distributed daily via their agencies across the globe to be published as single images within mainstream media, compiling them into a photo-story is a remarkable curatorial decision. Why would the curators include these images at the beginning of the catalogue? Or, to paraphrase Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s question: does the exhibition catalogue of one of the most influential contemporary art shows really need to display images that we can see in news media? (Downey 2003: 91).

EPISTEMOLOGICAL FRAMEWORKS

The Demise of Critical Photojournalism The dissemination of photojournalistic images depicting social and political issues via galleries, exhibitions and photobooks is scarcely a new phenomenon and can be related to the weakening of photojournalism in the mainstream media since the 1960s. The ascendancy of television and the demise of the weekly illustrated magazines in the 1960s contributed decisively to the decline of critical photojournalism, which led critics such as Andy Grundberg to declare the death of ‘Old Photojournalism’ and the development of ‘New Photojournalism’. The main difference between the new and the old forms of photojournalism is not that New Photojournalism has a different style or conveys a more sophisticated meaning, but that its circulation takes place primarily in art spaces (Grundberg 1990: 186). This phenomenon has been intensified by the impact of neoliberal globalization on Western printed mass media over the last three decades, namely the concentration of media ownership as a result of the expansion of multinational corporate market practices in every economic sphere. The oligopolistic structure of the media and its overdependence on advertising as its primary source of income have left very little space for any sustained criticism of neoliberalism’s set of values. Herman and Chomsky have analysed the shared interests of major media corporations and political elites, and have reflected on how these links have had a profound impact on the general agenda, content and function of the Western mainstream press. (Herman / Chomsky 1988) Serious photojournalistic stories have been detrimentally affected by this continuously changing media landscape. The immediate effect is that photojournalists nowadays compete for much less editorial space given that the great majority of photographs printed in dailies are related to the content of the newspapers’ lifestyle, fashion and celebrity supplements. 4  Some of these themes recur among the artworks included in the main exhibition. For example, Multiplicity’s ID: A Journey through a Solid Sea (2001-2002) depicts the wreck of a ship loaded with refugees that sank in the Mediterranean Sea; Chantal Akerman’s From the Other Side (2002)

portrays Mexicans’ attempts to migrate to the United States via the Mexico/US border; and Fareed Armaly’s collaboration with the film-maker Rashid Mashawari in the project From/To (2002) addresses the displacement of Palestinians since the founding of the State of Israel in 1948.

A Collage of Globalization Given the heavy emphasis placed on advertising, photographs that challenge the prevailing corporate ethos may be looked at unfavourably. In other cases, only single spectacular images find their way to publication, at the expense of critical photo-stories. The decline of printed photojournalism has also been hastened by the popularity of new technologies, the Internet and social media, which have greatly facilitated the production and global dissemination of a whole range of practices: from photojournalistic images to photographs taken on mobile phones by civilians. The mainstream media increasingly rely on amateur images and videos, which are available to them at no cost, leaving less editorial space for photojournalistic images. The rise of the new technologies and the Internet in the 1990s and early 2000s was concomitant with upheavals of the period, including the emergence of the anti-globalization movement, 9 / 11 and the resurgence of radicalism in Iraq. These developments spawned a huge volume of political imagery in the public domain, most of which became available to a wider public through the Internet. Hito Steyerl argues that new documentary forms have recently been channelled to the art sphere. In her view, this is due, on the one hand, to the availability of cheap digital cameras and accessible software for documentarists, and on the other, to an increasingly privatized public sphere (Steyerl 2008: 14). Images that are left out of the mainstream media are therefore either circulated on the Internet or displayed in art exhibitions.5 Marginalization of Political Imagery in the Neoliberal Mainstream Media Some of the images reproduced in the catalogue allude to the news stories that remained largely marginalized in the years that preceded Documenta11’s opening. Photographs of peaceful protesters which – like Marco DiLauro’s photograph of the anti-globalization demonstrations in Genoa in 2001 (Fig. 1) – challenge the ethos of neoliberal globalization, its social injustice and ecological destruction, have not always been deemed newsworthy by Western mainstream media, which usually prioritize the spectacular or violent. The photojournalistic coverage of the anti-G8 demonstrations in Genoa, for instance, focused on spectacular images of destruction and violent clashes between the protesters and the police and the shooting of a young protester, Carlo Giuliani, by the Italian carabinieri (Memou 2013: 48-63). These protests took place from 19 July to 22 July but were not covered extensively and certainly not photographically until the day after Carlo Giuliani was shot. On 21 July 2001, the majority of European papers 5  “Antiphotojournalism” is but one indicative example of an exhibition that has focused on critical practices challenging the traditional notion of photojournalism. The exhibition was

curated by Carlos Guerra and Thomas Keenan and took place in La Virreina Centre de la Imatge in Barcelona (5 July –10 October 2010).

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Fig. 1   Page from Photo Essay in   Documenta11_Platform 5:      Exhibition Catalogue, Kassel

A Collage of Globalization

Fig. 2   Page from Photo Essay in   Documenta11_Platform 5:      Exhibition Catalogue, Kassel

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Antigoni Memou / featured the photograph of the dead protester on their front pages as part of full stories on the protests (ibid.). Their sensational framing of this photograph is indicative of the emphasis placed on the spectacular in the mainstream media: the photograph of his body was inserted in photo-stories containing iconic images of burning cars and street battles between masked protesters and the police suggesting a direct link between the performative violence of some protesters (in particular, the Black Bloc) and the shooting of Carlo Giuliani. The spectacularism of violence in news reporting goes hand in hand with the visual marginalization of peaceful protesters resulting in homogenized hegemonic narratives of protest that can shape public opinion. The mechanisms in place here are quite subtle: topics sympathetic to neoliberalism’s ethos are given frequent coverage and in-depth treatment, while stories that resist and challenge the system are covered only briefly and unfavourably, unless they contribute to the media’s spectacle. Photographs of peaceful protesters such as that by Marco DiLauro do not fit into the stereotypical narratives about violent resistance that is depicted as threatening to democratic society. Therefore, such images tend to fall into the black hole of news coverage. (Memou 2013: 48-63) Richard Drew’s controversial photograph known as “Falling Man”, also included in these first pages of the Documenta11 catalogue (Fig. 2), may be seen as another exemplary case of what is normally overlooked in the mainstream media. Taken on the day of the terrorist attack in New York City on 11 September 2001, the photograph depicts a man jumping to his death from the window of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Drew’s lens caught one of the many people who jumped to escape smoke and fire before the building collapsed, capturing in the most iconic way the terror that the victims had to face on the day. The iconic power of the image was immediately recognized by the Associated Press photographer, who hoped that his picture would become one of the most reproduced images of the events (Junod 2012: 167-176). However, the photograph was not widely published, appearing only in the New York Times and a small number of other newspapers in the USA and around the world the next morning (ibid.). In the days that followed, many of those newspapers that had printed it ‘were forced to defend themselves against charges that they exploited a man’s death, stripped him of his dignity, invaded his privacy, turned tragedy into leering photography’ (ibid.: 171). As a result of these complaints, the photograph remained largely unpublished in the subsequent months due to self-censorship on the part of the mass media. The most prominent reasons given for its impermissibility were respect for the survivors and the relatives of the deceased, and the issue of good taste (Sontag 2003: 61-62). These editorial decisions reflect long-standing perceptions about the ethics of representing dead bodies or people in pain.

A Collage of Globalization Images of pain and death in remote, exotic and poor places are more likely to be reproduced, reaffirming that unjust suffering takes place only outside our Western world (ibid.). These two images seem to represent the two sides of the ‘news telling’ coin. DiLauro’s photograph of peaceful protesters was not spectacular enough to be rendered newsworthy, while Drew’s iconic image challenged established codes of Western media to refrain from showing the vulnerability of their own citizens too clearly. Considering Enwezor’s proposal that the anti-capitalist ‘Multitude’ (Hardt / Negri 2010) and ‘Ground Zero’ be taken as starting points for regrounding an alternative new world order (Enwezor 2002: 45), it is perhaps no coincidence that these specific images and their related stories were placed at the centre of Documenta11’s narrative. Placing images of the anti-capitalist movement and 9 / 11 in the opening pages of the catalogue can be seen as a prelude to the essays and the artworks, which also address some of these issues. By compiling material that tends to be marginalized or subdued by the mainstream media stories, the catalogue presents an alternative portrait of globalization. A Collage of Times and Places Another very significant element in these pages is that the photographs do not appear alone, but collaged together with other photographs. The editor of Documenta11’s catalogue seems to have gone through a process of selecting and arranging a great number of photojournalistic images, often presenting as many as six different photographs on one page. Richard Drew’s photograph, for instance, appears alongside five others on a double page. There is a photograph of two women walking in front of a wrecked building, with a caption informing the reader that the photograph relates to the Russian military occupation of Grozny in Chechnya and its failure to contribute to the restoration of peace. Another one shows an old woman holding a photograph of a young man, in reference to the kidnapping of plantation workers by right-wing paramilitaries in Colombia. Moreover, there is a photograph of young men, with a caption about the 60.000 people killed in the civil war in Algeria; another one shows Congolese soldiers guarding a train convoy. Finally, the sixth one depicts a Chinese immigrant being searched by California’s border police. (Fig. 3) Grouping urges viewers to look for relationships, continuities and ruptures. Readers are confronted with a pixelated grid of images that initially seem unrelated, provoking them to make sense of the links, flows and cross-references between the diverse subject-matter. The gaze shifts from a long-distance shot of the falling man to the close-up of the Congolese gun. The shifting perspectives make viewers zoom in and out of the pictures, and so it is difficult to remain unaffected by them. What all these photographs

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Fig. 3   Page from Photo Essay in   Documenta11_Platform 5:      Exhibition Catalogue, Kassel

A Collage of Globalization have in common is the vulnerability of the human body in conflict zones and on Western borders. Viewers might even share this vulnerability as they look at the soldier’s gun pointing back to the photographer’s camera, almost an extension to themselves. Thus one could say that the viewers are almost violently forced to pay attention and to put aside the traditional detached mode of looking at photojournalistic images rapidly and fleetingly, while scanning the page for the accompanying headline, caption or article within the newspaper. The catalogue urges viewers to move their gaze from one image to another, acknowledging relationships between the images and shared themes as well as their own involvement in these global dynamics from which they cannot escape. The collage curtails spatio-temporal differences, compressing them into one image by linking together seemingly unrelated events. The disjointedness of time and place suggests that each image is only part of a larger picture of globalization and that meaning is fabricated through the visual, social and political links. Because the ability of a single photograph to provide information about the complex entanglements of globalization is limited, combining photographs of different places and moments in time allows the collage to capture globalization’s multilateral reality more comprehensively. Moreover, the constructed nature of these pages calls to mind Berthold Brecht’s criticism of photography’s ability to represent reality. In his now celebrated statement that a documentary image of a factory cannot reveal much about the actual conditions of production inside its walls, Brecht denounces the view that mere fidelity to appearance can somehow help in understanding complex modern reality (Benjamin 2009: 190). We would learn more, Brecht believes, from “something artificial, invented” or “constructed” (ibid.). Towards a Conclusion The constructed, fabricated, fragmentary character of the grid presentation permits a spatial and temporal condensation of globalization to be visualized appropriately. In contrast with mainstream news media, which prioritize single, often spectacular images, the catalogue provides a narrative of globalization by combining a large number of images taken from different spatio-historical contexts. The viewer also encounters images that have been overlooked by the mainstream media, mostly due to their association with stories that do not fit the neoliberal spirit. The collage may be read, therefore, as an attempt to make visible what is hidden, excluded from public view or even censored within an image-saturated society, while at the same time reducing the distances and time differences that would normally separate the events they represent, thus inviting viewers to think

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about the complex entanglements of the globalized world they live in. While the editorial collage of photojournalistic images seems more appropriate than the single photojournalistic image to address this complex reality of globalization, the editors’ overreliance on Western photo agencies suggests a failure to reflect on the latter’s entanglement in hegemonic structures of image distribution. Why did Documenta11 – which aspired to include in the exhibition a multiplicity of viewpoints from artists all over the world – still draw so heavily on Western lenses to represent refugees, migrants or civil war victims in remote countries of the globe? After all, is Western photojournalism not part of the “epistemological structures” and “the narrow focus of Western global optics” that Enwezor (2002: 44) aimed to question through the show? Is it even possible that an exhibition of contemporary art can denounce Eurocentricity when it relies on existing Western structures for its realization? Documenta11 and the documentation it produced (in the form of the archive, the exhibition catalogues and the website) attest to the challenges of situating documentary practices within a wider political critique of neoliberal globalization. •

A Collage of Globalization References Ammann, Jean-Christophe (2002): “Not Enough Art, Political Correctness.” In: The Art Newspaper 128, 13 September 2002. Araeen, Rasheed (2002): “In the Heart of the Black Box.” In: Art Monthly, N° 259, p. 17. Araeen, Rasheed (2005): “Eurocentricity, Canonization of the White / European Subject in Art History and the Marginalisation of the Other.” In: Irene Below and Beatrice von Bismarck (eds.), Globalisierung / Hierarchisierung. Kulturelle Dominanzen in Kunst und Kunstgeschichte. Weimar: Jonas Verlag, pp. 54–61. Benjamin, Walter (2009): “Short History of Photography.” In: idem, One Way Street and Other Writings. London: Penguin Books. Célius, Carlo A. (2015): “Metamorphoses.” In: Kate Ramsey and Louis Herns Marcelin (eds.), Transformative Visions: Works by Haitian Artists from the Permanent Collection. Miami: The Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami, pp. 53–72. Downey, Anthony (2003): “The Spectacular Difference of Documenta XI.” In: Third Text 17 / 1, pp. 85-92. Enwezor, Okwui, Documenta and Museum Fridericianum GmbH, eds. (2002): Documenta11, Platform 5: Exhibition Catalogue. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz. Enwezor, Okwui (2002): “The Black Box.” In: Documenta11, Platform 5: Exhibition Catalogue. Kassel / OstfildernRuit: Hatje Cantz, pp. 42–55.

Enwezor, Okwui (2008): “Documentary / Vérité. Bio-Politics, Human Rights, and the Figure of ‘Truth’ in Contemporary Art.” In: Maria Lind and Hito Steyerl (eds.), The Green Room. Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary. Berlin / New York: Sternberg Press, pp. 63–102. Grundberg, Andy (1990): Crisis of the Real: Writings on Photography: 1974–1989. New York: Aperture. Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio (2000): Empire. Cambridge / London: Harvard University Press. Herman, Edwards S. and Chomsky, Noam (1988): Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon Books. Junod, Tom (2012): “The Falling Man.” In: Geoffrey Batchen (eds.), Picturing Atrocity: Photography and Crisis. London: Reaktion, pp. 167–176. Kimmelman, Michael (2002): “Global Art Show with an Agenda.” In: The New York Times, 18 June 2002, http:// www.nytimes.com/2002/06/18/arts/ design/18NOTE.html, last accessed 21 May, 2015. Lind, Maria and Steyerl, Hito, eds. (2008): The Greenroom: Reconsidering Documentary and Contemporary Art. Berlin / New York: Sternberg Press. Martin, Stewart (2003): “A New World Art? Documenting Documenta11.” In: Radical Philosophy 122, pp. 7–19.

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Antigoni Memou / Memou, Antigoni (2013): Photography and Social Movements: From the Globalisation of the Movement (1968) to the Movement Against Globalisation (2001). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Sontag, Susan (2003): Regarding the Pain of the Others. London: Penguin Books.

Copyrights

EPISTEMOLOGICAL FRAMEWORKS

Fig. 1          Fig. 2          Fig. 3         

documenta und Museum Fridericianum GmbH / Hatje Cantz Publishers,   Ostfildern-Ruit documenta und Museum Fridericianum GmbH / Hatje Cantz Publishers,   Ostfildern-Ruit documenta und Museum Fridericianum GmbH / Hatje Cantz Publishers,   Ostfildern-Ruit

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Institutional Politics

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Birgit Mersmann

Lacing Places: Situationist Practices and Socio-Political Strategies in Korean Urban Art Projects Urban art is now not only a globally visible public art genre, but has come to epitomize global art, its definitions, meanings, and practices. While it would be unjustifiably one-sided to identify urban art completely with global art, evidence has shown that the relation of urban art to global art is indispensable for situating global art. As urban art is most virulent and powerful in global cities, it strikingly reflects the developments, strategies, and effects of globalization in urban spaces. Since it is a distinctly place-related art form and practice, it can help to situate the globalization of art in its varied integrating and segregating manifestations and link it to the globalization of the city, its socio-political reality and cultural image.    The field for this case study illustrating the local urban placement of public art with and against globality is defined by Korean urban art projects conducted in Seoul since 2000. The analysis will include two different system angles: an official one from the perspective of the local city government and a communal one from the perspective of urban citizens and their neighbourhoods. By investigating both local government-led public art projects and independent artist-led urban art projects in Seoul and its metropolitan area, it seeks to explore the conflict, co-optation, and cohabitation zones that emerge between local needs, urban living conditions, global art and city politics in Asian megacities like Seoul. The analysis centres on two big urban design and urban art projects: 1. the Cheonggyecheon River Restoration Project (finished in 2005) led by the Seoul Metropolitan Government in combination with the Mental Map response (2001–2003) by the urban research group flyingCity, and 2. the public art project ART in the City conceived by the public art and design studio Insite to make over the urban slum Ewha-dong. In comparing the site-specific works, practices and meanings of these two projects, special attention will be paid to how history in its tripartite junction of local community history, city history, and national history is resituated and restored at the places experiencing this redesign, and how the wounds and damages inflicted upon the city structure and cityscape by high-speed industrialization and globalization are visualized and mended by localizing strategies that culturally and socially mediate between historization and futurization.

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Birgit Mersmann / The Revitalization of Seoul: Urban Art and Design in the Global City The world today is more about cities, than about countries, and a place like Seoul has more in common with Singapore and Hong Kong, than with smaller Korean cities.

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(A. T. Kearney Global Cities Index 2012: 5)

Over the last decade, the Korean capital of Seoul has succeeded in gaining global city status. In the A.T. Kearney ranking of global cities for 2015, Seoul is ranked eleventh and assigned to the group of “Elite Global Cities”. The Global Cities Index measures the global engagement of cities “according to 27 metrics across five dimensions, including business activity, human capital, information exchange, cultural experience, and political engagement”. (A.T. Kearney 2015 Global Cities Index: n.p.) One important basis for this rating success was the “Seoul Master Plan for 2020” released by the Seoul Metropolitan Government in 2006 (Seoul Metropolitan Government 2006), which sets out the visions and goals for future city planning in Seoul. The master plan “was established to reflect the changes in spatial structure in the Seoul metropolitan region and to suggest a development direction” that shifts from quantitative to qualitative (Seoul Master Plan 2006: 30). One priority is to develop Seoul into a “World City leading the Northeast Asian economy” (ibid.). This includes a business-friendly and foreign-friendly environment, a beautiful urban scenery that protects the natural environment, and the creation of an information city, incorporating e-governance ruled by administrative transparency. In seeking to build a global city, it sets out to transform Seoul into a culture city 1, eco city, and welfare city. The “healing of urban problems during the rapid growth area” by the “recovery of Seoul’ s history and natural environment” is a key incentive for the model master plan (ibid.). To balance urban development, the master plan suggests that rundown areas should be redeveloped and the downtown area revitalized. The “Downtown Development Plan” included in the master plan attaches great importance to rediscovering the urban structure and restoring the historical and cultural heritage. It even considers rebuilding the old city wall of Seoul so the city can be experienced as Korea’s historical capital. The Cheonggyecheon Restoration Project, discussed in the following section, was part of the Downtown Development Plan to restore the historical, natural, and cultural heritage of this place. 1  The 600th birthday of Seoul as capital of Korea (“Sixth Centennial Celebration project”) already caused a change of mindset. It initiated an interest in re-emphasizing the historical continuity from old to contemporary Seoul. Numerous activities were undertaken by the Seoul Metropolitan Government

to preserve the historical heritage and traditional culture. According to Hae Uni Rii and Jae-Seob Ahn, the project “highly focused on tracing the historical roots of Seoulers and constructing local consciousness facing a massive tide of global forces” (Rii/Ahn 2002: 94).

Lacing Places The Cheonggyecheon Restoration Project and its Anti-Globalist Revision by the Urban Research Group flyingCity The Government Policy of Site-specific Urban Renewal and its Public Critique The Cheonggyecheon Restoration Project, implemented between 2002 and 2005 with the aim of recreating the “clear water stream” of the Cheonggyecheon River through Seoul, was an ambitious project devised by Seoul’s mayor Lee Myung-Bak (later President of the Republic of South Korea), who took office in 2002 and pledged to modernize the city while restoring its historical status. The announcement of the Cheonggyecheon Restoration Project coincided with the release of the book Cheonggyecheon’s History and Culture, published by the Institute of Seoul Studies and the University of Seoul in 2002. The archival study on the forgotten historical and natural relics of Cheonggyecheon, in particular its river system and bridges, was commissioned by the Seoul Metropolitan Government. The project to restore the stream (Fig. 1) “required the dismantling and demolition of an elevated highway, and the uncovering of the historic 5.8 km waterway that ran underneath. This was transformed into an ecologically sensitive green pedestrian corridor”.2 The corridor that runs from Seoul to an ecological conservation area outside the city was split into three zones, marking the transition from an urban landscape to a natural environment. The project was implemented by CABE, the London-based Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, a design council specializing in international consultancy for governments around issues of architecture, urban design and public space. According to their official presentation of the project, the Seoul Metropolitan Government “successfully addressed a range of economic, social, cultural and environmental problems through a scheme that has provided a template for planning across South Korea and further”.3 The restoration plan sparked a public controversy over urban redevelopment and regeneration in the city of Seoul. People debated “whether this project is merely discovering the natural water line or a sneaky redevelopment for capitalist profit, which will expel already marginalized social groups like street vendors and ugly-looking workshops located there” (Jeon 2007: 369). This was actually a well-founded criticism, as the official plan of the city government was to settle new industries, such as international 2 http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov. uk/20110118095356/http://www.cabe.org.uk/ case-studies/cheonggyecheon-restoration-project/ description, last accessed 6 June 2015.

3  http://ecrr.org/Portals/27/Cheonggyecheon%20 case%20study.pdf, last accessed 6 June 2015.

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Birgit Mersmann / finance, business services, information technology and cultural industries in the Cheonggyecheon area, thereby increasing the competitiveness of Seoul as a global city. The idea was to keep the fashion and printing industry, but to move out the metalwork industry which gave the district its identity. In its entirety, this restructuration process began to symbolize the transition of the city from the mechanical age of heavy industrialization to the digital electronic age of global business and information networking. It became obvious that the city government was using the urban renewal project in Cheonggyecheon to accumulate economic and cultural capital. Duncan Cook, author of the study Art, Agency and Eco-Politics: Rethinking Urban Subjects and Environment(s), supports this evaluation: “In advocating a spectacle of capitalist spatial politics in the Cheonggyecheon area, the city government sought to cultivate both economic and cultural capital through new alignments between land use, social organization and the reestablishment of nature in the city” (Cook 2014: 136).

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FlyingCity’ s Situationist Research Practices and Urban Interventions for Repositioning Cheonggyecheon Locally The interventionist projects of the Korean urbanism research group flyingCity 4 focus on investigating the impact of rapid industrialization and globalization on the transfiguration of urban reality in Seoul. The group’s work is distinctively site-specific in that its research projects concentrate on specific places and areas in the city of Seoul. In terms of methodology, the group combines a psychogeographical technique of mental mapping with concrete urban actions and interventions. The psychogeography of mental mapping is understood and implemented as geo(carto-)graphical visualization of the subjective atmosphere in and imaginative perception of urban areas of interaction from the perspective of the people living and working in the respective Cheonggyecheon area. flyingCity publicly protested against the government-led redevelopment project in Cheonggyecheon5 because they “wanted to argue against the capitalist politics of the spectacle” (Jeon 2007: 370) they saw implemented in the restoration project and to critique the “kitsch redevelopment fantasy images” (ibid.: 372) that it produced. They adopted a three-stage urban research approach to articulate their protest and intervene in the official restoration process. It comprised field work, public discussion forums, and a new urban design concept for parts of the Cheonggyecheon area as a communitybased alternative to the government’s “capitalist politics of the spectacle”. flyingCity carried out socio-economic urban research on site to investigate the living conditions of local communities. Following an initial 4   The urbanism research group flyingCity was founded in 2001 by Jeon Yong-Seok and Jang Jong-Kwan.

5  This happened partly in collaboration with some non-governmental organizations.

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Fig. 1   Cheonggyecheon before and after the River Restoration Project

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Birgit Mersmann / analysis, the fieldwork soon concentrated on the informal economies of Cheonggyecheon, in particular the precarious situation of the industrial workshops and street vendors whose survival was threatened by the government-led revamp. The study of small-scale industrial workshops in the area, who were producing a range of iron, steel and metal wares including tools and electronics, included site visits, interviews, and finally mental mapping to visualize the findings. The urban research group found out that the various labour communities in Cheonggyecheon were united by a creative system of interconnected micro-industries with highly adaptable and flexible production assembly lines. The field researchers of flyingCity encountered a hybrid production system with a horizontal organization structure based on front-rear production lines. Its networks “effectively managed production through a responsive system of control that was flexible enough to keep costs low and to adapt to changes across the network (in terms of resources and labour) and fluctuations in the local ‘market’ ” (Cook 2014: 124). To present this organized system, flyingCity created a mind-mapping diagram showing the production line of metal workshops in the Cheonggyecheon area (Fig. 2). It visualized how each workshop was connected to others and how specialist work was collectively managed. “Drifting” was pinpointed as a key strategy for micro-economic survival, even a creative tactical strategy for self-management and innovation. It was meant to designate the impossibility of predetermining the production lines “in an a-priori way”. The urban researchers of flyingCity diagnosed that by drifting, that is by migrating and shifting in response to the changing economic conditions of market volatilities, these small-scale workshops “can adapt to a post-Fordist economy. It allows them to take unexpected turns of direction, and merge in a creative way” (Jeon 2007: 370). These features of the production processes gave the urban research its name: Drifting Producers. As if to endorse this line of argument, the title Drifting Producers was apparently borrowed from a book describing the survival of a family business and elaborate handicraft industry in an area of Italy after the breakdown of earlier mass manufacturing.6 At the same time, the word “drifting” is an implicit reference to the situationist concept of dérive, as presented in Guy Debord’s Theory of the Dérive (1958). The members of flyingCity make no secret of the fact that the formation of the group was inspired, among other things, by the Situationist International in Europe. The situationist implications of Drifting Producers will be discussed later when comparing the two Korean urban art/research projects. Having analysed the network of metal workshops as a micro-economic hybrid production system situated between pre- and postmodernity, flyingCity moved on to study the street vendors as another social group in Cheonggyecheon marginalized by the restoration project. In their on-site research and interviews, the group identified similar principles of

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Fig. 2  Diagram Drifting Producers

“drifting”, i.e. a strategy of adaption to unexpected changes of situation. Although street vendors are considered illegal by the city government, the study revealed that they actively contribute to a flourishing micro-market as they “recycle waste items, invent new businesses like street fashion, and introduce new goods” (Jeon 2007: 375). The interviews with the street vendors were carried out in talk-show tents in order to attract public attention, both from the local community and from the municipal authorities. In response to plans by the city government to relocate the community and market of Cheonggyecheon to a peripheral area around the Dongdaemun stadium in order to press ahead with the redesign project, the members of flyingCity switched their operational strategy from a mere research project to an interventionist political project with room for critical public debate. They collaborated with local NGOs, the Consortium for Urban Environment and the Urban Architecture Network to organize discussion forums. The tents mimicked the design of the parasols popular among street vendors, thus reflecting the surrounding market place in a concrete physical form. The hearings in the talk-show tents gave voice to street vendors protesting against the relocation plans of the city government. They expressed their concern that the relocation could pose a real threat to the survival of the poor, unemployed people and their illegal small trading businesses. The 6    This information is provided in the description of the Drifting Producers project on the official website of the urbanism research group flyingCity, http: //flyingcity.kr/project-eng/pro4.htm (http://flyingCity.

kr/project-eng/pro4.htm, last accessed 6 June 2015). Unfortunately, no concrete bibliographical reference is provided.

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Birgit Mersmann / public staging of these talks in tents was also intended to raise awareness that the city government had never carried out any democratic public consultation with the local inhabitants or the working population affected by the restoration when preparing to implement the project. Hence it comes as no surprise that the protest tents, which occupied central sites in the Cheonggyecheon area, were a thorn in the flesh of the city government. On 30 November 2003, the tents were duly removed, and protesting street vendors and citizens were forcefully evicted by the police. This repressive government response brought the interventionist urban action of the Talkshow Tents, designed to fuel public debate about the urban redesign of Cheonggyecheon, to an abrupt end. With the All-things Park project, an urban and architectural design proposal for relocating the Cheonggyecheon street vendors and small-scale traders, flyingCity adapted its interventionist approach to the official policy of urban development and redesign in Cheonggyecheon. The new “drifting” strategy employed for public interaction involved both site-specificity and time-specificity. The design concept for All-things Park was directly inspired by the city government’s public promise that the workshops, street vendors and market traders would be moved to a permanent site around the Dongdaemun stadium – an area which already had an agglomeration of micro-businesses comparable to those in Cheonggyecheon. flyingCity took the city government by its word and came up with a concrete urban planning proposal for rehoming the Cheonggyecheon market and workshops by transforming the Dongdaemun stadium. The architectural proposal was developed in cooperation with street workers and traders directly concerned by the publicized relocation. As “an imaginary plan to accommodate productive networks” and an urban “center of post-Fordist alternative economy” 7, it challenged the clean capitalist vision and economy of urban planning proposed by the official government side. As a process-oriented counter-strategy, it strove to undermine the power of the urban visualization spectacle staged by globally ambitious city governments, which paraded the development as friendly to business, the environment and people. The project proposal for All-things Park comprised architectural models, maps, drawings, film footage and digital presentations. Once again, mental mapping played a pivotal role in creating the design concept for the park (Fig. 3). The mental map models were used to overlay and overwrite real-life city maps, thereby situating the imaginary amidst urban reality. They served as a test bed for exploring to what extent the construction of urbanity might co-opt the fantastic, even phantasmagorical input of human imagination. The self-definition of flyingCity corresponds with this imaginary design strategy: its members consider themselves not as part of a political activist 7    All-Things Park, http://flyingCity.kr/project-eng/ pro4_park.htm, last accessed 6 June 2015.

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Fig. 3   Model Map for All-things Park

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Birgit Mersmann / group, but of an “imagination activation group” (Kremer n.d.). Ultimately, the potential implementation of the All-things Park design proposal was made impossible by the urban realpolitik of the Seoul city government. The plan to relocate the labour communities of Cheonggyecheon to the area around the Dongdaemun stadium was thwarted, because this site became itself a new prestigious object for the accumulation of global cultural capital in the heart of Seoul. In 2008, the Dongdaemun stadium was demolished in order to create a space and new hub for the glamorous design and fashion businesses. The Dongdaemun Design Plaza, designed by Zaha Hadid and the Korean studio Samoo, opened in 2014. Left over from the All-things Park project are the models and maps that are now permanently on display in the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven in the Netherlands. The imaginary urban park model is resituated in the imaginary space of the museum (Fig. 4).

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Insite: Locality Immersion and Participatory Design in the Ewha-dong Public Art Project The Naksan Public Art Project was initiated by the Ministry of Culture & Tourism as part of its “ART in the city 2006” campaign to foster arts and culture-friendly environments in urban areas. 46 artists participated, in collaboration with village inhabitants, under the motto “Mix, Connect, and Get Together”. They adorned the public urban space with murals, sculptures, tile decorations, art installations, street furniture and signboards. The overall project focused on the district of Dongsung-dong, which is known for its poor homes and shanty factories. Ewha-dong, another neighbourhood in the Naksan area chosen by the urban design group Insite for their own “ART in the City” project, is known as a Daldongnae, a poor village on the lower slope of a mountain.8 The aim of the Naksan Public Art Project was to transform the area into an artistic and cultural district. Looking back today, this goal has been successfully achieved, as the Naksan area is now one of the most artsy destinations in Seoul tourism. The Ewha-dong Public Art Project was one sub-project in the Naksan Public Art campaign. It was implemented by Insite, a spatial research and public design/art studio dealing with issues of public space and local community in the city. Resisting design as a final product, the group’s practice is focused on design as a process of “discovery—collect—de/reconstruct”. Its chief motivation is “to propose a new genre for public domain, based on 8    See Minn (1997: 46) for a sociological descrip-

tion and local community characterization of Daldongnae (Moon Village): “Daldongnae is the area of Seoul that is considered most ugly when viewed from urban planning side. Because it is located in high mountain districts, people would say from there it is easier to see the moon. [...] The residents have

strong mutual bonds and a uniting spirit and are adapting to the urban environment in a very cooperative and structural way, and are not the target of social isolation or alienation.” 9    http://spaceinsite.com/About, last accessed 6 June 2015.

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Fig. 4  All-things Park, Installation View   in the Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven

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Birgit Mersmann / direct interaction with people’s daily lives”.9 The concrete goal of Insite’s Ewha-dong Public Art Project was “to provide an opportunity to establish Ewha-dong’s regional identity in the spatially and psychologically segmented city through revealing historical and psychological geographic features of Ewha-dong”.10 The methods used by the urban research group Insite for (re)constructing the local identity of the Ewha-dong community very much resemble those applied by flyingCity for exploring the local community of the Cheonggyecheon area. They started with research into the urban site’s economic, social and communal history by means of psychogeographic situating and continued with mental mapping that ultimately served as an orientation system for real/ized urban interventions in public space. Their diagnosis of the site’s communal history revealed that Ewha-dong “is a poor neighborhood with many people living by working in the cottage industry including sewing and setting factories” (ibid.). Beyond this historical fact, the urban research group also discovered that notable craftsmen had recently moved to the area, dreaming of it as an art / isan village. With regard to the communal life, it observed that “the village elders have substantially participated in community activities as leaders, while middleaged people, feeling a generation gap, have established their own groups and freely carried out their activities” (ibid.). How does the project devised by Insite relate to these specific features of the local community, their sites of living, places of interest, and common activities? Based on their site-historical findings, the group members organized workshops with the residents to discuss their living conditions and visions for the future of the neighbourhood. In teamwork, they developed a concept diagram in the form of a mental urban map for the imaginary restructuring of the Naksan area, including the Ewha-dong district (Fig. 5). This mental map would later be made visibly public for all community members and visitors, decorating the front wall of a house in the recharted area. The mental mapping diagram identified altogether five imaginary areas for communal redesign: the Naksan Fantasy area, the Imagination Powerhouse area, the Ogre’s Courtyard area, the Magic Rice Bucket area and the Muajung area. The Naksan Fantasy area was intended to make the community aware of the site’s history with a view to rediscovering and rebuilding local urban identity. The visual mapping of the site’s history was implemented in real urban space by displaying historical relics as memory markers and by installing signs, plaques and sculptures as historical and psychological geographic traces within the neighbourhood. To design motifs and icons for the site legend, the urban researchers drew on various 10   http://spaceinsite.com/Naksan-Public-Art, last accessed 6 June 2015.

.

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Fig. 5   Mapping Diagram for Ewha-dong   Public Art Project Diagram

life stories and fantastic narratives, including the traditional Korean ogre folk tales they heard in their workshops with local residents. The role ogres seemed to play in the imaginary fairy-tale memory of the local community was reflected in the inclusion of the “Ogre’s Courtyard” as part of the spatial mapping of the Naksan Fantasy area. By installing concrete points of contact and communication about the history of the site in public space, the urban designers laid bare the deep “in-site” history of places under the outer surface of the actual neighbourhood site. The “Imagination Powerhouse” area of the urban mental map designated the many uphill roads in Ewha-dong as spaces for public art installations. They would not only serve to beautify the grey and monotonous footpaths, but also be used (in particular by children) as playthings to promote imagination. Even slightly redesigned architectonic elements, such as railings, sticks, and stairs, made up a place for a playground. The “Magic Rice Bucket” map area was created as a symbolic gathering place for all the generations. It was conceived as a multipurpose space, offering use as a playground, observatory platform and performance area. The name “Magic Rice Bucket” refers to recycling in Korean. Working with this principle, the urban designers

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Birgit Mersmann / arranged playgrounds by assembling outdated or unused material or recycling furniture to build spatial structures. They emphasized the informal use of space and the construction of temporary, easily changeable structures. The “Muajung” area included in the mental community map was designated as a resting area. In Korean, Muajung means “where you forget or lose yourself, and where everybody is the owner”. It is a public space of an intimate, meditative nature. The concept here was to create small public places from housing elements such as roof(top)s, benches, stairs. Additionally, the Muajung area was decorated with wall paintings by designers, studio groups and artists selected through an open recruitment process. The final outcome of the “ART in the City” project by Insite was a gradual transformation of the urban reality of Ewha-dong, through psychosocial mapping and visionary imagination, into a new powerhouse of local identity and community building.

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Global Art and Urban Design: Situationist Practices Reinterpreted As these project analyses show, both urban research groups adapted situationist practices in order to change and/or reconstruct the urban image of Seoul. They combined on-site field research with open-ended interactions, concrete interventions, and experimental imaginations in order to mediate the lived experience of various local communities in Seoul against the image horizon of the capital as global city. With their open workflow strategy reallocated in the urban public space, they resist the spectacle of both exhibitionary and documentary form(at)s of representation. For Yeon-Sok Jeon, the mastermind of the urban research group flyingCity, it is “problematic that documentary-style representation still depends upon methods of ocular centrism for what it can say about the future” (Jeon 2007: 374). As an alternative, the group proposed “to focus on rediscovering and resocializing aspects of urban life that have disappeared from view, and change them into concrete reality”.11 To visualize the heterogeneous social, economic, and cultural life structures of the cityscape of Seoul, they applied what I propose to term “drifting strategies”. These arise as a response to the urban circumstances, the drifting condition of life in the global / izing city. By understanding this condition of life and rethinking it “as a platform for creating a new style of life” 12, drifting strategies become socio-political instruments. The name of the group, flyingCity, reflects this programme: it expresses an “Invitation to Drift”. 13 Drifting as situationist practice in the city 11  http://flyingCity.kr/text-eng/text.htm,

last accessed 6 June 2015. 12 http://flyingCity.kr/intro-eng/intro.htm, last accessed 6 June 2015. 13   See the mission text of the Urbanism Research Group at http://flyingCity.kr/intro-eng/

intro.htm. Even the group’s name flyingCity can be read as a reference to Debord’s film The Naked City (1948) and its concept of “flying over the city” as a method of reconstructing the city in the imagination (Sadler 1999: 82).

Lacing Places can (and should) relate to the past, present and future of the urban space. It implies following the drifting paths of the present urban environment, the drifting paths of site history with its various developments and meandering shifts, but also the drifting paths of the urban imaginary as fantasy projections into the future. Reveries are recognized as powerful components of drifting. flyingCity claims that “we need to redefine the notion of the dream in a completely different context, as a space where reality returns” (Jeon 2007: 373). These dream spaces soaked with urban realities of life are visualized by means of mental mapping. The concept of drifting together with mental mapping as a situationist psychogeographical practice of urban ambient experience is, no doubt, inspired by the European urban art movement of the Situationist International. The technique of psychogeography is explicitly mentioned in explanatory texts by flyingCity 14 and Insite 15, and the maps that these groups have designed very much resemble those “drifting city maps” produced by Guy-Ernest Debord and Asger Jorn for The Naked City (Fig. 6) and the Psychogeographical Guide to Paris. Debord was the first urban artist and researcher to discover and adopt psychogeography as a means to study “the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals” (Debord 1955: n.p.). Urban drifting (dérive) was propagated by him as a basic situationist practice. “Dérives involve playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll,” explains Debord in his Theory of the Dérive (1958: n.p.). In view of this approach, the ecological analysis of the role of microclimates and neighbourhoods in the city has to be complemented by psychogeographical methods that help discover “units of ambience” which are distinct from the classical cartographical zones of urban planning. The idea that “an urban neighborhood is determined not only by geographical and economic factors, but also by the image that its inhabitants and those of other neighborhoods have of it” 16 is reflected in particular in the work of the Korean urban research group Insite, with their understanding of social urban space constructed by imagined communities. Their “ART in the City” project serves as an “Imagination Powerhouse”. Mental community mapping reveals “the historical and psychological geographic 14 “We tried to focus on how the people have lived since the economic development in Korea, which formed both the look of that area [Cheonggyecheon – B.M.] and the present atmosphere – the psychogeographic reality – from its sub-conscious level to its outermost skin.” (Jeon 2007: 371) 15 “The Ewha-dong Public Art Project will provide an opportunity to establish Ewha-dong’s regional

identity in the spatially and psychologically segmented city through revealing the historical and psychological geographic features of Ewha-dong.”, (http://spaceinsite.com/Naksan-Public-Art, last accessed 6 June 2015). 16  Chaumbart de Lauwe, author of the study Paris et l’agglomération parisienne (1952) cited in Debord 1958.

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Fig. 6   Guy-Ernest Debord and Asger Jorn: The Naked City, 1957

Lacing Places features of Ewha-dong”. At the same time, the map as mnemonic aid and point of ambient orientation helps to change features of architecture and urbanism in the real physical space. In Debord’s sense and wording, this means: “The imaginary is that which tends to become real” (Debord 1955: n.p.). Despite fundamental overlaps, the drifting strategies employed by the contemporary urban research groups are different in nature and character from those of Europe’s modern situationists.17 Drifting is no longer defined as a free-floating, aimless movement, as half-spontaneous, half-calculated wanderings and vagrancies, but as a sophisticated socio-political strategy and tactic of political activism that allows for moving and transgressing the real urban space with the drifting power of collective imagination. Here, the social category and political factor of agency joins in. Drifting is situating oneself in the midst of a politics of public space. If global art is per definitionem art that is produced, mediated, presented and disseminated under conditions of globalization (or the virtual imagination of globality), then the drifting condition of urban art in global cities fulfils this definition par excellence. Even the employment of situationist methods is increasingly shared by urban art and research on a global level. The major question arising from this connection is how these situationist practices relate to global spatial city politics. Is psychogeography applied as a tactic against global capitalism? Does drifting present a form of anti-globalization strategy? Or do the situationist practices contribute to a local embedding of global capital in city areas that were ignorant, if not hostile towards processes of global transformation? These questions cannot be answered unambiguously. We are dealing with conflict, co-optation and cohabitation zones between different urban imaginaries – the inhabitants’ imaginary and the urban planners’ imaginary. As architecture and urban planning represent a form of engendering dreams, the clash of “imaginations” in public space is inevitable. Despite pursuing comparable objectives with similar methods, the two urban projects discussed here largely differ from each other in terms of political orientation and effectiveness. flyingCity clearly resists the city authorities’ desire to “reorganize space into a legible structure in the name of development, thus turning it into a manageable one” (Jeon 2007: 373). With their activities, the urbanism research group seeks to go beyond the spectacle of the reorganized cityscape and dive into the invisible and unreadable realms of the city. The real site experience of urban communal life is set against the rational logic of global city planning. Community-based imaginary mapping counters 17  “They distance themselves from an era where writers and artists put the term ‘drift’ in the service of a fantasy about a city which they aspired to discover anew by wandering and acknowledging sense and poetry in the nonsensical: the city stripped bare

of its economy. flyingCity looks at the economic reality of the city to see to what extent it already contains and co-opts the fantastic and phantasmagorical.” (Kremer n.d.: n.p.)

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artificial ratioeconomic city zoning. Tactically, it overwrites the lifeless memorial site mapping adopted by city governments to remind visitors of the great imperial past and cultural heritage of their city. Insite was acting against the social abstraction and space-time non-situatedness virulent in public art projects. The Ewha-dong Public Art Project was intended to make arts “feel [...] alive in public spaces”. It was conceived as a cohabitation project between art and urban life in the global city, lacing places of living, working and socializing together. Despite this noble goal, one can also receive it as a decoration and beautification of Ewha-dong, finally leading to a gentrification that will once again exclude and force out the local community. The art village might be degraded to an open-air city museum, freezing the situationist life experience as a tourist monument site. The city’s power game between the state and its citizenry, the official city master blueprint and the informal, subaltern urban community narratives, remains a continuous drift. •

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References A.T. Kearney (2012): “2012 Global Cities Index and Emerging Cities Outlook.”, https://www.atkearney.com/ research-studies/global-cities-index/ 2012, last accessed 2 June 2015.

Jeon, Yong-Seok (2007): “Drifting Producers.” In: Will Bradley and Charles Esche (eds.), Art and Social Change: A Critical Reader. London: Tate Publishing / Afterall, pp. 396-377.

A.T. Kearney (2015): “2015 Global Cities Index and Emerging Cities Outlook.”, https://www.atkearney.com/ news-media/news-releases/news-release/-/asset_publisher/00OIL7Jc67KL/ content/a-t-kearney-global-cities-2015/ 10192, last accessed 2 June 2015.

Kremer, Mark (n.d.): “See Seoul, Then Die: the flyingCity Experience”, http://flyingCity.kr/text-eng/text.htm, last accessed 6 June 2015.

Cook, Duncan (2014): Art, Agency and Eco-politics: Rethinking Urban Subjects and Environment(s). PhD Thesis. London: Royal College of Art, http:/research online.rca.ac.uk/1645/1/Dun-can%20 Cook%20PHD%20Full%20Document. pdf, last accessed 6 June 2015. Debord, Guy-Ernest (1955): “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography.” In: Situationist International Online, http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/presitu/ geography.html, last accessed 6 June 2015. Translation and publication by Ken Knabb (1981 & 1989): “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography.” In: Situationist International Anthology, Berkley: Bureau of Public Secrets. French original: “Introduction à une critique de la géographie urbaine.” In: Les Lévres Nues 6, September 1955. Debord, Guy-Ernest (1958): “Theory of the Dérive.” In: The Situationist International Text Library, http://library. nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/dis play/314, last accessed 6 June 2015.

Minn, Sohn-Joo (1997): “Seoul? Ugly? Beautiful?” In: Hou Hanru and HansUlrich Obrist (eds.), Cities on the Move. Ost-fildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz. Sadler, Simon (1999): The Situationist City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Seoul Metropolitan Government (2006): The Master Plan of Seoul Towards 2020. Seoul: Seoul Metropolitan Government.

Copyrights Fig. 1   Seoul Metropolitan Government Fig. 2  Urbanism Research Group flyingCity Fig. 3  Urbanism Research Group flyingCity Fig. 4  Urbanism Research Group flyingCity Fig. 5 http://spaceinsite.com/Naksan-Public-Art Fig. 6  Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische     Documentatie, The Hague.

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Gulf Labor: The Boycott as Political Activism and Institutional Critique In 2006 the New York based Guggenheim Foundation announced that its latest branch would be established in the United Arab Emirates capital state Abu Dhabi.1 The Guggenheim franchise is one of the cornerstones of Abu Dhabi’s cultural strategy, along with the Louvre Abu Dhabi and a number of other cultural institutions that are being built on the man-made ‘Island of Happiness’, Saadiyat Island. Since 2010 an international artist initiative named Gulf Labor has been reacting to this cooperation, engaging the Guggenheim in a critical dialogue about its practice and function in the art world and beyond. In his paper “Are boycotts the new ‘Collective Curating’?”, delivered at the Curating Everything conference at the Migros Museum in Zurich (2015), Sergio Edelsztein described recent boycotts as a symptom of an artistic culture that seeks short-lived media attention at the expense of alienating sponsors and losing long-time funding. Despite the fact that there has been nothing short-lived about Gulf Labor’s engagement ever since the museum’s initial planning phase, Edelsztein included the Gulf Labor boycott of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi 2 alongside the boycotts of the 19th Sydney Biennial and Manifesta 10 in St. Petersburg in 2014. While a thorough discussion and systematization of boycotts in art is well beyond the scope of this paper 3, I want to show that the Gulf Labor boycott by no means represents a fad or to quote Edelsztein, a “withdrawal”, but rather a constructive engagement with a mid to long-term strategy, committed to broader discourses both in the sphere of the art world and society at large. To this end, the paper first situates the artist initiative Gulf Labor in relation to the Guggenheim Foundation and Abu Dhabi’s socio-political structure, outlining its activism and artistic strategies. In addressing the 1  All press releases by the Guggenheim Foundation are available online at: http://www.guggenheim. org/new-york/press-room/releases/press-releasearchive. 2  Currently the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi is due to open in 2019. At present, however, only its infrastructure (piping, roads, foundations) has been laid. A preview exhibition of the museum’s collection in assembly was shown at the cultural centre Manarat al-Saadiyat in 2014-15.

3  To my knowledge, there is no academic literature on boycotts as a strategy employed by artists. Artists have, however, supported wider political boycotts which ultimately have achieved their goals: artistic involvement in the US-American civil rights movement and in the boycott of the South African Apartheid regime were crucial to their ultimate success. The BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement against the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories is likewise driven mainly by artists and cultural workers seeking to effect political change.

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Guggenheim Abu Dhabi specifically, both in dialogue and by means of a boycott, Gulf Labor draws on the discourses of the artistic movement Institutional Critique, which has critically engaged with the political and societal role of art world institutions since the 1960s. Secondly, this paper will juxtapose two exhibitions: Gulf Labor’s 52 Weeks (2013-2014) and Guggenheim Abu Dhabi’s Seeing Through Light (2014-2015). Two major claims will emerge from these foci. One is that Gulf Labor transcends the operational framework of Institutional Critique, traditionally centred on the art world, through its coordinated effort to join forces with global civil society institutions like the International Labour Organization, Human Rights Watch and Occupy – highlighting the museum as a space of very profane political struggle. The other is that juxtaposing these two exhibitions indicates a new quality to Institutional Critique: Gulf Labor inscribes itself and its concerns into the very becoming of a new museum, both by blocking sales of works to the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi and by building up and publicizing a parallel corpus of work. What Prompts Gulf Labor’s Political Activism? Massive investments in tourism and culture, including franchises of top Euro-American cultural institutions, play an important role in the selfpositioning of all Arab Gulf States as soft powers within the international community (Peterson 2006: 741ff.). However, a dual purpose is served by hosting sport events and diplomatic summits and by licensing international university campuses and museums. On the one hand, the rulers of these Gulf monarchies have a vital interest in diversifying their economy away from fossil fuels and providing future generations with a liveable, modern infrastructure. On the other hand, multibillion-dollar deals with foreign governments not only boost cultural advancement but also help to broker arms deals and policies favourable to the Gulf’s regional interests. Needless to say, it is expedient to highlight the first and to downplay the second set of reasons for cultural sponsorship in the Gulf. In recent years, however, the self-constructed image of the Gulf States has been undermined by international news coverage that focuses increasingly on human rights abuses, especially abundant in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar due to the structure of their population.4 In most Arab Gulf monarchies, only about 10% of the population are citizens, ruling over an overwhelming majority of migrant workers. Abuses of workers’ rights are willingly accepted, both under sponsorship (kafala) 4  All major news channels and newspapers in German, French and English have reported extensively on these matters, mainly in connection with Qatar’s successful bid to host the soccer World Cup in 2022. Even the Qatar-based news corporation Al-

Jazeera has covered the issue. While cautious in its own criticism, the following article contains extensive links to more detailed and explicit material: http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/2/17/ hundreds-of-migrantworkersfacedeathinqatar.html.

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laws and de facto. Most of these issues concern unskilled workers in the domestic sector and construction. The list of violations is long:5 workers are ghettoized in camps which are often shoddily built, overcrowded and in poor sanitary condition. Discriminatory rules keep workers away from recreational facilities, which most of them cannot afford on their minimal wages anyway while saving for their families abroad, whom they often see only every couple of years. Further restrictions of movement include the confiscation of passports to ensure that they will pay back the illegal recruitment fees for their journey to the Gulf and to prevent workers from switching employers. There is no protection from lay-off, nor are workers allowed to organize, nor can they change their employer freely. Working hours are long, especially excruciating in summer, and often deadly, with temperatures frequently exceeding 50 degrees Celsius. In 2010, after the announcement of the Guggenheim Foundation franchise for the municipality of Abu Dhabi in 2006, a number of international, mostly New York based artists, along with Human Rights Watch (HRW), started to engage the Guggenheim Foundation in a dialogue about these human rights violations around the construction of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi.6 The initial lack of tangible results from this dialogue prompted 43 artists to write a petition aimed at preventing labourers on the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi site from having to work under these conditions and focusing on the workers’ right to organize. Progress towards reaching the goals is documented by Gulf Labor and HRW in joint annual reports (2010-2015). Many of the petition’s signatories commit to varying degrees to a boycott of the collection and possible exhibition projects in Abu Dhabi, which will only be lifted if and when all the goals set out have been met. The petition increased pressure on the Guggenheim and effected some change, including the installation of an improved monitoring system for contractors on the construction site (Ross 2015: 15ff.). Gulf Labor draws upon larger human rights discourses about the small Arab Gulf monarchies which have been widely covered by international media over the past years. The artists involved in Gulf Labor address labour rights, migration, global capital flows, commons, human rights and ethical thinking, all topics concerning the enforcement of the rule of law with which collectivist/activist movements are concerned worldwide and which do not necessarily apply artistic means (Westra 2014: 1ff.). The ini5  The kafala laws apply to all non-citizens working in the Gulf monarchies and are thus structural limitations to basic rights. Foremost among them is the requirement for the sponsor to agree to a person’s movements within as well as in and out of the country. This is a topic rarely raised with regard to professional workers, though it has gained some media attention in connection with the French footballer Zahir Belounis.

6  All documents, reporting, artwork, interviews and statements referring to Gulf Labor can be found on its website: http://gulflabor.org/. Likewise, all HRW’s global and country reports, as well as individual press releases are available on their website: https://www. hrw.org/. Moreover, comprehesive accounts of motivations and timelines have also been published in: The Gulf: High Culture / Hard Labor, edited by Andrew Ross for Gulf Labor, New York / London 2015.

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Janna-Mirl Redmann / tiators’ strategy for the boycott is similar to that of anti-sweatshop activists in the 1990s (Ross 2015: 33ff.). The argument against the Guggenheim is framed along the lines of global activism against multinational corporations, but situating Gulf Labor’s boycott in relation to the art world will show that it has a far greater and more complicated impact than a simple “buy-cott”. Gulf Labor as Institutional Critique In an interview with the Daily Star Lebanon, Walid Raad, one of the initiators of Gulf Labor, relates that when the Guggenheim started approaching galleries in 2009 in order to acquire art works by a number of artists:

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Gulf Labor […] seemed to be one of the rare occasions when artists had some leverage in their dealings with an institution, in this case the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi – an institution that needed to build a collection of contemporary art. Without it, there is nothing to show. This is why we concentrated on the Guggenheim. But also because we thought they shared our concerns about labor standards.  (Quilty 2013) As Ross (2015: 34) points out, cultural institutions – unlike factories – are obliged to uphold ethical standards towards staff and the general public. A museum cannot just close shop and adopt more “favourable” conditions for exploiting workers. The boycott’s initiators are mostly art world professionals on whose work the future Guggenheim depends. As such, they are producers rather than consumers, which places them in a quite different position from activists and lobby groups or initiators of a consumer boycott. This, combined with some significant names among the original signatories of Gulf Labor’s petition (Hans Haacke, Andrea Fraser and Thomas Hirschhorn), reveals a dimension to the project that goes beyond the concrete opportunity for intervention described in the above quote, situating Gulf Labor within the art historical discourse on Institutional Critique. What is today discussed as “Institutional Critique” developed during the 1960s, not as a coherent “movement”, but through individual artists associated with conceptual art practices questioning the way in which artistic institutions frame art and influence its coming into being (Fraser 2005: 408ff.; Alberro 2009: 3ff.). The movement can be read against its contemporary background as being directly linked to the Critical Theory of the 68 generation, with anti-war protests, feminism and identity politics (Piper 2009 [1983]: 246ff.), but also against the context of a lagging art market, which prompted many artists to position themselves outside its

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institutional framework (Eichhorn 2006: 41). The “first wave” 7 of Institutional Critique during the 1960s and 1970s was mainly directed at exposing the entanglement of capitalist interests with the supposedly politically disinterested institution of the museum. The second wave of Institutional Critique, during the late 1980s and 1990s, expanded into an analysis of the broader network of agents making up the art world, including the position of artists themselves. The Guggenheim Museum in New York was one of the earliest and most recurrent targets of Institutional Critique 8, and the Guggenheim Foundation’s extensive international branding has epitomized the globalization of the art world since the 1990s. Over the past decades it has run several museum branches and franchises. 9 The “Bilbao Effect” – named after the Guggenheim in the Basque Country – is now the term commonly used to refer to the spread of private museums as a means of marketing tourism (Guasch 2005: 259). Together with so-called ‘biennialization’, it is one of the two major developments symptomatic of neo-liberal expansion in Western art markets since the 1990s (Bydler 2004: 150ff.). As a strategic partnership between the richest of the United Arab Emirates and a foundation that is proverbial in the art world for its aggressive expansionism, the new Guggenheim therefore expresses the aspirations both for local, regional and global leadership. In addressing the Guggenheim specifically, Gulf Labor’s boycott taps directly into the art world’s memory. Moreover, Gulf Labor’s strategy could also be seen as engaging with recent claims to a “third wave” in Institutional Critique. Simon Sheikh, for example, argues for a third wave based on the emergence of new proponents, namely the representatives of institutions themselves: curators and museum collections (Sheikh 2009: 31). According to Julia Moritz, on the other hand, this third wave is associated with the globalization of the art world and, accordingly, of the products of Institutional Critique 7  Texts about Institutional Critique invariably point to the difficulty of canonizing a non-coherent movement that has at its core a questioning of the politics of inclusion/exclusion and of canon-making. However, since the use of different “wave” models is ubiquitous and helps to sketch its diachronic development and shifting concerns, I will continue talking about “waves” and capitalizing Institutional Critique for the sake of clarity. 8  The Guggenheim’s notoriety, as well as the almost mythical aura of Institutional Critique today, stem from the fact that Hans Haacke’s first show in a major museum had to wait another 18 years after the Guggenheim cancelled the event because Haacke had refused to withdraw two site-specific works. Both Haacke’s works exposed the entanglement of several members of the Guggenheim’s board of trustees with the real estate market in New York.

Both works referred directly to the museum and its structures. In the same year, the Guggenheim had already given way to protests by artists demanding the removal of Daniel Buren’s “untitled” from the first major group exhibition of artists working with site-specific installations. This caused a number of other artists to come together and withdraw their works in return. Both incidents of museum censorship provoked rallies and interventions by numerous artists (Moritz 2010: 58ff; Mannes-Abbott 2015: 86ff.). 9  Soho (1992-2001, NY II), Bilbao (1997, Spain), Berlin (1997-2013, Germany), Guadalajara (2007– 2009, Mexico), Oslo (in planning since 2011, Norway), as well as the Peggy Guggenheim collection in Venice (1951/1979/2000, Italy) and co-operations with the Hermitage: Las Vegas (2001-2008, US) and Vilnius (2008-2009, Lithuania).

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Janna-Mirl Redmann / (Moritz 2010: 3, 203). However, while contemporary globalization might well spawn even more complex entanglements than those identified during the first wave of Institutional Critique, the issues remain the same: the dialectics of working with(in) and against the institution, and the focus on socially engaged art and collectivist issues, are a mirror rather than a new dimension as Institutional Critique responds to the globalization observed by Moritz. At the same time, I would argue that Gulf Labor manages to actively engage the institution and to restore the possibility of taking a position outside the institution, and in some ways has even indirectly shaped the coming into being of the institution and taken over its ability to curate – reversing the trend of co-optation by the institution explicitly arraigned by Sheikh. 52 Weeks of Artist Protest – A Multi-Platform Exhibition

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In 2013, the commonly spelled out goals relating to workers in Abu Dhabi had consistently not been met. Besides (and possibly worse?), the Guggenheim had disregarded the boycott and had acquired several works on the secondary art market by artists who were among the boycott’s original signatories.10 By that time, the total number of signatories to the petition had grown to more than 2000 art world professionals (Ross 2015: 17), so Gulf Labor decided to increase pressure on the Guggenheim Foundation, inviting the participating artists to contribute to an exhibition project entitled 52 Weeks (Fig. 1). From October 2013 until October 2014, each week another artist, curator or collective responded to the call by contributing work relevant to, but also expanding on, the issues raised by Gulf Labor. In this way a critical body of work was created, re-enforcing Gulf Labor’s demands and engaging audiences in the art world and beyond by maintaining a continuous buzz and a constant stream of news, using the collective as a basis for individual art works, actions and exhibitions to build up an extra-institutional platform.11 The works produced for the 52 Weeks exhibition reflect the structure of the initiative, literally connecting the two localities (NY/UAE) with the global sphere of activism, the Internet (Westra 2014). Gulf Labor’s desire for virality was pursued by inviting artists who mainly work with web art, 10  Yto Barrada, 2010: Beau Geste (2009). Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, 2010: Lasting Images (2003). Mona Hatoum, 2012: Impenetrable (2009). Amar Kanwar, 2012: The Trilogy: A Season Outside (1997), To Remember (2003), A Night of Prophecy (2002). Alfredo Jaar, 2014: A Logo for America (1987 and 2014). Barbara Kruger, 1981 /  2011: Untitled (not perfect) (1980), Untitled (Money Money Money) (2011). Natascha Sadr Haghighian, 2011: I can’t work like this (2007).

11  Not only the influential blog hyperallergic.com, but also the highly selective major art world noticeboard e-flux.com repeatedly published news about Gulf Labor and 52 Weeks. Moreover, the multiple reports on Gulf Labor by the NY Times were taken up by other mainstream media as well. A full documentation of the reporting on Gulf Labor and 52 Weeks can be found on Gulf Labor’s blog: http:// gulflabor.org/.

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Fig. 1   Gulf Labor Coalition, 52 Weeks   Campaign Poster, 2013–2014

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Fig. 2   Week 47: Andrea Fraser, “Wer baut das Guggenheim Abu Dhabi?”. Advertisement in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), 17 August 2014.

Gulf Labor designed to be disseminated online, in the form of comics, drawings and cut-outs, but also by campaigns in more traditional media, like Andrea Fraser’s ad in the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (week 47, Fig. 2). A Gulf Labor spin-off, the direct action collective Gulf /Global Ultra Luxury Faction (G.U.L.F.), contributed a number of local interventions at the Guggenheim in New York, including occupying the rotunda, raining leaflets and (fake) money (Fig. 3) from above, video projections on the building, setting up a fake Guggenheim website (www.globalguggenheim.org) and interrupting the Guggenheim’s annual Donor Gala.12 Local interventions in Abu Dhabi were designed to reinforce the group’s argument visually by gathering documentary images from the Emirates. They did not, however, encroach on the museum site or engage its (future local) public. Rather, they aimed to establish a counter-image to the glossy advertisements of the monarchies by showing the country from the perspective of construction workers. Obtaining those images was essential not only as a basis for several contributions to 52 Weeks, but also because of the severe restrictions on movement under which human rights groups have to operate in the Gulf (Ross 2015: 33). One notable exception to the documentary work done in the Gulf itself is the artwork submitted in Week 38: Nida Sinnokrot’s sculpture KA (JCB, JCB) from 2009. KA (JCB, JCB) rearranges the arms of two mechanical diggers into an “orans”, an ancient religious gesture indicating prayer and pleading at the same time: arms raised, palms open and facing inwards (Fig. 4). The sculpture had been part of a major exhibition for Mathaf – Arab Museum of Modern Art in Qatar in 2012−2013. KA (JCB, JCB) and the exhibition Tea with Nefertiti travelled in 2014 to museums in Paris and Munich. For 52 Weeks the artist recontextualized his sculpture by removing it from its former institutionalized setting and inscribing it into Gulf Labor’s boycott. It thus signals the process of artists divesting from the politics of major Gulf institutions, not only targeting the Guggenheim or Saadiyat Island, but also implicating regional structures. The boycott thus becomes a statement simultaneously directed against the Guggenheim and the small market segment of Middle Eastern art which has developed an astounding momentum over the past twenty years, beginning with the emergence of a potent art market in Dubai and then bolstered by the emergence of a number of institutions.13 12  Their actions were designed to match the style of the respective exhibitions running at the Guggenheim at the time (Ross 2015: 22). Several also echoed the recent protests by Liberate Tate (Mannes-Abbott 2015: 94 ) and against Guggenheim’s censorship of Hans Haacke’s solo exhibition in 1971 (Moritz 2010: 70ff.).

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Fig. 3   G.U.L.F. May Day action 2015: “Meet Workers Demands Now” banner and fake money raining down the rotunds of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum New York.

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Fig. 4  KA (JCB, JCB), Nida Sinnokrot, 2009

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Initially, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi announced that it would focus its collection on the museum’s relation to the Arab Gulf as well as on “global” 20th and 21st century art practices, with temporary exhibitions serving both objectives specifically conceived for local audiences and also shows travelling to Abu Dhabi from the Guggenheim in New York or its other branches. Now I will analyse how this proposed focus manifests itself, at this early stage of the collection, through Guggenheim’s preview exhibition Seeing Through Light: Selections from the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Collection at Manarat al-Saadiyat (5 November 2014 − 26 March 2015). My claim is that Gulf Labor’s protest has shaped the collection in the process of being assembled for the museum: the body of work assembled by Gulf Labor’s 52 Weeks exhibition points exactly to the blind spots in what we now know about the future work and collection of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. The exhibition Seeing Through Light included work by nineteen artists, spanning from minimalist positions of the 1960s Light Art Movement and Zero Group to ultra-contemporary works like Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrored Room (2011). The works were thematically linked by the theme of “light”, ranging from spiritual to technological explorations of the topic.14 The organizers link the exhibition’s theme to the term enlightenment: in its first headline, the official website of the cultural district claims that ‘Manarat al-Saadiyat’ literally means ‘the place of enlightenment’.15 From the perspective of the Gulf countries claiming enlightenment for themselves and seeking to convey this insight to an audience, it is an emancipatory project, highlighting both the inclusion of global contemporary artists and an ability to identify and handle the most technically advanced art on the market. This take on art is in tune with the above-mentioned geopolitical 13  Sharjah Biennale, Orientalist Museum, Mathaf Arab Museum of Modern Art and MIA, Museum of Islamic Art in Qatar, the ADHAF Saadiyat Island institutions in Abu Dhabi etc. Gulf Labor member Walid Raad, quoted above, has tried to probe this phenomenon through a series of works produced since 2007: Scratching on Things I Could Disavow – A History of Art in The Arab World. Developments like the Louvre Abu Dhabi or the involvement of the British Museum and the Berlin Museums in the Sheikh Zayed Museum also signal the growing importance of oil money for European institutions. In the case of Orientalist art, the cultural sponsorship of institutions and wealthy individuals has led to a re-evaluation and shift in the academic discipline of art history (Volait 2009: 252).

14  Five sections, 19 artists: PERCEPTUAL (Light Art Movement): Larry Bell, Dan Flavin, Robert Irwin, Keith Sonnier, Douglas Wheeler. / REFLECTED (Zero Group, ME contemporary): Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, Ghada Amer, Rachid Koraïchi. / TRANSCENDENT (“contemplative painting”): Monir Farmanfarmian, Samia Halaby, Shirazeh Houshiary, Y.Z. Kami. / ACTIVATED (focusing on advanced technologies): Angela Bulloch, Hassan Khan, Rafael LozanoHemmer. / CELESTIAL (“emulating the infinite”): Bharti Kher, Yayoi Kusama, Song Dong. 15  “Manarat” is usually translated into English as “light house” (although it is important to note that the Arabic term “manarat” does not directly include the term “light” as does in English “light house”). The use of the term “en-light-enment” is a direct translation from European languages to Arabic.

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strategy for which the Gulf principalities use culture as a vital means of gaining influence in the West. At the same time, however, it stakes a claim on leadership in the Middle East. This claim is often enforced by suggesting that the Gulf is a contemporary manifestation of Al-Andalus, the medieval state on the Iberian peninsula often cited as a pre-Enlightenment example of peaceful co-existence through enlightened leadership. A longing for Al-Andalus is shared by many Arab intellectuals and rulers (c.f. Contributions in Doubleday 2008).16 Gulf principalities often legitimize this claim to regional leadership by arguing that the Gulf has become the only peaceful island in the Middle East and that, in particular, the transportation hub Dubai has already been transformed into a multicultural hub (Lindsey 2013). Using ‘light’ as a central metaphor of the Guggenheim’s preview exhibition alludes to cultural production in Al-Andalus, to Islamic mysticism, where light figures prominently. It also references the universally cited “Light Verse” / māyat an-nūr, Quran 24:35, which is frequently used in mosque decoration (Schimmel 1975: 96). This claim to represent a contemporary Al-Andalus has far reaching implications with regard to the religious politics of the Gulf States. All Gulf States follow the Wahhabi doctrine.17 Since the 1970s oil boom, the Gulf States have engaged in an aggressive export of their beliefs all over the world. What on first sight seems modern and attractive has been the breeding ground for Al-Qaeda and Da’esh (IS). Seeing Through Light included an interesting variety of contemporary art but also much more, appealing to more liberally minded Muslims by alluding to the Sufi symbolism of light, all the while reinforcing the claim to be building a new Al-Andalus and complying with the image sensitivities of Islamic Wahhabi doctrine (make new, make an-iconic). While the Guggenheim’s sophisticated exhibition managed to cloud the impression 16  Radiating out from the capital city of Cordoba, these Islamic ruled territories in Europe stretched from the Strait of Gibraltar (Jebel al-Tariq) up to Southern France, occupying most of the Iberian Peninsula from the 8th to the 15th centuries. Al-Andalus signifies a place and a time in which the Muslim world was far more advanced in terms of science and culture than the neighbouring Christian kingdoms, and in which Jews, Christians and Muslims peacefully lived together under Muslim rulers. 17  The Wahhabi doctrine is a radical and fundamentalist strand of Sunni Islam closely associated with the Gulf municipalities since its founder Abd al Wahhab reached an agreement with the house of Ibn Saud in 1744 (EI III). Since this time, the holy sites of Islam have been under their guardianship. Due to an extreme emphasis on tawhid (the concept of

oneness of god) and on taking the scripture literally, Wahhabi Islam is extremely antagonistic towards other varieties of Islam which have developed and especially towards any historical traces of veneration. The ongoing destruction of historical sites in Mecca and Medina like the prophet’s house or grave (which could encourage shirq or idolatry) have also caused a stir in Western media over the past years. In Mecca and Medina, the centuries-old urban and sacred topography has been discarded in favour of an eclectic modern fusion of styles. As Eric Roose has shown in his dissertation on the representation of Islam through mosques in the Netherlands (2009), the Salafi mosques financed by Wahhabi sponsors tend to sport highly modern and minimalistic designs.

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Janna-Mirl Redmann / of incompleteness very well through its multi-faceted approach to the theme of light, in order to do so it veered away from displaying critical and political works by artists already present in the New York collection, and it had to forsake any claim to completeness in representing Middle Eastern art production. Gulf Labor’s boycott caused the Guggenheim to withdraw from a politics of inclusion towards political and institutionally critical works and to adopt a classical museum position, downplaying social and political factors in art. However, as the above analysis has shown, the resulting exhibition was anything but apolitical. Synthesis

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The museum’s public communications originally focused on and still emphasize the importance of “Middle Eastern” modern and contemporary art of the 20th and 21st century for the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi.18 Many of the signatories’ works were held by the Guggenheim Foundation prior to the announcement of an Abu Dhabi branch 19, and the high number of artists originating from Arab countries, Iran and Turkey who signed the petition and joined the boycott significantly restricts the museum’s ability to build a representative collection or exhibit works previously held by the Foundation in the Gulf, in particular, because some of the boycott’s signatories belong to a small group of artists from the region – like Shirin Neshat, Mona Hatoum, Akram Zaatari, Oraib Toukan, Kader Attia, Emily Jacir and Walid Raad – who have garnered sustained and wide international acclaim since the 1990s. Having to exclude some of the region’s most important 20th and 21st century artists, it became impossible for the Guggenheim to claim a hegemonic representation of “Arab” or “Middle Eastern” art. Through its boycott, Gulf Labor forced the Guggenheim to give up its claim to comprehensively represent Middle Eastern art production through its collection. The resulting orientation of the exhibition could and would integrate regional artists (if cooperative), but they were no longer essential. Although the Guggenheim side-lined the work of Gulf Labor artists held in its collection, with all its political, social and historical potential, the museum could not detract from Gulf Labor’s leverage: the critical body 18  For example, on 14 January 2010 the Guggenheim appointed curators Suzanne Cotter and Reem Faddah, both of whom focus on “Middle Eastern” art, in order to augment the project team, advise on building the collection and develop the future programme. In addition, the Guggenheim/UBS Global Art Initiative includes the MENA region as one of three regions alongside Latin America and South/South East Asia, a rather unusual move given that the other two regions have received far more art historical attention thus far.

19  Shirin Neshat, 2001: All Demons Flee (1995), Passage (2001). Paul Pfeiffer, 2004: Pier and Ocean (2004). Walid Raad 2007: Let’s Be Honest, the Weather Helped (Finland, Germany, Greece, Egypt, Belgium) (1998). Martha Rosler, 2004: Red Stripe Kitchen (1967−72). Rikrit Tiravanija, 2004: Untitled 2002 (he promised). http://www.guggenheim.org/ new-york/collections/collection-online.

Gulf Labor of work assembled by the coalition and directed against the Guggenheim’s spirit of ‘deflecting’ criticism. Gulf Labor has thus both continued and expanded the notion of Institutional Critique: while maintaining an open dialogue with the institution, artists have also built up a forum outside the institution. The body of work created in the context of 52 Weeks – to which the very absence of Gulf Labor artists in the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi’s collection points – has become intertwined with the institution’s history. Unlike other projects and art works of Institutional Critique, the Gulf Labor protest has been part of the institution’s development from the very beginning and will have to be read in parallel to it in the future. With this, Gulf Labor can be seen as marking a turning point for Institutional Critique, in that it actively shapes the acquisition policy and exhibition strategy of a museum while working from outside the institution. Postscript Three members of Gulf Labor have been denied entry to the United Arab Emirates since 52 Weeks ended. In particular, Walid Raad’s deportation on 11 May 2015 due to “security concerns” on the part of UAE authorities caused a stir in the art world. Raad was an invited guest of Sheikha al-Qassemi, the head of Sharjah Art Foundation and founder and organizer of the Sharjah Biennial and the March Meetings (from 11 to 16 May in 2015), where Raad was going to present. As many prominent commentators and art world professionals have noted, the denial of entry on grounds of security can only be explained by his involvement in Gulf Labor’s organization and activities, based on a critical art practice. As shown by the reaction of the state authorities, Gulf Labor’s boycott of the institution in Abu Dhabi implicates both the Gulf State, with its double standards for citizens and migrant workers, and the museum as a complicit international player which deliberately looks the other way, while at the same time actively shaping an ‘enlightened’ public discourse. It also shows what a vital piece of geopolitics the museum is, and how vital it is for the country as a whole to receive media attention. •

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References Alberro, Alexander and Blake Stimson (2009): Institutional Critique: An anthology of artist’s writings. Cambridge/London: The MIT Press. Bardaouil, Sam (2012): Tea with Nefertiti: The Making of the Artwork by the Artist, the Museum and the Public (Catalog for the Exhibition from 17 November 2012 – 31 March 2013). Doha: Bloomsbury. Bydler, Charlotte (2004): The Global Art World, Inc. On the Globalization of Contemporary Art. Uppsala: Uppsala University Press. Doubleday, Simon R. (2008): In the Light of Medieval Spain: Islam, the West, and the Relevance of the Past. 1st edn. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Eichhorn, Maria, ed. (2009): The Artist’s Contract: Interviews with Carl Andre, Daniel Buren, Paula Cooper, Hans Haacke, Jenny Holzer, Adrian Piper, Robert Projansky, Robert Ryman, Seth Siegelaub, John Weber, Lawrence Weiner. Köln / New York: Verlag König. Fraser, Andrea (2009 [2005]): “From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique.” In: Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (eds.), Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artist’s Writings. Cambridge / London: The MIT Press, pp. 408–425. Guasch, Ana M. (2005): Learning from the Bilbao Guggenheim. Reno Nev: Center for Basque Studies, University of Nevada Reno. Kazerouni, Alexandre (2015): “Musées et soft power dans le Golfe

persique.” In: Pouvoirs (Emirats et monarchies du Golfe), pp. 87–97. Lindsey, Ursula (2013): “The New Arab Capitals.” The Arabist Web-log. 25 October 2013: http://arabist.net/blog/ 2013/10/25/the-new-arab-capitals, last accessed 4 June 2016. Mannes-Abbott, Guy (2015): “The Emergent Wave of Art World Activism.” In: Andrew Ross (ed.), The Gulf: High Culture/Hard Labor. New York / London: OR Books, pp. 86–99. Moritz, Julia (2010): “Blurring the Boundaries? Institutionskritik im transnationalen Raum.” Dissertation, Kunstgeschichte, Freie Universität Berlin. Peterson, J. E. (2006): “Qatar and the World: Branding for a Micro-State.” In: Middle East Journal 60 (4: Autumn), pp. 732–48. Quilty, Jim (2013): “Let’s Talk about Building Gulf Art Space.” Daily Star Lebanon online edition, 25 November 2013: http://www.dailystar.com.lb/ Culture/Art/2013/Nov-25/238744lets-talk-about-building-gulf-art-space. ashx, last accessed 4 June 2016. Raunig, Gerald and Gene Ray, eds. (2009): Art and Contemporary Critical Practice: Reinventing Institutional Critique. London: MayFlyBooks. Roose, Eric (2009): “The Architectural Representation of Islam: Muslim-commissioned Mosque Design in the Netherlands.” Doctoral Dissertation, Leiden University, Leiden. https://openaccess. leidenuniv.nl/handle/1887/13771, last accessed 4 June 2016.

Gulf Labor Ross, Andrew [for Gulf Labor] (2015): The Gulf: High Culture / Hard Labor. New York / London: OR Books. Schimmel, Annemarie (1975): Mystical Dimensions of Islam. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Sheikh, Simon (2009): “Notes on Institutional Critique.” In: Gerald Raunig and Gene Ray (eds.), Art and Contemporary Critical Practice. London: MayFlyBooks, pp. 29–32. Sholette, Gregory (2015): “Art out of Joint: Artists’ Activism Before and After the Cultural Turn.” In: Andrew Ross (ed.), The Gulf: High Culture / Hard Labor. New York/London: OR Books, pp. 64–85. Steyerl, Hito (2009): “The Institution of Critique.” In: Gerald Raunig and Gene Ray (eds.), Art and Contemporary Critical Practice. London: MayFlyBooks, pp. 13–20. Volait, Mercedes (2015): “Middle Eastern Collections of Orientalist Painting at the Turn of the 21st Century: Paradoxical Reversal or Persistent Misunderstanding?” In: François Pouillon and Jean Claude Vatin (eds.), After Orientalism: Critical Perspectives on Western Agency and Eastern Re-appropriations. Leiden Studies in Islam and Society, Vol. 2. Leiden: Brill. pp. 251–271. Westra, Laura (2014): Revolt Against Authority. Studies in Critical Social Sciences, Vol. 65. Leiden: Brill. Whitson, Sarah Leah (2015): “Foreword.” In: Andrew Ross (ed.), The Gulf: High Culture/Hard Labor. New York / London: OR Books, pp. 7–10.

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Copyrights Fig. 1  Gulf Labor Coalition, 52 Weeks campaign poster. Image use courtesy of Gulf Labor Coalition. Fig. 2   Week 47: Andrea Fraser, “Wer baut das Guggenheim Abu Dhabi?”. Adverstisement in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), August 17 2014. Image use courtesy of the artist. Fig. 3  G.U.L.F. May Day action 2015: “Meet Workers Demands Now” banner and fake money raining down the rotunds of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum New York. Image use courtesy of Gulf Labor Coalition. Fig. 4  KA (JCB, JCB), Nida Sinnokrot, 2009.         Courtesy of the artist.

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You Can’t Always Curate Your Way Out!

Leah Gordon

You Can’t Always Curate Your Way Out! Reflections on the Ghetto Biennale Introduction Atis Rezistans (Resistance Artists) is a dynamic, subaltern group of artists working in the Grand Rue neighbourhood of downtown Port-au-Prince. This is a shifting community which is made up of a number of experienced, mature artists, who are primarily sculptors, and a range of younger emerging artists, some of whom are working in sculpture and painting, but also, more recently, photography, video, music, slam poetry, writing and performance. In December 2009 Atis Rezistans hosted the 1st Ghetto Biennale, which was conceived and devised in 2008 by group member André Eugène and myself. Atis Rezistans invited Haitian and international fine artists, film-makers, academics, photographers, musicians, architects and writers, via a global open call, to come to the Grand Rue area of Port-Au-Prince, Haiti, to make work or witness the event in their neighbourhood. The idea for the Ghetto Biennale came from conversations with members of Atis Rezistans about issues of mobility and exclusion for Haitian artists. A number of times members of the group had not been able to attend private views of their own work abroad, often in major museums, due to visa refusal. In terms of visa restrictions Haiti is one of the most prejudiced against countries in the world, lying joint 79 in a ranking of 94 (Henley & Partners 2014). This lack of mobility leads to a collective exclusion of Haitian-based, lower-class artists from the globalized, fluid, networked art circuit. The Ghetto Biennale offered a possibility through which Atis Rezistans could make wider art world contacts and have more control over the distribution of their works and ideas within the art world. It served as a kind of reverse mechanism of the mobility that most international artists enjoy: if members of Atis Rezistans could not get to the international biennials, then the biennale could come to them.

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A Short History of Subaltern Art in Haiti After a protracted struggle starting in 1791 between the slaves, the affranchis and the various stakeholders in the colonial plantation system, including French Republicans and Royalists, by 1804 Haiti became the second postcolonial country in the Americas after it had the first, and only, successful slave’s revolt. During the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, the new Haitian ruling classes privileged visual arts that paralleled the forms, aesthetics and themes of European fine arts. From the mid20th century, there was a marked emergence of Haitian art which demonstrated particular aesthetics and thematics in which, in the words of world art historian and curator Don Cosentino, “the tangles of the revolution live on as myth” (Cosentino 2004a: 13). Since the 1940s, many of the artworks depicted multiple crossroads between a historic revolutionary past, a mythologized Africa of the imagination and a symbolic, theocratic cosmology. The artists were engaging with some of the many intervolved, and often contested, narratives of this volatile geographical region and colonial history. This thematic transformation in Haitian art, from predominantly European-influenced traditional landscapes and portraiture to an artistic expression increasingly dominated by local cultural motifs and symbolism, had taken place after the 1915−1934 U.S. occupation of Haiti, when Haitian ethnologist Jean Price Mars published “Ainsi parla l’oncle” (Thus Spoke the Uncle). This extremely influential text “called upon Haitian writers, composers, and artists to look to popular cultures, with Vodou at their centre, as a repository of artistic inspiration” (Ramsey 2015: 7). This text was central to the Indigéniste movement, which was driven by a radical nationalist resistance to the U.S. occupation. Jacques Romain, Haitian Marxist, novelist and political organizer was also a central protagonist of this group. The movement shifted cultural influences, first in literature and later in the visual arts, from the residual French Colonial influences to the Afro-American traditions of the Haitian peasant. At first, in the 1930s, the change was purely in terms of theme, as the Haitian peasant became a legitimate subject matter for visual, theatrical and literary narratives. In the 1940s, the Haitian lower classes further transformed Haitian arts by becoming the producers as well as the subjects of representation. There is much debate as to the root cause of the class shift in the dominant cultural production and what Haitian cultural commentator Carlo A. Célius refers to as “the irruption of the subalterns” (Célius 2015: 53). Anthropological texts from the early twentieth century confirm that most aspects of the Vodou religion incorporated aspects of visual, plastic, performative and musical arts (Herskovits 1937; Rigaud 1914).

You Can’t Always Curate Your Way Out! The secularization of the sacred arts and the move toward commercial arts practice by the lower classes was both preceded and accelerated by the effects of the anti-superstition campaign waged by the Catholic Church and the Lescot regime, in the 1940s, which destroyed many of the previous spaces for sacred arts practice. The proliferation of untapped neighbourhood-based creative skills, formally connected with a Vodou temple community, were ripe for commodification when Estime’s government, in the mid- to late 1940s, promoted Haiti as an American tourist destination, which created a dynamic market to sell Haitian art and crafts. Another factor was the establishment of the Centre d’Art, founded by a group of Haitian cultural producers including Gerard Bloncourt, Georges Remponeau, Albert Mangones, Philippe Thoby-Marcelin and an English teacher from the United States, DeWitt Peters. It opened in 1944 in Port-au-Prince as an artists’ space for creative exchange and exhibition. After two years the centre was offering free access to arts materials, training, studio space and markets to artists of all classes. This particular correlation of underemployed artistic skills, access to training and workspaces, newly developing tourism and art markets, boosted by interest from the visits of Surrealists Andre Breton and Wifredo Lam, contributed to the promotion and proliferation of lower-class neighbourhood groups, which are still today producing art works in Bel Air, Croix-des-Bouquets, Carrefour-Feuilles, Rivière-Froide and the Grand Rue. In the case of Grand Rue, its proximity to the Iron Market, a popular tourist destination, further strengthened the cottage industry manufacture of wooden carved goods. In the late 20th century and early 21st century, the creative interventions by wealthier Haitian contemporary artists such as Mario Benjamin, Maksaens Denis, Jean-Claude Garoute aka Tiga, Pascale Monnin and Barbara Prézeau Stephenson, who have all championed Haitian subaltern practices through collaboration, investment and promotion, also contributed to further developments in many of these neighbourhoods. Atis Rezistans The artistic practitioners often referred to as Atis Rezistans or The Sculptors of Grand Rue and Rue du Magasin de l’Etat, started to make art in the late 1990s. Their primary skills originate from apprenticeships to learn to make the artisanal wood carvings that were once sold to tourists in Haiti but are currently more often shipped to the tourism centres in the Dominican Republic and the Turks and Caicos Islands. The main founder of the group, Céleur Jean-Hérard, who lives on Rue du Magasin de l’Etat, started to learn to sculpt in the locality in 1977, sanding and polishing completed woodcarvings usually destined for the tourism market. In 1982 he

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Leah Gordon / began to work on larger pieces, learning the trade from his older brother, Christophe Hérard, who died in 1999. After his brother’s death, Céleur experimented with the form, materials and content of his sculptural works. He incorporated recycled, locally sourced materials into his sculptures, including discarded car and motorbike parts, metal sheeting, nails, human skulls, and tyres. André Eugène, another central member of the Sculptors of Grand Rue, was born in Port-au-Prince, the youngest of six children all fathered by different men. His father, said to be a Port-au-Prince slipper maker, but whose identity Eugène never knew, died when Eugène was a few months old. When his mother died in 1973, he became an orphan at the age of 14 and was supported by an aunt and godparents. Once he finished school, André Eugène moved into Céleur Jean-Hérard’s neighbourhood, living in a small shack just behind Grand Rue. Eugène credits this rundown, marginalized neighbourhood, with its network of Vodou temples and many local bann a pye (musical foot bands), for teaching him more about Haitian culture than he ever picked up in school or from his mother and aunt, who, whilst both initiated into Vodou, had converted to evangelical Protestantism. As a young man, he hoped to become a soccer player, but when the city mayor redeveloped the local pitch as a parking lot in 1996, Eugène redirected his energies into sculpting because he had already developed some woodcarving and polishing skills by working for neighbourhood artisans. Influenced by Céleur Jean-Hérard and the more established subaltern artist Jean Camille Nasson from the Rivière-Froide neighbourhood, he embarked on transforming the woodcarvings previously geared toward the taste of tourists into large-scale Vodou-influenced sculptural monuments. (Fig. 1) By the early 2000s, both Céleur Jean-Hérard and André Eugène, who form the core of the group, were joined by other local artists, some of whom had been their students / apprentices, such as Frantz Jacques aka Guyodo, Jean-Claude Saintilus and Ronald Bazile aka Cheby. They had also begun to attract the attention of other contemporary Haitian artists such as Mario Benjamin, Maksaens Denis and Barbara Prézeau Stephenson and to collaborate with them on film, carnival float and exhibition projects. Since 2007 a number of the artists became known as Atis Rezistans after the creation of a website in the same name by photographer and web designer Romain Forquy. The name was chosen by André Eugène and agreed on by the other two artists, as the domain name Sculptors of Grand Rue was not available. Artistic affiliations to this group have fluctuated and changed many times since then, particularly with the disengagement of Frantz Jacques aka Guyodo in 2009, and the more recent withdrawal of Céleur Jean-Hérard in early 2015, which have altered local dynamics, alignments and hierarchies. Céleur Jean-Hérard, for instance, chose to distance himself from Atis Rezistans after his success in the exhibition “Haiti:

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Fig. 1  Dokto Zozo sculpture by André Eugène

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Leah Gordon / Two Centuries of Artistic Creation”, held at the Grand Palais, Paris at the end of 2014. He explained, at a Ghetto Biennale meeting held in the neighbourhood in January 2015, that he felt that Atis Rezistans was increasingly appearing like a social movement, and he feared that his own practice and output ran the risk of being subsumed by the over-arching political narratives present within Atis Rezistans. Céleur felt he needed to step back to further establish his personal profile and individual image as an artist. There are also other, lesser known, members that have either ceased artistic practice, left the local neighbourhood or Haiti, whilst other artists have joined their ranks. Currently Atis Rezistans is a loose group of artists, which contains, beyond its core of four or five mature artists, fifteen to twenty younger artists. They have been producing sculptural works, often referred to as recuperation (Levy 2007: 131) or assemblage (Cosentino 2004b: 16) art, using either a combination of carved wood and recycled materials or purely reclaimed materials. Their politics often seem to speak through their choice of materials, interrogating – I would claim – globally imported commodities as they bastardize, disintegrate and rust them into warped fetishes. “The Americans send us their trash, we use it and transform it, then sell it back to them to put in their living rooms,” says André Eugène.1 Therefore, American anthropologist Katherine Smith adroitly noted, “probably the only materials in the work of these artists that are actually made in Haiti are the skulls”.2 The concept of the Ghetto Biennale has its roots in these strategies of material and symbolic appropriation. Atis Rezistans use recycled materials, but it has never just been a re-appropriation of imported junk. They also appropriate figures and symbols from Haitian culture and history. Moreover, Eugène sees the appropriation of bourgeois art world institutions as central to his practice. In 2001 he named his yard and atelier a ‘Musée d’Art’. “Usually it’s the bourgeoisie that make the galleries, the museums. I organised myself in the ghetto. […] We made a sort of gallery, a kind of museum. […] usually it’s always the bourgeoisie who make the galleries. I want to have a gallery and a museum […]. This is the reason why I have given my studio the name, E. Pluribus Unum: Musée d’Art.” 3 This established tradition of appropriating the designations and formats of Western art institutions and queering them with specificities of the locality was also key to the establishment of the Ghetto Biennale. 1  André Eugène (2002): “E Pluribus Unum”, documentary, directed by Maksaens Denis. Paris: Collectif 2004 Images. 2  Contribution by Katherine Smith to the conference of the 1st Ghetto Biennale 2009 held at Fokal, Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 20 December 2009.

3  André Eugène (2008): “Atis Rezistans: The Sculptors of Grand Rue”, directed by Leah Gordon, in the DVD collection “Iron in the Soul: The Haiti Documentary Films of Leah Gordon.” London: Soul Jazz Publishing.

You Can’t Always Curate Your Way Out! Multiple Agendas of Ghetto Biennale Stakeholders The Ghetto Biennale has had many shifting and evolving agendas, many of them contradictory, which makes it difficult to locate, articulate or historicize a sole foundational discourse. Artists in the contemporary Caribbean art world, especially but not exclusively, are obliged to become organizers as well as producers due to the lack of viable institutions to support education, networks, visibility and distribution. Hence, André Eugène’s practice, besides producing sculptural art objects for exhibition and sale, also corresponds to traditions of social art practices in North America and Europe. After conversations with him and other members of Atis Rezistans on issues on mobility and exclusion, the term Ghetto Biennale first emerged in the spring of 2008 in a conversation between myself and Vivian Chan, a close colleague and architect. Combining two historically troublesome words in a provocative way, was a spontaneous idea for a title rather than an elaborated conceptual framework. The juxtaposition was instinctual, possibly grounded in punk process 4 rather than critical discourse, and promised many possibilities. The consequent framework was created after further conversations with André Eugène as to what these words could finally constitute in his neighbourhood. There was an instant contrariness of intent arching from institutional critique to pursuit of the institution. From the very start, by appropriating the super-charged word ‘biennale’, the Ghetto Biennale could be accused of scrambling up the greasy pole whilst affecting to cut it down at the roots.5 Conceptual Starting Points One of my personal starting points for thinking about what shape and meaning a Ghetto Biennale might embody was one of the original strap lines of the first Ghetto Biennale: “What happens when first world art rubs up against third world art? Does it bleed?” The line is a transmutation of a quote from a book about the maquiladoras in Juárez, Mexico. The original quote, by Gloria Anzaldúa, states, “The U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta (is an open wound) where the Third World grates against the First and bleeds” (Anzaldúa 1987: 3). I was interested in the Ghetto Biennale to see what new practices, processes and relationships could emerge from these, often uncomfortable, entanglements. 4  I was a member of a feminist punk folk band called “The Doonicans” from 1983–1989 based in London, UK. A central tenet of punk philosophy was that you didn’t need musical skills to be in a band.

5  The idiom “to climb the greasy pole” means to attempt to reach the higher echelons of any hierarchy.

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Leah Gordon / A second point of departure was a quote in an essay by John Kieffer about art and political engagement. He discusses the possible political dynamics of a “‘third space’ […] an event or moment created through a collaboration between artists from radically different backgrounds” (Kieffer 2008: 5).6 This quote proposed a positive perspective on a difficult and daunting prospect of bringing together people from widely disparate economic, cultural and gendered backgrounds. Whilst the Ghetto Biennale potentially had all the dangers and pitfalls of creating neo-colonial and neo-liberal power relations and avowing various forms of exploitation, it was important to see that there could also be the possibility of a third position of relationships which were neither exploitative nor paternalistic, and perhaps even a space for art which was neither institutional nor commercial in the narrowest sense. A third important inspiration was Nicolas Bourriaud’s catalogue “Altermodern: Tate Triennale” and his book “The Radicant”. Both had been published in 2009, the year of the first Ghetto Biennale. The Biennale was not so much a contestation, but possibly a reaction to some of his ideas concerning his concept of the contemporary global artist as a ‘homo viator’ (Bourriaud 2009: 23). Travel, for the majority of the global population, most usually takes two forms: forced migration or illegal immigration. It appeared to me that the international art world was responding enthusiastically to the themes of migration and immigration within art works, but there appeared to be less discourse around the art world’s institutionalized blindness to the restricted mobilities experienced by artists from particular races, nationalities and, especially, classes. Inviting artists to come to make work in the Grand Rue neighbourhood in Haiti confronted Bourriaud’s theory with these unequal / stratified realities.

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Agendas of the Local Artists Another inceptive strapline for the Ghetto Biennale has been “A Salon des Refusés for the 21st century”. Due to visa restrictions, the Haitian artists feel that they are denied access to the globalized art scene that they both see on the Internet and had heard about from their contemporary collaborations with Haitian artists from the more prosperous classes. The way in which they make work and learn and share their skills is very different from the contemporary Western art school model, as they use a local neighbourhood-based apprenticeship system to disseminate skills. This difference from what is considered a conventional European and North 6  I do not want to open up the attendant discourse covering Homi Bhabha’s “Third Space Concept” by quoting John Kieffer. My use of the term ‘Third’ is in closer affiliation to the politi-

cal use of the term ‘Third World’ as used at the Bandung Conference in 1955 and the way it posited an alternative, post-colonial system of knowledge outside of Capitalism and Soviet State Communism.

You Can’t Always Curate Your Way Out! American centred art historical education has often forced them into the unwelcome category of ‘outsider’ or ‘naïve’ artist, attributed to them by Western audiences. By holding the Ghetto Biennale and inviting international contemporary artists, Atis Rezistans were refusing this positioning and embracing a repositioning by their association with contemporary international artists. Inviting international artists to visit Haiti was a way for the Haitian artists to plug themselves into global art networks and to experiment with multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary collaborative practice. As the Haitian artists’ agenda was more far-reaching than the actual event itself, the Ghetto Biennale could almost be described as a Trojan horse in that it also functioned as mechanism for creating the networks necessary to gain access to major Western arts institutions. As Barbara Prézeau Stephenson, Haitian artist, critic and long-term collaborator with Atis Rezistans, wrote: The continuing success of the movement […] Atis Rezistans (Resistance Artists) will no doubt contribute to shelve the myth of the naïve peasant artist […] bypassing the tight network of Haitian galleries and art dealers […]. The dissemination of art is following different paths today […]. The centres of creation are still the shanty towns […] but the artists are in contact with the rest of the world – despite poverty and a general lack of resources.  (Prézeau Stephenson 2012: 79) There are ethical considerations in situating an arts festival in an informal neighbourhood, especially one in Haiti, whose usual by-line in the mainstream press is “the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere”. In this context creativity can be an important means to struggle against the disorder and chaos. But at the same time it implies the risk of celebrating the slum “as a dangerous but creative place where people improvise solutions” (Gilligan 2006: 56). Whilst some critics of poverty tourism and its consequent representations claim that such projects “‘raise awareness’ only to support the underlying economic conditions” (ibid.: 52), another view is that to visit and interact can “promise a meaningful and transformative experience that is rewarding for both tourists and local communities”(Dürr / Jaffe 2012: 11). Finding balance between these two positions remains central to the curatorial decisions of the Ghetto Biennale directors and volunteer organizers. Divergent Interests of Haitian and Visiting Artists Many of the visiting artists 7 regarded the Ghetto Biennale as a form of ‘institutional critique’, an anti-Biennale or, at least, parodic gesture based

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on a critique of the international Biennale circuit. They had interests in the exploration of forms of anti-authorial and non-material practices which created a considerable gap between the projections of the visiting artists and the expectations of the Haitian artists. The Haitian artists were making material objects with the intention to access markets and sell them, whilst many of the visiting artists had more idealistic practices which critiqued authorship and privileged immaterial relational practices. These paradoxical conditions at the heart of the Ghetto Biennale project, however, brought to light the contradictions inherent in the practices of both visiting and Haitian artists. Thus, on the one hand, many of the visiting artists critiqued the current locus of global art power while, on the other hand, most of the Haitian artists, as Katherine Smith noted, “were desperate to plug themselves right into it”.8 So whilst many of the visiting artists were exploring supposedly non-commercial, indistinctly authored, dematerialized works, the Haitian artists were making art objects that they, unfashionably, wanted to sell. The often unequal social contracts between the stakeholders sometimes unravelled the relational aspirations of some social practice projects. During the Ghetto Biennales, the concept of collaboration has at times been misused and misunderstood. Sometimes collaborations have become, paradoxically, an unconscious device to avoid confronting the divisive power structures within the working conditions of the site. There have been projects which the visiting artist has wanted to call collaborative but their Haitian counterpart has refused the pretext, preferring the more honest designation of employer and employee in order to get waged. This dynamic tension led many of the visiting artists to reconsider the privilege of their positions and concede that invisible structures, economies and institutions shadow their dematerialized ideals. It also gave birth to the radical piece of performance art “Tele Geto”, a hybrid blend or coupling of both approaches, which was created and performed by three local teenagers. They had fashioned a pretend video camera from a plastic litre oil container and used a stick with gaffer tape at the end for a microphone. For three days they ghost filmed the Ghetto Biennale, mimicking the movements of foreign filmmakers with uncomfortable accuracy. 7  Since its inception in 2009, the Ghetto Biennale has welcomed and hosted over 150 visiting artists, chosen through an open call, from over 25 countries including Australia, Barbados, Belgium, Bermuda, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Denmark, the Dominican Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Lithuania, Malaysia, Martinique, Mexico, Mongolia, Oman, Poland, Peru, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland,

Trinidad, the UK, and the USA. Since 2013 the open call to artists has been translated into Chinese, French, Kreyòl, Portuguese, Greek, Russian and Spanish to further widen the potential demographic of the visiting artists. 8  Contribution by Katherine Smith to the conference of the 1st Ghetto Biennale 2009 held at Fokal, Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 20 December 2009.

You Can’t Always Curate Your Way Out! A Chronology of the Ghetto Biennials: Curatorial Decisions and Reflections A call is released onto a wide number of online artists’ networks and platforms and each time I myself, twice in collaboration with an invited co-curator and twice working with a curatorial assistant, have considered over 100 applications, from which about 35-50 artists have been chosen to participate. In the open calls it is made clear that the visiting participants have to pay their own flights, accommodation and material costs. Mostly the projects that are given further consideration are those which are physically possible in the difficult spaces of the neighbourhood and require materials which are available in Haiti, especially in downtown Port-au-Prince. Quieter, simpler projects are often privileged over louder, more spectacular works, not particularly for ideological reasons, but out of knowledge of the space, resources and economics of the neighbourhood. After the 1st Ghetto Biennale there has been an increasing tendency to privilege projects that attempt to engage with Haitian history and culture, with the inherent structural inequalities of the Ghetto Biennale or with the material dilapidation of the site. 1st Ghetto Biennale 2009 The 1st Ghetto Biennale was co-curated by myself together with André Eugène, Céleur Jean-Hérard from Atis Rezistans and US scholar Myron Beasley. The primary curation, in a traditional sense, was done at the point of assessment of the visiting artists’ proposals, which was done by myself and Beasley. All the local and visiting artists negotiated the space between themselves for the final hang, which took the form of a clash of art works on cluttered walls, the art thus competing for space with beer sellers, friend pork vendors, musicians and dancers. Some works, including Ebony Patterson’s drapo project, were installed in rooms in local houses which had been hired for the exhibition period, many of the performance-based projects took place in small lakous (yards) in the neighbourhood, some murals and objects were hung from walls in the main central lakou. Furthermore, social practice projects, such as Carole Lung-Francis’ sewing project and Bill Drummond’s 17 project, occurred in relevant locations in the neighbourhood, including schools and participants’ homes. There was also a sculptural structure by Jesse Darling built at the entrance to the neighbourhood, which doubled as a rap house and projection space. This wide variety of non-conventional exhibition spaces containing both art works and quotidian consumables gave the opening days an energized dissonance of art, performance and commerce. (Fig. 2)

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Fig. 2   The entrance to the Ghetto Biennale in 2009 which was decorated as a project by John Cussans and Michel Lafleur.

You Can’t Always Curate Your Way Out! Also during the 1st Ghetto Biennale, word of the project spread around Port-au-Prince and other artists from other ‘informal’ neighbourhoods started arriving, hearing they could freely show work and get involved in the project. Stone sculptures were brought by truck from Rivière-Froide, giant Vodou flags brought down from the hills of Carrefour-Feuilles by artists who felt there was an alternative to the galleries in Pétionville, although this was a miscalculation, as the visiting artists were not the purchasing classes the Haitian artists seriously needed. This also led to a very different demographic of Haitian art audience. People from popular neighbourhoods in the city, who normally rarely visit an art show, came to see the work for the first time. At the 1st Ghetto Biennale a number of academics with research interests in Haiti attended the event with a view to contributing to a closing conference organized by the co-curator Myron Beasley. Among them were LeGrace Benson, Jana Braziel, John Cussans, Sibylle Fischer, Toni Sanon, Katherine Smith and Gina Ulysse. We held the conference in a well-equipped and modern conference centre. All the visiting artists, the academics, Atis Rezistans and people from the neighbourhood, drawn in by the three weeks’ activities, showed up. Right from the beginning there was a sense of how the structural organization and architecture of the conference space applied its own power dynamics and changed the energy. The conference started with a number of academic papers using a rarefied academic language which increasingly confounded the efforts of the interpreter. As he made less and less sense of the specialist English register, his Kreyòl translation became increasingly incomprehensible. A group of us, including myself, Beasley, Eugène and Fischer, intervened and adjusted the structure of the conference, inviting local participants and artists to replace the academic speakers and to reflect on their experiences with the Ghetto Biennale alongside visiting artists. As Beasley noted: The conference served as a moment of ref lexivity about the ‘Third World’ rubbing against the ‘developed’ nations. [...] Poignant and at times emotional, the conference moved from ‘high theory’ to honouring more grounded knowledge. The academics became the audience, and the Grand Rue residents became the theorists, ref lecting upon their lived experience. (Beasley 2012: 74).

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2nd Ghetto Biennale 2011 The 2nd Ghetto Biennale took place in December 2011 and was again cocurated by André Eugène, Céleur Jean-Hérard and myself with curatorial assistance for application reviews from British artist Marg Duston, and assistance onsite in Haiti from a volunteer intern and German PhD student David Frohnapfel and UK / Barbadian graphic designer Liz Woodroffe. Two years after the earthquake, the political, social and economic situation in Haiti was far more distressed than it had been during the 1st Biennale, particularly for the urban poor in Port-au-Prince. André Eugène and I had made a decision not to invite an external curatorial figure this time and just to organize the event between ourselves and Céleur Jean-Hérard, as we felt that post-earthquake Haiti was too traumatic and disarrayed to accommodate a newcomer at that time. In retrospect this may have been a misguided decision and have led to a blinkered and inward-looking style of management. Also, perhaps due to the trauma – André Eugène and Céleur Jean-Hérard experienced the actual earthquake and I returned five days later working as a photographer for a syndicate of aid agencies – we felt reluctant to commit to a theme which engaged with the earthquake curatorially, attempting rather to continue with the project in a semi-oblivious state of acknowledgment. Within these extreme post-traumatic conditions, in contradiction to its aims, the 2nd Ghetto Biennale revealed its own contextual, internal and institutional vulnerabilities to the inequalities that run across race, class and gender. These inequalities were embodied within the neo-colonial relations that structure the Ghetto Biennale, the hierarchical nature of the local host community and the increasingly imbalanced gendering of the local site, all of which had not been considered enough so far. The unequal economic power dynamics between the visiting artists and the local artists were revealed in a more blatant and stark form during the 2nd Ghetto Biennale. The donor / victim mentality, already present in Haiti before the earthquake, had been reinforced in 2010 and 2011. There was a sense of entitlement from some of the local youth, comparing the Ghetto Biennale unfavourably with the glut of foreign aid agencies, many of which were now using culture as a tool for development. This came in parallel to heightened paternalism from some of the visiting artists. At times strong, seemingly critically projects, on paper at least, were transforming into charitable gestures, and artists were complacently self-judging the local benefits of their projects to the community. (Fig. 3) There was also increasing unease within Atis Rezistans as some local artists felt that the organization of the exhibition spaces was privileging André Eugène’s economic interests. As a local art dealer, artist and organizer, and co-curator and co-director of the Biennale, he was in a particular position of power, with most of the activity taking place in his yard.

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Fig. 3   Wall installation by Fungus Collective at 2nd Ghetto Biennale 2011

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Leah Gordon / To counter this centralization, we located the installation sites for the visiting artists’ work around the neighbourhood to create a visitors’ walking route. Liz Woodroffe designed the invitation as a map, which was later used to guide visitors around the neighbourhood, leading them to the sitespecific works by Haitian and visiting artists and to the previously unrecognized, unfrequented ateliers of the Haitian host artists. Moreover, the 2nd Ghetto Biennale was given the chance to curate a small show called “Nouvo Rezistans” (new resistance), held in the courtyard of the Institut Français in Port-au-Prince. André Eugène and Céleur Jean-Hérard, whose work has enjoyed international visibility, stepped back in order to allow this exhibition to showcase the work of younger, lesser known emerging artists from Atis Rezistans. The show, curated by myself and David Frohnapfel in the closest approximation to a white cube that downtown Port-auPrince can offer, gave the Haitian artists’ works space to breathe outside of the clamorous neighbourhood setting. This let each local artist display their own personal styles, themes and use of materials within the genre of recuperation sculpture, often difficult to discern against the noisy backdrop of the neighbourhood. This show increased the visibility of the emerging artists amongst the more traditional Haitian art audience. Finally, although there had been a noticeable number of phallic and muscular artworks before, the masculine domination of the site became increasingly palpable. Whilst there was flirting and sexual activity between Haitian and visiting artists, visiting artists and visiting artists, and Haitian and Haitian artists of all genders, there were a number of complaints about sexual harassment made by visiting female artists against a number of the younger male local artists in their late teens and early twenties. They were not accusations of physical sexual assault but of insensitive and over-zealous advances, sexual innuendo and flirting. The clashes over overt flirting and sexual advances between female visiting artists and the Haitian male youth made the space feel more male-dominated than it had before, the glut of carved penises made by the Haitian artists feeling less symbolic and literally more oppressive. While the 1st Ghetto Biennale 2009 was conceived to expose social, racial, class, gender and geographical immobility, the 2nd Ghetto Biennale 2011 appeared to have upheld these imbalances against best intentions. Many of these issues erupted at the post-exhibition conference, which again proved itself thoroughly ill prepared to negotiate these issues. It was held in an open-air conference space at the Oloffson Hotel, the designated hotel for the visiting artists and ten minutes from the Grand Rue neighbourhood. André Eugène and I had wanted to make connections with the wider Haitian arts community and invited Axelle Liautaud and Philippe Dodard, Haitian art historians and cultural producers, to speak. Language again led to the unravelling of this event as the speakers preferred to speak

You Can’t Always Curate Your Way Out! in French, which meant the interpreter had to attempt dual translations into Kreyòl and English. As John Cussans noted in his Zombie Diaspora blog about the conference, “I could only assume that the post-colonial legacy of French cultural hegemony still shapes the academic discourse of contemporary art in Haiti” (Cussans 2012). I was aware by the close of the conference that there needed to be a serious rethink, at a directorial level, about the structural basis of the Ghetto Biennale. The 3rd Ghetto Biennale 2013 The 3rd Ghetto Biennale 2013 was co-curated with André Eugène, David Frohnapfel and Céleur Jean-Hérard. The visiting artist applications were reviewed by myself and Frohnapfel. The period between the 2nd and 3rd Ghetto Biennale had been used to reflect on how to find more balance amongst the multifarious and often contradictory agendas underpinning the event. André Eugène and I travelled to New York, whilst I took part in a curatorial intensive held by the Independent Curators International, which provided an excellent platform for peer-to-peer discussion and reflection. Due to the social effects of the earthquake and reflections upon the ethnographic gaze and paternalism by some of the artists taking part in the previous event, Frohnapfel suggested the Ghetto Biennale should be reviewed critically within the growing academic discourse and controversies around “tourism and poverty alleviation, voyeurism, ethics and exploitation” (Dürr / Jaffe 2012: 113). This is why we more explicitly explored the potentially problematic nature of the visiting artists’ interest in working in Haiti. We attempted to work with a more sensitive awareness of the effect that the earthquake and the ensuing NGO culture has had on crosscultural relations in Haiti. (Fig. 4) We decided to respond to the challenges by giving the 3rd Ghetto Biennale a shared theme for the artists’ applications. The straplines for the first and second Biennales were not themes so much as provocations and questions, and the responses were more open-ended. Now we sought artistic projects from Haitian and visiting artists alike which investigated or responded to the theme “Decentring the market and other tales of progress”. The shared theme facilitated a move toward greater artistic parity, as this was the first time that we had asked the Haitian artists to send in proposals that responded to a common theme. In response to a number of incidents of predominately lens-based voyeurism during the 2nd Ghetto Biennale, I decided to have a lens ban for the visiting artists, hopefully to resist the exoticizing Western gaze and to alleviate the implicit technology-based power dynamics. Furthermore, we also ensured that there was better signage all around the neighbourhood to enable visiting artists and the audience to find the ateliers outside the

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Fig. 4   “Mache Zonbi (Zombie Market)” by Fanel Duce at the 3rd Ghetto Biennale 2013

You Can’t Always Curate Your Way Out! central yard, as this was still proving to be a source of conflict within the collective. Perhaps due to the lack of lens-based work there were more screenings, performances and workshops than before, so curation was more an act of scheduling and information design than actual placement of objects. Moreover, the problem of sexual harassment was addressed in meetings held by André Eugène and the host artists in the months leading up to the 3rd Ghetto Biennale as a mechanism to self-police the hustling and unwanted sexual advances, which appeared partially successful as there were fewer complaints. After discussions with John Cussans, a long-time Ghetto Biennale associate and former Occupy participant, I came to the decision that the 3rd Ghetto Biennale should have a congress rather than a conference and to hold it on site in the central neighbourhood lakou instead of an external conference centre. The strategy for the congress was to break up into small mixed groups of visiting and Haitian artists, each with an interpreter. Each group critically discussed the organization of the 3rd Ghetto Biennale, the works produced and some ideas for the future. This method of assembly and dialogue felt more democratic than the two former conferences. Language and ideas were connectors rather than barriers, and the use of the congress as a mechanism for critique or self-reflection and as an arena for future ideas fostered a greater sense of collective control amongst the host artists. The 4th Ghetto Biennale 2015 The 4th Ghetto Biennale took place in December 2015 and was curated at the stage of reviewing applications with curatorial assistance from British artist Marg Duston. On site it was managed and produced by a curatorial team which consisted of Atis Rezistans artists Claudel Casseus, André Eugène, and Evel Romain, German artist Cat Barich, French architect Maccha Kasparian, US artist and curator Lazaros Sorazal, UK / Barbadian graphic designer Liz Woodroffe and myself. All members of the team had experienced at least one previous Ghetto Biennale. André Eugène and I wanted the event to enable deeper engagement with Haitian history and culture, and after some discussion we had decided on the theme “Kreyòl, Vodou and the Lakou: forms of resistance”. We felt that the linguistic and territorial aspects could contextualize the more easily exoticized Vodou religion. Inspired by a text from historian Laurent Dubois (2013: 104), the theme considered the three tools that the formerly enslaved peasants used to embed their ‘counter-plantation’ position after the revolution: the Kreyòl language, the lakou system, as well as the belief system and ritual practices of Vodou, a triumvirate of linguistic, territorial and cultural resistance. We welcomed projects that not only incorporated language, space,

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Fig. 5   Installation shot of “Conversing in Art” by Nastasia Meyrat  (CH) and Katrina Meyrat (CH), at the 4th Ghetto Biennale 2015 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

You Can’t Always Curate Your Way Out! symbolism and performance or considered global territorial struggles, forms of linguistic refusal and friction, but also ritual and esoteric forms of obstruction and intransigence. The 4th Ghetto Biennale invited artists and curators to explore what potentials these historical radical tools, Kreyòl, Vodou and the lakou, have to offer to the contemporary world. (Fig. 5) There was an enthusiastic response to the theme from visiting and local artists alike. Due to the increased number of applications we chose over sixty visiting artists and accepted over thirty Haitian applications. This was the greatest number of participants to take part in a Ghetto Biennial, which stretched our production management to the limits but at the same time created a vibrant and varied body of work. This included, for instance, Radyo Shak, a collaboration with Brooklyn-based Clocktower radio, which set up a radio studio in the centre of the main compound. There was also play called “The Fall of the Lakou”, written and directed by Getho Jean Baptiste. Furthermore, “The Museum of Trance” explored the links between German 1990s trance music and Haitian Vodou drumming, creating a rave night and mini-club environment, while Rossi Jacques Casimir performed an evening of slam poetics on the theme of Vodou with image projections. Finally, Tom Bogaert worked with a local Rara band to create new work inspired by the apocryphal story that Sun Ra – the legendary African American jazz pioneer, mystic, poet, activist and philosopher – travelled to Haiti and visited Port-au-Prince during his ‘lost years’. The congress took the same form as two years previously, and there were many suggestions for how to move forward to the 5th Ghetto Biennale 2017. It was interesting to see that many of the younger Haitian artists are also moving away from object-based sculptural practice toward photography, video and sound recording skills and practices. Moreover, quite remarkably the two prizes, which had been awarded for the first time during this edition of the Biennale,9 went to female artists. The prize for local artists was awarded for the film “Vaudou Réalité” by a local group of Haitian women (Syndia Leonce, Amazan Esperanta, Jovin Dieunie, Milor Sherline &  Vital Geralda), and the award for visiting artists went to an environmental social practice project, “Sacred Soil: Cultivating the Urban Lakou” by US artist Lee Lee. 9  It was voted for by all participating artists

and narrowed down by juries made up of visiting and local artists.

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Outro The Ghetto Biennale’s utopian starting points may have proven unattainable in many aspects, but through the process we have been able to recognize pressure points, weaknesses and fissures and made attempts to negotiate, and strategize around them. It has been a slow process with many difficulties along the way, but it does appear that a utopian departure – and an ambition for a better future – does not necessarily preclude a critical position. The strapline “What happens when first world art rubs up against third world art? Does it bleed?”, is no longer our primary question. It is not relevant for us to assess whether the Ghetto Biennale bled or not, but more important to pinpoint where and why. And we need to assess how these ruptures, discharges and haemorrhages are going to lead us to a better understanding of how the Ghetto Biennale can also be a tool to explore class and its relationship to the periphery and the centre in the global art world. There is a sense that, after four editions, the Ghetto Biennale is at a crucial crossroads. Atis Rezistans and I find it necessary to assess what and where it is now, and which course the project should take for the future. Therefore, we have raised funding to create and publish a four-part catalogue which will be a valuable tool to document, critique and review the last four events and help define the future direction. Based on the feedback from the discussion groups at the last congress, many of the Haitian artists want the Ghetto Biennale to attract more international curators, collectors and A-list artists. At this point in time, it is still unclear whether the Ghetto Biennale is going to progress toward becoming a small-scale replica of the global biennale format with the attendant hierarchies, spectacles, codes, priorities and exclusivities or to posit a convincing, creative transgression from the norm. Perhaps these two potential futures do not have to be mutually exclusive as the tension between both options seems to have always been the driving dynamic of the event. Of course, it is ambivalent to embrace a Western Biennale format at the possible expense of the local installation and exhibition strategies. But we would like to use the catalogue as an arena not only to celebrate the often overlooked words created at the Ghetto Biennale but also to discuss the ethics and contradictions of the event itself. Writing these reflections, I find myself looking back to the past, the 1980s, when I used to be a member of a feminist folk punk band. The ethos was that you didn’t have to be skilled at music, or even able to actually play an instrument, to be in a band. This is the same ethos that Atis Rezistans and myself bring to the Ghetto Biennale. The punk rock and punk folk movements were reactions to the slightly bloated, at times pompous, selfsatisfied, overblown progressive rock and folk scenes of the late 70s. Whilst the first wave of punk was very quickly commercialized, it did spawn a

You Can’t Always Curate Your Way Out! second wave, generating a dynamic movement of independent and alternative music market models which took control of the production, distribution and venues. Post-punk was a rebellion against the strangling dawn of the neoliberal impasse and the Thatcherite “There Is No Alternative” spirit. Perhaps we all need to ask what could be the equivalent response to the highly professionalized biennale scene? Where would the revolution come from? Who would be its stakeholders? And how do you deal with its contradictions? You can’t always curate your way out! •

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References Anzaldúa, Gloria (1987): Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books. Beasley, Myron M. (2012): “Curatorial Studies on the Edge: The Ghetto Biennale, a Junkyard, and the Performance of Possibility.” In: Journal of Curatorial Studies 1 / 1, pp. 65–81. Bourriaud, Nicholas (2009): Altermodern: Tate Triennial. London: Tate Publishing. Célius, Carlo A. (2015): “Metamorphoses.” In: Kate Ramsey and Louis Herns Marcelin (eds.), Transformative Visions: Works by Haitian Artists from the Permanent Collection. Miami: The Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami, pp. 53–72. Cosentino, Don J. (2004a): Divine Revolution: The Art of Edouard DuvalCarrié. Los Angeles: Fowler Museum of Cultural History.

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Cosentino, Don J. (2004b): “Discovering Haitian Sculpture.” In: Elizabeth Cerejido (ed.), Lespri Endependan: Discovering Haitian Sculpture. Exhibition catalogue. Miami: The Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum /Florida International University. Cussans, John (2012): “Gwo Bezoin: The Micropolitics of the 2nd Ghetto Biennale”, Zombie Diaspora Blog, http:// codeless88.wordpress.com/gwo-bezointhe-micropolitics-of-the-2nd-ghettobiennale/, last accessed 5 August 2016. Dubois, Laurent (2013): Haiti: The Aftershocks of History. New York: Picador.

Dürr, Eveline and Jaffe, Rivke (2012): “Theorizing Slum Tourism: Performing, Negotiating and Transforming Inequality.” In: European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies / Revista Europea de Estudios Latinoamericanos y del Caribe 93, pp. 113–123. Eugène, André (2002): “E Pluribus Unum.” Documentary, directed by Maksaens Denis. Paris: Collectif 2004 Images. Eugène, André (2008): “Atis Rezistans: The Sculptors of Grand Rue.” Documentary, directed by Leah Gordon. In: DVD collection Iron in the Soul: The Haiti Documentary Films of Leah Gordon. London: Soul Jazz Publishing. Gilligan, Melanie (2006): “Slumsploitation: The Favela on Film and TV.” In: Josephine Berry Slater (ed.), Naked Cities – Struggle in the Global Slums. Mute Magazine 2/3, p. 56. Henley & Partners, Visa Restriction Index 2014, https://www.henleyglobal. com/international-visa-restrictions/, last accessed 5 August 2016. Herskovits, Melville J. (1937): Life in a Haitian Valley. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Kieffer, John (2008): Don’t Mention the War – Let’s Talk About Me. London: ArtQuest, p. 5, http://www.artquest.org. uk/uploads/recovered_files/Dont%20mention%20the%20war%20lets%20talk%20about%20me.pdf, last accessed 9 August 2011.

You Can’t Always Curate Your Way Out! Levy, Paul Elie (2007): Fête de la Sculpture. Port-au-Prince: Institut Français d‘Haïti/FOKAL. Prézeau Stephenson, Barbara (2012): “Haiti Now – The Art of Mutants.” In: David A. Bailey, Alissandra Cummins, Axel Lapp and Allison Thompson (eds.), Curating in the Caribbean. Berlin: The Green Box. Ramsey, Kate (2015): “Transformative Visions: An Introduction.” In: Kate Ramsey and Louis Herns Marcelin, Transformative Visions: Works by Haitian Artists from the Permanent Collection. Miami: The Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami; pp. 3–22. Rigaud, Milo (1914): Secrets of Voodoo. New York: Arco.

Copyrights Fig. 1  Dokto Zozo sculpture by André Eugène Photo: Leah Gordon Fig. 2   The entrance to the Ghetto Biennale in 2009 which was decorated as a project by John Cussans and Michel Lafleur. Photo: Chantal Regnault Fig. 3  Wall installation by Fungus Collective at 2nd Ghetto Biennale 2011 Photo: Melitza Jean Fig. 4  “Mache Zonbi (Zombie Market)” by Fanel Duce at the 3rd Ghetto Biennale 2013 Photo: Multiversal Services Fig. 5  Installation shot of “Conversing in Art” by Nastasia Meyrat (CH) & Katrina Meyrat (CH), at the 4th Ghetto Biennale 2015 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Photo: Lazaros

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Generation 00: The Artist as Citizen Tout va bien. All is well. This message was sent by Karim Rafi from his studio in Casablanca where he was stuck due to his request for a travel visa to Europe being refused. This refusal made it impossible for Rafi to travel to Working for Change, an exhibition at the Venice Biennale where he was an invited artist.1 In the form of a photographic image, the message was sent by email. It was a way of finding an artistic form to express a subject, one that touches society and one in which the artist participates as a citizen. The work describes a situation: the artist is in his studio; in his apartment, he works with full consciousness; conversations seem as carefree as always; the artist is visibly calm in taking this picture; in other words, all is well. But if we look closely at that day’s news, we see that we are in the full disorder of the “Arab revolutions”. Tunisia had just witnessed the fleeing of its president and the streets of Egypt, Libya and Yemen were overheating. Here, then, as in much of his work, Karim Rafi adopts a language that is ironic, poetic, and strongly inspired by both rap and Gnawa trance, forms of expression that are in tension with the present with a knowledge of the bases of improvisation and a consciousness of the thickness of history and of the social context in which the artist lives. This was also true of the work that precedes All Is Well, called The Show Is Over.2 In it, the artist clearly takes a radical formal position, creating a sound installation that interrogates and experiments with the idea of the end, of the circle as a symbol of the revolution of life. He creates a rupture with the forms of art and the artist’s status. The latter should not be isolated from the rest of society but must interact with it in the same space-time. This essay examines artists and their productions during the decade preceding the uprisings in Tunisia and the Arab World, along with other cultural and social movements. Its timeline, which focuses on the years between 1999 and 2011, suggests that a long decade of initiatives preceded the so-called “Arab Spring”. In what follows, I discuss and expand on my concept of “Generation 00” as a way to read art practices emerging at the turn of the century and millennium, and I employ the methodology of what I call the “Curatorial Delegation” (CD) as a tool for study and for activating concepts and dialogues. 1  Working for Change, 2011, curated by Abdellah Karroum and the Curatorial Delegation, collateral exhibition at La Biennale di Venezia. 2  The Show Is Over was part of the exhibition Flowers, Animals, Urbans, Machines, with Sofia

Aguiar, Younes Baba-Ali, Gabriella Ciancimino, Karim Rafi, curated by Abdellah Karroum, L’appartement 22, Rabat, 2010, http://www.appartement22.com/ spip.php?article295, last accessed 26 August 2016.

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Abdellah Karroum / What I would like to put forward here is a contextual reading of the origins of the two intertwined concepts, Generation 00 and the artist as citizen, and to elaborate on histories that, I suggest, contribute to clarifying the present moment. I do so not only in order to contextualize the Generation 00, but to interpret the work of these artists within the broader world that surrounds its production and exhibition. As I first defined it in a discussion of artist Mustapha Akrim, the term Generation 00 describes the group of artists who produced works in the first decade of the twenty-first century, right before the start of what has been variously called revolutions in the Arab World or the “Arab Spring”. This generation appears globally, but its members address issues that are different and they adopt equally diverse strategies of action. I focus on the decade prior to the “Arab Spring” in order to question the ways in which these historical movements have been portrayed and to raise the question of the extent to which artists – long involved in political and public protests − paved the way for these broader changes and challenges. The idea that the Arab revolutions “arrived in the street” is true in the sense that the street is traditionally the space of assembly and collective action, and every “spontaneous” movement appears first in streets and public squares, with Tahrir Square in Cairo being the most significant. But it is also important to consider more organized movements that amplified these street-based movements in coordinated ways, notably community unions and student movements that have long identified themselves with a wide-range of political and ideological tendencies. If we look earlier into history at the signs of change, we can see that more than ten years before the uprising in Tunisia, political and cultural movements were beginning to construct tribunes and / or to consolidate strategies of power and to express ideas for change. Contrary to what certain media propose, intellectuals are at the heart of the Arab revolutions and of revolutions in general. With this in mind, this essay recounts a story told through two intertwined threads: first, that of observation, based on my own reading and knowledge of artists’ projects; and second, that of experience, drawn from my more than twenty years of experience working on curatorial projects and deep involvement in exchanges and debates with artists and intellectuals. I use the concept of the “artist as citizen”, citing specific examples that reflect my work across the globe from my bases in Morocco and, more recently, Qatar. I developed this concept most explicitly in the 2012 Biennale Benin, Inventing the World: The Artist as Citizen, and it continues to drive much of my research and curatorial work. I suggest defining the term, artists and authors are citizens who look at their surrounding societies − at the world around them, at both the macro and the micro level − in order to interpret issues into or through art forms.3 The artist as citizen witnesses the society in which he or she lives or about which he or she is

Generation 00 informed. The artist expresses ideas and suggests an experience of art and a way of living, proposing other possibilities, using new forms of engagement with audiences, and creating spaces around the artwork. If the idea of change is not yet there, the artwork can create expectations, as is visible in almost every country, from Eastern Europe to Africa, or from Latin America to the larger Arab World. Artists create languages that are adapted to the speed and the speech of their contemporary moment and this artistic language goes beyond the media space into the space of conversation and daily life. If 1989 marks the physical fall of the Berlin Wall, it signifies for me the beginning of what I call the “post-contemporary” period, which corresponds to my first passage from one country to another (Morocco to Spain) and from one continent to another (Africa to Europe). The term “postcontemporary” is useful here because it emphasizes the idea of progress in a multitude of locations rather than presuming an expansion of the same definition of art. The “contemporary” is seen, from this position, as a period in art history bookended by the end of the second World War in 1945 and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. For me, everything that happened in this period is only information gleaned from ideas and images, since I arrived in this new geography in 1989. This “historical” link has become an abstract reference from which to construct the meaning of these comings and goings, or back-and-forth movements, between the crossing of spaces and artistic experiments. These passages translate themselves concretely in the happenings and exhibitions of L’appartement 22, the art space I founded in Rabat in 2002, as well as in the nomadic Le Bout Du Monde (“The End of the World”), a series of expeditions I have led since 2000. L’appartement 22 is physically identified as a location that functions as an exhibition space but it is also the basis for the Expeditions and the Hors’champs publishing house. I created the space in order to meet and experiment with artists and intellectuals of my generation. In other words, L’appartement 22 was a response to a physical need and it acts as a point in a real landscape as well as an archival process that documents the experience of exchange and production. The creation of this space is also a response to the lack of investment in art and culture for a younger generation in Morocco and North Africa in general. This deficit of investment is equally visible at the political level, which created a gap between the post-independence generation and the younger generation. L’appartement 22, then, is a place characterized by constant comings and goings, by routes shared with artists, often of my generation, whose work situates itself in spaces that go beyond exclusive small places yet still 3  See the exhibition project The World Around You, 2008, proposed for the Brussels Biennial, and produced in Fez and Rabat, http://the-world-

around-you.appartement22.com/spip.php? article2, last accessed 26 August 2016.

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Abdellah Karroum / resist uncontrollable globalization where all individuality could be lost. L’appartement 22 is connected to the idea that any place can be temporarily transformed into a forum or stage, as long as the intention of the project or encounter is clear.4 These back-and-forth interactions, or exchanges between geographies, individuals and materials, create a double visibility for the artists who appear and who transform the places where they have invested themselves into centres of their own choosing, thereby working to abolish the colonial model of the centre versus periphery through creating centre for dialogue and exchange rather than centres for marketing. The situation of artists in countries like Egypt and Algeria interests me on many levels, most notably because they are confronted by experimental political and social situations that are necessary for us to understand without necessarily judging them. Generation 00 artists are all artist-citizens: they work in the places where they actually live, such as Amal Kenawy (1974-2012) and Mustapha Akrim (1981), but they are also implicated in questions that affect the entire planet. An artist’s work is often elided with his or her biography. Being from a certain country and having a passport does or, alternatively, does not give one access to certain spaces. But the notion of a homeland remains relative and fragile. These artists insert global topics into local art production all the while creating new vocabularies and addressing localized themes and taboos, such as gender, the representation of power, religion, and the market. As a curator, researcher, and now museum director who has long worked with these Generation 00 artists, I do not see myself as particularly responsible for the artists from the countries of the Maghreb region just because I was born in Morocco. In retrospect, I accompany and accept my engagement with the reception of artwork and the artists with whom I work as much in Europe as in Africa. The appearance of an artist in a country’s cultural landscape is tied to his or her project and to a particular institutional or media conjuncture. As such, the work of an artist can appear with force in Shanghai, Berlin, Rabat, Tokyo, New York, and Dakar at the same time. The work that I do through projects at L’appartement 22 is based on a permanent investigation, as much in Morocco as in France, and on a larger scale, in Europe and in Africa. But as soon as we begin to think in terms of a country or a continent, misunderstandings about identity paradigms metastasize. I choose not to bypass them, but to introduce myself to their symbols and representations, hence the necessity of constantly interrogating contemporary creation, its challenges, and its networks. Experiencing art renders transparent the idea of utopic capital, which gives birth to an activism that transgresses borders and boundaries. 4  On this process of creating spaces, see Brook 1996.

Generation 00 Art is not tied to a single place. Instead, it operates according to permanent comings and goings, moving between convictions, beliefs, ideologies, ecologies, languages, and taboos in order to suggest a convivial or simply more liveable world. It is now a question of interrogating which methods are put in place to inscribe these ideas and projects in the societies that artists hope to transform. Do artists have access to the tools of action which allow them to participate in change? As L’appartement 22 has grown, it has evolved over time and become increasingly collaborative. Its programming is now led by the Curatorial Delegation (CD), which is a methodology that I developed for curatorial research and action linked to production and to the creation of conditions for encounters and for the activation of artworks. More specifically, as we defined in the initial manifesto: The concept of a Curatorial Delegation evokes the speed and distractedness with which the field of art engages with politics today, often treating social conditions as subjects of or for a spectacle, extracting content, as one extracts essence from f lowers, granting cultural practices the stamp of authenticity, and guaranteeing global recognition. The Curatorial Delegation aims to translate and propose more intuitive and methodical forms of engagement with available or invented spaces, suggesting ways to establish meaningful dialogue, research, production, and communication (exploration, editing, and publishing). The Curatorial Delegation operates by deploying different tools for collecting and sharing content, functioning outside of the conventional formats for conducting research and presenting forms of cultural expression.5 The structure of the Curatorial Delegation is similar to a Diplomatic Corps, and the initials CD play on this idea: it suggests the potential of the curator as a negotiator, and also the collective and collaborative nature of curatorial work in different contexts. Collaboration and complicity are important notions in the sense that, in a Delegation, the leader must adapt with every new project and new negotiation and context. This methodology offers a platform where the general idea of curating can be challenged at every possible location on the globe, but it adopts tools that can be a response to the issue of how to situate global art: it offers mobility and it is very localized around each example of intervention or study. 5  This is the CD initial definition, published for the first time during the MDE11 (Encuentros de Medellin 2011), Medellin, Colombia The whole manifesto can

be accessed here: http://appartement22.com spip. php?article301, last accessed 26 August 2016.

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Abdellah Karroum / The example of the Curatorial Delegation’s participation in MDE11 is illustrative. For MDE11, curated with a group by Rose Roca, L’appartement 22 was invited as an art space from Morocco for a residency exchange with Casa Imago, an art space in Colombia. I then invited curator Juan Gaitán to take part in the residency because we had already started discussing the idea of, and possible methodologies for, the Curatorial Delegation. It was important for us not to go to Colombia with the idea of producing a preconceived program there. Instead, the idea was to set up a conversationbased programme linking contexts in Morocco and Colombia, which we called “Radio For Example”. We started with a few ideas using open-ended terms that would help us listen to the people we interviewed: geography (mountains, countries), media (radio, exhibition), and curatorial methodologies (collaboration, cooperation). Later, in 2014, curator Natalia Valencia, who is also from Colombia, came to Morocco for an expedition and exhibition project with artists Julia Rometti & Víctor Costales. In her words, the project was one of “Julia Rometti & Víctor Costales pursu[ing] their ongoing research on Anarquismo Mágico, a little known transnational political movement, and one of its leading figures – Azul Jacinto Marino. Rometti & Costales interrogated the historical movement’s relevance within North Africa’s current botanical, mineral, and political context. These enquiries were sparked by subaquatic communications intercepted by the artists in the coast of Ecuador.” This is one example of how the Curatorial Delegation expands and responds to situations and to the need to initiate dialogues and create space for encounters between artists, artworks, and audiences. And it too is connected to the concept of Generation 00, which is fundamentally linked to the idea of change. Change is only possible through understanding contexts and with research, encounters, and possible action. This idea of change is important for positioning the role of the artist and the curator. It clarifies the relationship local / global and intervention / production. Let’s return once again to the Generation 00 in order to explain in greater detail how I conceptualize it. From a curatorial view, Generation 00 is connected to perception. From an artistic perspective, it is connected to self-identification and belonging within a shared space and time. In both instances, by linking this concept to a radical number − 00 − this notion of generation communicates the idea of rupture with that which came before, whether it is at the level of meaning or instead, the voiding of meaning. By rupture, I mean the knowledge of the past from which the rupture takes place. In the case of many countries, it refers to colonial and postcolonial systems. The Dakar Biennale Dak’art is one project that looks at the continent of Africa and its production. As such, it is a very particular example of an exhibition that, in its inclusion of many Generation 00 artists, seeks to be

Generation 00 both global and highly specific to the African continent. It began in 1992 and it positioned itself as a platform for contemporary art and expression across the entire continent as well as in the diaspora. It is interesting to see how a local institution is built, especially when it looks at individuals, such as artists and writers, rather than at national projects and systems. The persistent curatorial challenge for the biennial’s curators is to define the “African element”, and to speculate about the diaspora and other connections. One interesting approach is to define the platform as the “African Biennale of Art” and not as the “Biennale of African Art”. I co-curated the 2006 edition of Dak’art, and this issue was central. The exhibition title was Afrique: Entendus, sous-entendus et malentendus, or Africa: Understandings, Double Entendres, and Misunderstandings. Each of the biennial’s six curators was in charge of a different part of Africa, and I was responsible for introducing artists from North African countries (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Egypt), and of course the final selection was a collaborative one. Looking back, we might see this project as a kind of CD before CD. In Morocco, meanwhile, the generation of artists that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s invented original and local languages, emphasizing their desire to detach from European influence. But at the same time, they remained connected to European artists and intellectuals who were also positioning themselves in relationship to political power. We saw the same cultural movements in the so-called post-war years in Europe. This, in part, is the spirit that led to independence. However, in the 2000s, which are my primary concern, the idea of change and the artist’s active participation as part of production, in order to invent materials, invest subjects, and create the conditions for an artwork’s diffusion, prompted debates that led to a confrontation with a different reality. This new generation operates a rupture with the 1960s to 1980s generation that “occupied” the art scene from the post-independence era to the media era, during the “years of lead” and the limited activation or engagement of artworks with the political and social context. This confrontation with social reality − and even with the condition of the artist as citizen, such as in the work of visual artists Mustapha Akrim, Yto Barrada, Younès Rahmoun as well as in that of their peers in cinema and music − has led to increasing awareness of the situation of creators in other domains, for example, the realization that economic and social domains function similarly. From the perspective of the Generation 00, it is not a question of isolated groups defined either as the masses or the tyrants, to refer to the recent body of photographs by Shirin Neshat, but something like a rhizome of exchanges and ideas that circulate in diverse political, social, cultural, and economic spaces, touching all levels of society but economic elites in particular. History will then be recounted as follows: Generation 00 is comprised of a group of artists and intellectuals, living on every continent,

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Abdellah Karroum / operating at the same time, in diverse social and political contexts, with the idea of bearing witness to and acting for change and social justice. These artists, like other citizens, receive the same global information and observe similar issues and injustices in their immediate environments. By way of conclusion, I would like to suggest looking at “For Example ‘Le Bout Du Monde Expeditions’ ” as a way of situating global art, of reflecting on what methods and tools might best serve us. As I have developed this project over the last fifteen years, the expedition can take place in any part of the world, and at the same time activities and art are localized in a specific time and place. We use curatorial and visual language as tools for discussion and production, similar to different languages, such that the meaning transforms the words and the exchange produces acts for progress or change. Artworks remain in the centre and the artist, as the actor / explorer in the expedition, builds temporary shelters or proposes objects of encounter that can resist an expanded time / space, moving from research to action. The first expedition, which took place in 2000, went to the Rif Mountains of Morocco and it was an example of an experience and experiment. The only remains are a photograph of a familiar local scene that subsequently became a postcard, or what artist Jean-Paul Thibeau called the “meta-activité du champs de l’arabe”, or the “meta activity of the Arab’s field”. It shows a group of chickens in action. This picture postcard is the only image communicated to larger audiences of the expedition, and reflects how its participants, including local farmers, the artists, and myself as curator, experienced the process over several days of discussion, walking around the village and surrounding hills, and sharing daily life. These exchanges brought out how, for example, some of the objects and activities highlighted by the guests had a different place or priority for the locals. Were we to look at this project and try to situate it as “Global Art”, it would not make sense as a discrete object. Yet it takes on greater sense if we approach it as a methodology, one that offers multiple possibilities for reading and interpretation. If we conceive of location as a temporary studio, we can in turn focus on artistic vocabulary and the notion of “metaactivity”. And if we look at the larger environment of the location and its population, then our reading and interpretation will be affected by natural history, colonial history, and migratory movements. In other words, our understanding will necessarily be conditioned by the many environmental, social, historical, and political challenges that we must take into account when developing and experimenting with different methodologies of situating art around the globe. •

Generation 00 References Peter Brook (1996 [1968]): The Empty Space: A Book About the Theatre: Deadly, Holy, Rough, Immediate. New York: Simon and Schuster.

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How Far How Near

Jelle Bouwhuis

How Far How Near : A Global Assemblage in the Modern Art Museum This essay is the follow-up to a lecture-in-progress given on various occasions as a means to reflect on an exhibition I curated at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam: How Far How Near – The World in the Stedelijk (19 September 2014  – 1 February 2015). This exhibition was compiled from the museum’s own collections and in addition included three commissions to contemporary artists (Bouwhuis 2014). How Far How Near was a reflection on the museum’s institutional history, in particular on the mostly absent position of art outside the realm of democratic capitalism, or roughly speaking outside the NATO allied regions. The exhibition was a proposal for a reconsideration of that history. The research, preparation and duration of the show coincided and became mentally interconnected with a fierce debate that was then raging in the Netherlands: the discussion around the “Black Pete”-tradition, which attracted international attention. Here, I will first have to briefly introduce the Stedelijk Museum’s history and my position in this institution. I will then go into the pre-history of How Far How Near, the Black Pete debate and the exhibition proper. After that I will arrive at some concluding remarks that open up space for more discussion. A Short History of the Stedelijk Museum As the principal museum of modern art in the Netherlands, the Stedelijk is probably less known as the leading Dutch museum of modern design or for its extensive collection of photography. Besides, since 1993 it has been running a small project space outside the museum, Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam (SMBA), in an area in the centre of Amsterdam where the city’s most important contemporary art galleries are located. This project space has managed to develop its own programme, which is quite, if not fully, autonomous from its parent museum. In 2006 I was entrusted with the responsibility for this project space. Without some of the experiments This essay has been made possible in part with financial support from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).

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Jelle Bouwhuis / that had already taken place here – with international programming around the ‘postcolonial unconscious’ of contemporary art – How Far How Near would not have been born (see Bouwhuis / Winking 2014 for an overview of and reflection on that previous programme in SMBA). The Stedelijk Museum itself was not always solely dedicated to modern art and design. It was the Second World War that laid the basis for its focus on modernism, basically in reaction to the waves of fascism and academism that swept Europe in the decade of repression before and during the war. After the war, under the famous director Willem Sandberg, himself a graphic designer and an active participant in the resistance against German occupation, the Museum was to show, collect and canonize the modern art for which it is now famous (Roodenburg-Schad 2004). Among this are a large collection of works from the Russian avant-garde centring on Kazimir Malevich; the Dutch avant-garde around De Stijl, including architect and furniture designer Gerrit Rietveld; as well as post-war CoBrA, especially Karel Appel. After the Sandberg era, a large body of post-war art from the United States entered the Stedelijk. The impact of the Second World War on the decisive formation of the Stedelijk, originally inspired by both Bauhaus and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, cannot be underestimated. Indeed, the Second World War is considered the most traumatic event in modern Dutch history, even today. It has traditionally overshadowed and simply pushed aside another quite traumatic event: Dutch colonialism (across the versatile and immense region that today encompasses Indonesia, Surinam and half of South Africa, and more). It lasted longer, approximately from the 17th century until 1975 to be precise, and is presumably lodged in the Dutch subconscious on a much more profound level than the wars in Europe. Although, during the last two decades or so, much progress has been made in researching and understanding Dutch colonialism, especially in the academic field, and even though national government has founded a national centre for the history of slavery (before decimating it due to austerity measures), colonial history rarely touched the nationwide consciousness, at least not until 2013.1 One might contend that our cultural bias is still quite affirmative of a worldview described by Okwui Enwezor as the “postcolonial constellation”. The colonial era may be over, but not that colonially imbued understanding that posits the world in rigid opposites: the developed versus the undeveloped world, for example, or the North versus the South, White versus Black (see Enwezor 2003). The term ‘Global South’ has now come into vogue as a refutation of the negatively connoted, Western-centric term ‘Third World’. Nevertheless, in the West European cultural domain, Enwezor’s split is upheld by the sheer fact that much or almost all of the art and artefacts of the 1   Suppression of the colonial past was the rule in historiography and public debate, see Oostindie 2009.

How Far How Near Global South have long since been delegated to the realm of ethnographic museums, like the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam – the former Colonial Museum (which, after a merger with two other ethnographic museums in 2014, was renamed National Museum of World Cultures). Project 1975 Given my own education as an art historian around 1990 and my expertise derived from working in a museum such as the Stedelijk and a contemporary art space like Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam, I can fairly say that my background bears all the hallmarks of the postcolonial constellation. That is, the art we find in ethnographic museums was simply left out of my art history curriculum and not deemed in any way interesting for the Stedelijk. And subsequently I did not care about it at all. But a conflation of events heralded some decisive changes. In 2008 the Stedelijk hosted Okwui Enwezor’s travelling exhibition Snap Judgments, which privileges African photography by African photographers over mere photography of Africa, and which prompted the museum’s photography department to acquire work by Africa-based photographers for the first time in its history. In the same year, that stunning work by Dutch artist Renzo Martens, Episode III − Enjoy Poverty, premiered in SMBA. This film is situated in Congo DRC. It draws attention to the interdependences between Africa, photography and the Western art audience, and signals the entanglement of those interdependences with the systematic failures of global capitalism.2 Both events confronted SMBA with its deeply felt ignorance about notions such as ‘African Art’, or even worse, Africa in general. This shortcoming triggered a curatorial endeavour, packed into the project format with which cultural institutions nowadays have to approach fundraising. And so Project 1975 was born. The year 1975 in the title does not refer to the conceptual turn in art identified by Dutch art theoretician Camiel van Winkel (2012: 11–74), nor to the commonly held view that this was the breakthrough of postmodernism. Instead, the point of reference here is the end of colonial administration in the Netherlands with the independence of Surinam and the beginning of the Dutch postcolonial era. Project 1975 was a two-year programme of exhibitions, events and publications, with many participants, not to mention institutional collaborations with the contemporary art institutions Nubuke Foundation in Accra, Ghana, and RAW Material Companyin Dakar, Senegal (Bouwhuis / Winking 2014). Eventually, some works specifically commissioned for the project, notably by artists from African origins, were acquired by the Stedelijk Museum at the instigation of its director at the time, Ann Goldstein. This acquisition faced the   

2   The film gave rise to many reflections, a lot of which can be found online. See also Smba Newsletter no. 107, published online in

pdf format at http://www.smba.nl/en/exhibitions/ episode-iii/, last accessed 31 August 2016.

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Jelle Bouwhuis / museum with another question: how to weave these works into a collection display? It does not have an ethnographically defined department of ‘African Art’ – for that matter, the museum distinguishes between art, design and photography – and there is no canonical concept that includes the notion of African Art either, comparable to, for instance, the traditional Stedelijk core specialities such as Art of the United States, the Russian Avant-Garde, De Stijl, CoBrA, et cetera. The Stedelijk is not a museum that simply presents the public with chronologically ordered canonical displays, and yet the possibility of art from the Global South is usually missing entirely from the picture, barring one or two individual exceptions to prove the rule. Global Collaborations, a three-year programme designed, among other things, to explore what a contemporary global narrative for the Stedelijk might be, offered the opportunity to show some of the recent acquisitions of Project 1975 in a temporary display spatially and conceptually separate from the mainstream Western narrative.3 This meant that its outlier position had to be explained, and the only way to do that was to question why it has always been taken for granted that a modern art museum such as the Stedelijk is so strongly indebted to art stemming from a fairly limited region of this huge globe.

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Another Short History of the Stedelijk Quick research into the history and collection of the museum proves that the watershed between the modern art museum and ethnographic museums, such as the Tropenmuseum, was relatively recent. Especially in the period of the break-up between the Netherlands and the East Indies (roughly between 1945, the start of the Dutch-Indonesian wars, and 1962, which saw the last Dutch colony in the archipelago, at Papua, transferred to Indonesia), this distance was easy to bridge. For some twenty years, until 1952, the museum building was host to the Asian Art Committee and permanently displayed its collection of Chinese, Indonesian and Indian artefacts, until the latter moved to the nearby Rijksmuseum, where it is now housed in the new, purpose-built Asian Art Pavilion. The vacated gallery in the Stedelijk would soon after, in 1956, become the locus for the museum restaurant – and to mark the occasion it was not only decorated with a mural by Dutch CoBrA artist Karel Appel but also with a 16-metre-long wuramon (a decoratively sculpted ceremonial canoe) of the Asmat in Papua, on loan from the Tropenmuseum (Fig. 1). It would later be substituted by a smaller version until its final removal in 1988. An important exhibition in this framework was Modern Art − New and Old in 1955. It 3 As a dedicated programme, it can be characterized as a smaller companion to ‘global’ projects such as UBS MAP (Guggenheim Foundation) and C-map (Museum of Modern Art), all accessible online.

Inserting a globally minded artistic policy within the modern art museum obviously still relies on projectbased programmes rather than daily practice.

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Fig. 1   Stedelijk Museum restaurant around 1960, showing the wuramon to the left and in the background the mural by Karel Appel from 1956

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Jelle Bouwhuis / pitted art works from various regions and ages together, following an earlier example at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London (RoodenburgSchad 2004: 381). Its didactic scheme was that it highlighted modernist features in art, such as abstraction and expressionism, as commonly shared with art of different ages and places. Obviously, the starting point were modernist European artists such as Klee, Lipchitz, Picasso, and so forth. Their work was showcased among other examples of visual culture, sometimes photography, like Duchamp Villon’s sculpture and a photo of train wheels, or a painted copy of Mondrian’s Victory Boogie Woogie together with an aerial view of high-rises in Manhattan. But most of the loans in the show were provided by the ethnography museum in Leiden. These were mainly masks and attire from West Africa, and a large section of items that originated in the Papua region (Fig. 2). As a peculiar exhibition in the history of the museum, Modern Art − New and Old became a pretext for How Far How Near, where I also wanted to bring together works from versatile regions. The museum’s acquisitions of African artists were presented in the main gallery of the exhibition, alongside some works from the collection (Klee, Lipchitz) that were already featured in the 1955 exhibition (Fig. 3). Even more, I was charmed by the didactic scheme of this predecessor. The museum’s extensive holdings consist for a large part of documentary photography and graphic design, the scope, quality and quantity of which can hardly be grasped by the visitor, since the display is usually marginal. For How Far How Near, specific parts of these collections became instrumental in revealing how the Global South is actually present in the museum in an illustrative compendium to a (post-) colonial constellation. The photographic collection consists of quite a number of items stemming from an ethnographic context, especially in the first half of the 20th century, addressing a colonial past in Africa and to a lesser extent Indonesia, but also later, from the age of decolonization in the 1940s (Indonesia), 1950s and 1960s (Africa), and 1970s (Surinam). A significant number of photos address poverty and famine, especially in Africa but also in India. And finally, a large number of works picture conflicts and war, for example the famous series made in Chile by Koen Wessing in response of the military coup of 11 September 1973. Most of these works are by Dutch and other European photographers. In general, the collection at the Stedelijk showcases the world outside the West as a world of conflict, misery, poverty and war. It confirms the postcolonial constellation and breeds an image that is not very positive about the chances of interesting art stemming from these regions and finding a place in the Stedelijk collection. To the contrary, it confirms Renzo Martens’s position that the main exports from the Global South are poverty, war and misery – through photographs in Western media (and one can add here: museum collections as well). This view is confirmed by some of the holdings in the graphic art department.

How Far How Near

Fig. 2   Overview of exhibition Modern Art – New and Old, 1955, with two versions of Jacques Lipchitz, Figure, 1926–30, among a Bakota mask (West African)

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Fig. 3   Overview of exhibition How Far How Near. The World in the Stedelijk (19 September 2014 –1 February 2015). From left to right: Dorothy Amenuke, How Far How Near, 2012 / Abdoulaye Konaté, Fête Africaine (des hommes et des marionettes), 2012 / Jacques Lipchitz, Study for Figure, 1926 / Vincent Vulsma, WE 455 (IX), 2011  

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Fig. 4 & 5   Overviews of exhibition How Far How Near. The World in the Stedelijk (2015), showing the two walls with posters and photos from the Stedelijk Museum collection

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Jelle Bouwhuis / You will find advertisement posters for a tourist trip to South Africa, for instance, but many more anti-Apartheid posters, as well as posters that show solidarity with suppressed nations and peoples throughout the world. Again, what you get is an image of struggle and of solidarity, but this solidarity did not prompt any direct interest in the possibilities of art from these regions. It enabled the disharmony of the rest of our world to be shown close to our homes, while at the same time the real world was kept at a safe distance – almost as if to avoid contamination. A selection of such photographs and posters became the backbone of How Far How Near (Fig. 4 & 5). It thus boasted another didactic scheme around a central question: How could the museum, which became a truly modern and contemporary art museum as soon as it privileged freedom of artistic expression from all parts of the world over restrained academism, become so exclusive in a geographical sense? The rhetoric of this question was ventilated through the portrait of the world ‘outside’ that radiated from the poster and photo walls. It did so in the same mode of exaggeration as Modern Art − New and Old, or rather over-identification: my message was aimed at museum practice in general and not so much at the collection departments. (Besides the Project 1975 acquisitions, the museum was already collecting, for example, posters from revolutionary Cuba and from the Solidarność era in 1980s Poland, and from around the time of the Snap Judgments exhibition onwards, the photography department sometimes acquired works by African photographers, such as David Goldblatt or the Malian photographer Malick Sidibé, both of whom were included in the main galleries of How Far How Near.)

Museological Narratives

Black Pete While I was starting the research for what was to become How Far How Near, the Netherlands was confronted in quite another way with a postcolonial constellation of a purely national yet stunning magnificence. In 2013, the lingering sensitivities of colonialism in Dutch society, hitherto suppressed and discarded, were addressed on a massive and discursive scale never seen before. In that year, the typical annual Saint Nicholas festivities were challenged. This needs some background explanation. The Saint Nicholas celebration (commonly known in the Netherlands as “Sinterklaas”) centres on the character of a very old, white-bearded bishop dressed in a red chasuble. He is assumed to come from Spain, and every midNovember he travels to the Netherlands by steamboat, after which he visits many towns riding his white horse, with the sole purpose of celebrating his birthday on December 5, which he does by overloading kids with presents and toys. It is a tradition that, given its pedigree of more than 150 years, usually passes by without much ado, at least not for adults. In 2013 it

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suddenly became subjected to one of the fiercest debates in contemporary Dutch history. The reason was not so much the bishop himself, with his conspicuous affection for little children. It was the bishop’s jolly servants. The servant is better known as Black Pete (Zwarte Piet), and he happens to appear in blackface. Black Pete is dressed in ornate costumes, wears a curly wig, uses red lipstick and sports large golden earrings – which by many are regarded as a racial stereotype from another age. The colonial age, to be more precise (Fig. 6). The matter is not new and people have protested against the appearance of Black Pete before, but this time it touched a sensitive nerve which the Netherlands did not know it had.4 This time the turmoil was unleashed by the artist, performer and poet Quinsy Gario. His roots in the Dutch Caribbean (St Maarten Island), influence of postcolonial theory, experience of racism in the Netherlands and a touch of inspiration from Édouard Glissant lie at the heart of his work. In the autumn of 2013 he decided to file a formal objection to the Sinterklaas parade in his home town of Amsterdam because of the allegedly racist character of the festival. And since Gario assembled the statutory number of protestors, the city was formally obliged to research the level of racism in the celebration, and thus it became an official investigation. From there, the matter attracted international attention, and in the Netherlands it became a trending topic that has not yet gone away – in newspapers, television reports and of course in the social media.5 The arguments raised against the Black Pete character are obvious. The black community in the Netherlands mostly consists of people of Surinamese and Caribbean descent. Formally, these are the heirs of the slaves brought there through Dutch trade from the late 16th until mid19th century (the Dutch were among the last to abolish slavery). The adversaries of Black Pete can be found among them and the leftish solidary mob, in general those who are pro-Europe. The admirers of the traditional Black Pete on the other hand are on the right, especially those who are fearful of globalization and immigration. For the most part however, it was hard to trace exact divisions in political terms, since the Dutch government declared that it was not its place to deal with this sensitive matter and deemed itself unqualified to pass judgement on ‘cultural traditions’. The ultra-nationalist Freedom Party (PVV) in the Netherlands, led by the world-famous Geert Wilders, claims to be the true protector of the traditional Black Pete figure. 4  For international coverage of the matter see, for instance, McGrane 2013. 5 The Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven had hosted an earlier discursive work around Black Pete in 2008, and had to deal with (local) protests and

aggressive responses in social media, see Lütticken 2014. However, unlike Gario in 2013, whose protest triggered a nationwide discursive turn and in the end was extremely successful, the Van Abbe Museum had to give in on its planned activities.

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Fig. 6   Sinterklaas and Zwarte Piet, 2006

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Fig. 7 & 8   Overview of exhibition How Far How Near. The World in the Stedelijk (2015), showing Michael Tedja, If I Was Locked in a Prison…, 1999, and Godfried Donkor, Organized Creation of Dissatisfaction I (Short Boy Wallpaper), 2014

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Jelle Bouwhuis / In short, in a long year preceding the Sinterklaas parade of November 2014 there was a cultural war going on that divided the Dutch community, and it continued into 2015 when, for instance, primary schools in the major cities of the Netherlands collectively and publicly announced a ban on Black Pete appearing in blackface altogether. Major newspapers have started to discuss issues such as White Privilege in the Netherlands, and the matter even gave birth to a ‘diversity’ political party, DENK, that won three seats in parliament following the 2017 national elections.

Museological Narratives

Black Pete in “How Far How Near” At the height of the Black Pete debate, the issue came to permeate How Far How Near. British/Ghanaian artist Godfried Donkor – whose film installation The Currency of Ntoma (Fabric), made for Project 1975, was among the acquisitions on display – was commissioned to do a site-specific work for the exhibition. Partly triggered by the international coverage of the Black Pete controversy, his resulting work – a wallpaper – boldly featured a 17th-century engraving of a Moorish character, an exact model for the traditional Black Pete, while at the same time suggesting a relation between Dutch colonialism, Apartheid and poverty among black people (Fig. 7 & 8). Another commission was allotted to Quinsy Gario, the instigator of the national Black Pete debate.6 At the opening night of How Far How Near, Gario performed his piece A Village Called Gario. By this time he had already become a national figure, much praised but even more despised, if not plain hated by many. His performance, however, eschewed the Black Pete controversy. It was a partly autobiographical, but mostly fictitious tale of a world journey, addressing colonial times, global migration, intercultural love stories and intercontinental family ties – the only hint of the Black Pete discussion comes at the end of this tale, as the journey abruptly ends in Spain, believed to be the home country of Sinterklaas (Bouwhuis / Winking 2014: 2). The performance was attended by a Member of Parliament from the PVV (Freedom Party), who the following day asked an official question in the national parliament about the amount of subsidy Gario had received for a work that, in his view, merited no state support whatsoever. The parliamentary query was clearly only meant for public consumption, however, since the Stedelijk is a municipal museum, and national government has no responsibility in this matter. The question of black representation in the realm of modern art was further elaborated by other artists in the show. A few months before the opening, the museum was presented with a gift of a work by Iris Kensmil, 6 Gario was already a participant in Project 1975, for which he contributed an essay with a postcolonial take on Blue Movie, the first successful Dutch

feature film, that became especially popular because of its soft porn overtones.

How Far How Near

Fig. 9   Iris Kensmil, The Problem of Defense, 2007

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Jelle Bouwhuis / a Dutch artist born in Surinam, that I promptly integrated in the show. The Problem of Defense consists of five portraits of black activists in the United States in the 1960s. Their presence in the Stedelijk followed swiftly after the Ferguson riots, which raised issues of ethnic (mis-)representation in U.S. public bodies such as the state police (Fig. 9). Another work that more or less summed up the whole argument of How Far How Near was already in the museum collection. It is a monumental painting on paper, If I was in a Prison … by Michael Tedja from 1999 (Fig. 7). The drawing comes mounted on a free-standing wooden scaffolding structure because, as the artist himself contends in the wall caption, “it should not share space with the colonial museum wall”. The Black Pete debate and the response from parliament to Gario’s performance laid bare the political edges of dealing with globalization within a museum of modern art. But originally, How Far How Near was intended to be a form of internal questioning, an institutional critique. Another example of that was offered in a room that joined Dutch photographer Koen Wessing with the Chilean-born, New York based artist Alfredo Jaar. The starting point was Wessing’s famous series of photos of Santiago in 1973 showing the drama and tension in the streets of the Chilean capital right after the coup by Mr Pinochet (Fig. 10). These photos hung opposite a similar photo series by Jaar, Faces of 1982.7 A shift thus appeared from having a Dutch voice speak of a drama elsewhere to a Chilean voice speaking of the same drama from within (Fig. 11). At Jaar’s instigation, this shift was emphasized by another work: Nothing of very great consequence (2008), a lightbox showcasing the transcription of a telephone conversation between President Nixon and his minister of foreign affairs Henry Kissinger, which revealed the American stakes in the coup in Chile (Fig. 12). The geopolitical power relations in the world as postulated in this assembly of works echoes through the collection of the Stedelijk Museum, with its interest in art from the United States that developed from the mid-1960s onwards. Jaar’s work visualized the deeper impact of the rather abstract propagation of (American) power on the realm of culture. The canonization of U.S. art within the Stedelijk can be regarded as the result of the soft power which privileged democratic, capitalist societies over others – of course communism, but also the totalitarian regimes of Africa and South America, for instance.8 7 In consultation with Jaar I proposed this body of works as the only loan in the exhibition; they were subsequently acquired by the museum, prior to the opening of How Far How Near.

8 Of course this argument has been postulated before, see Guilbaut 1985 and Stoner 1999, the latter especially with regard to the Chilean poet and communist Pablo Neruda, whose burial a few weeks after the coup by Pinochet figures prominently in Jaar’s Faces.

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Fig. 10   Overview of exhibition How Far How Near. The World in the Stedelijk (2015), showing Koen Wessing, selection from the series Chile, September 1973, 1973

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Fig. 11   Overview of exhibition How Far How Near. The World in the Stedelijk (19 September 2014 – 1 February 2015), showing Alfredo Jaar, Faces, 1982/2014 and Alfredo Jaar, Faces, 1982/2014 (detail)

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Fig. 12  Alfredo Jaar, Nothing of Very Great   Consequence, 2008/2014

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Questioning the Museum The discursive space that I was looking for with How Far How Near boomeranged back inside the museum organization. Whereas the Stedelijk’s graphic design department was quite satisfied because the exhibition enabled it to showcase an extensive selection from its large poster collection (the fate of which usually is, sadly enough, to stay in storage eternally), the photo department, equally rich in holdings and almost as poorly represented in museum displays, was less enthusiastic about framing certain photographs in terms of the postcolonial constellation. My chances to showcase the abundance of ethnographically minded photography alongside the scores of examples of African ‘poverty porn’ in the collection were already effectively brushed aside by the stipulation that only vintage photographs were allowed. This curtailed the selection I had envisaged, as original works like this require expensive framing, much more wall space and restricted light conditions. There followed a discussion about highlighting single works of photographers by separating them from the more encompassing reportage and, indeed, the whole oeuvre (prompted by the imposed limitations of choice). Separating out a work entitled negro houses by Walker Evans, which was the only work the museum held from a much larger reportage by Evans on rural poverty in the United States in 1935, was a non-issue, while another ‘orphan’ in the collection, a famous photograph by Robert Lebeck showing the theft of the Belgian king’s sword in Leopoldville on the day of Congo’s independence in 1960, did not raise any objection.9 The impressive image of Third World famine radiating from the collection was channelled into just one series, a strong choice though, of a sequence of photo’s by the Dutch photographer Willem Diepraam illustrating how he decisively singles out a child’s face from a larger group of impoverished Fulani in Senegal in 1979. Another set of works concerned a part of a reportage on poverty in New York’s Harlem in the 1960s by Gordon Parks, a cofounder of the Magnum agency and, as an African American, instrumental in the development of black photojournalism. Elsewhere in the exhibition, the photography department demonstrated how far it had advanced in collecting specimens of African artists by hanging the complete series of The Transported of KwaNdebele by David Goldblatt from 1989 (acquired in 2006), portraying the humiliating treatment of black workers in Apartheid South Africa. Obviously, the photography department was entitled to frame itself positively, whereas the whole enterprise of the exhibition revolved around creating awareness of the troubling ‘other side’ to the ruthless positivism of the modern art museum, which has led to an exclusive and biased modus operandi. 9 See Kooiman 2014 on this discussion of selective treatment of photographic ‘icons’ in the Stedelijk.

10 This publication is the outcome of a research project within Tate Museums.

How Far How Near Although relatively marginal in the museum’s programme of exhibitions, How Far How Near had become quite a complex undertaking. With hindsight, I not only confronted the museum with its limited conception of internationalism, but also ‘accused’ it of exclusivism, if not sheer colonialism. Perhaps this was the first time such a thing happened in the Stedelijk, but it is of course not entirely new in the context of a modern art museum. A frank and severely critical recent publication accuses the modern and contemporary art museum in general of having “ignored the challenge of social and cultural difference” and, as a consequence, “limited the potential for providing a democratically engaged basis on which to develop the contemporary cultural role of the art museum” (Dewdney 2013: 9)10. This problematic position was confirmed in the Stedelijk, and not only through the argument that the show wanted to make in the first place. While the Black Pete debate anno 2015 has surprisingly turned into a simmering discussion on institutional racism in the Netherlands, for the first time injecting long accepted notions from postcolonial theory into the wider public domain, one might ask why, at a slightly earlier stage, the museum did not respond at all to the totally unfair parliamentary questioning of Gario’s work. Why did the museum refrain from publicly defending the freedom of artistic expression, which is surely its raison d’être as a modern art museum in the first place? The most probable answer is: fear. Fear of getting entrapped in an issue of politics that in its turn eschews discussions on ethnic and cultural dissent. It is obvious that museums today are increasingly subjected to a dominant logic of privatization, often in the name of austerity. This makes a museum less focussed on “a collection, a history, a position, or a mission than a sense that contemporaneity is being staged on the level of image: the new, the cool, the photogenic, the well-designed, the economically successful,” as critic Claire Bishop (2013: 12) states in Radical Museology. The tendency towards homogenization when museums function as institutions of a ‘global industry’ has been observed before (Rectanus 2006). Bishop offers the alternative of the modern and contemporary art museum as a space that can use its collection and institutional history for a politicized project with a more radical understanding of the term ‘contemporary’ in art today: “it is underpinned by an inability to grasp our moment in its global entirety, and an acceptance of this incomprehension as a constitutive condition of the present historical era” (Bishop 2013: 6). She finds few examples of this constitutive condition among the current wave of new museums, which are proliferating at an unprecedented rate. Austerity is, of course, not the only issue here. If it comes to installing a globally orientated mind set within the museum, the institution itself needs to make the necessary changes to cater for the age of what Peggy Levitt has coined “cosmopolitan nationalism”, for example by equipping

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itself with a transcultural staff. In the knowledge that museums, through “the ordering […] of objects […] legitimized particular social and political hierarchies, privileging some ways of knowing while excluding others” and “rather than being a catalyst for social change, reproduce social boundaries”, she pleas instead for “global museum assemblages changing repertoires of ways to display, look at and organize objects, and educate others” (Levitt 2015: 7-8). In retrospect, How Far How Near was such a global assemblage, albeit a temporary one, revealing the many challenges the museum faces if it wants to situate globalization at the very heart of its practice. •

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References Bishop, Claire (2014): Radical Museology: Or What‘s Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art? Cologne: Walther König.

Levitt, Peggy (2015): Artifacts and Allegiances. How Museums Put the Nation and the World on Display Oakland: University of California Press.

Bouwhuis, Jelle (2014): How Far How Near − The World in the Stedelijk. Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

Lütticken, Sven (2014): “Piet Zwart & Zwarte Piet.” In: Jelle Bouwhuis and Kerstin Winking (eds.), Project 1975 − Contemporary Art and the Postcolonial Unconscious. Amsterdam / London: Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam / black dog publishing, pp. 30–52.

Bouwhuis, Jelle and Winking, Kerstin, eds. (2014): Project 1975 − Contemporary Art and the Postcolonial Unconscious. Amsterdam / London: Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam / blackdog publishing. Bouwhuis, Jelle and Winking, Kerstin (2014): “Interview with Quinsy Gario.” In: Victoria Walsh, Paul Goodwin and Pamela Sepúlveda (eds.), Transfigurations. Curatorial and Artistic Research in an Age of Migrations. London: Royal College of Art London, pp. 151–157. Dewdney, Andrew; Dibosa, David and Walsh, Victoria (2013): Post-critical Museology. Theory and Practice in the Art Museum. London: Routledge. Enwezor, Okwui (2003): “The Postcolonial Constellation: Contemporary Art in a State of Permanent Transition.” In: Research in African Literatures 34/4, pp. 57–82. Guilbaut, Serge (1985): How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kooiman, Mirijam: “How Far How Near: Photography and Context”, 30 December 2014, http://global.stedelijk.nl/ collection-en/how-far-how-near-photography-and-context/?lang=en, last accessed 31 August 2016.

McGrane, Sally: “The Netherlands Confronts Black Pete.” In: The New Yorker, 4 November 2013, online at http:// www.newyorker.com/culture/culturedesk/the-netherlands-confronts-blackpete, last accessed 31 August 2016. Oostindie, Gert (2009): Postkoloniaal Nederland. Vijfenzestig Jaar Vergeten, Herdenken, Verdringen. Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Bert Bakker. Rectanus, Mark W. (2006): “Globalization: Incorporating the Museum.” In: Sharon MacDonald (ed.), A Companion to Museum Studies. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 381–397. Roodenburg-Schadd, Caroline (2004): Expressie En Ordening. Het verzamelbeleid van Willem Sandberg voor het Stedelijk Museum, 1945–1962, Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Saunders, Frances Stonor (1999): Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War. London: Granta. Van Winkel, Camiel (2012): During the Exhibition the Gallery will be Closed. Contemporary Art and the Paradoxes of Conceptualism. Amsterdam: Valiz.

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Copyrights Fig. 1  Stedelijk Museum restaurant around 1960, showing the wuramon to the left and in the back-ground the Karel Appel mural of 1956. Photo: Stedelijk Museum. Fig. 2   Overview of exhibition Modern Art – New and Old, 1955, with a. o. two versions of Jacques Lipchitz, Figure, 1926–30, among a Bakota mask (West African). Photo: Stedelijk Museum. Fig. 3  Overview of exhibition How Far How Near. The World in the Stedelijk (19 September 2014  – 1 February 2015) from left to right: Dorothy Amenuke, How Far How Near, 2012; Abdoulaye Konaté, Fête Africaine (des hommes et des marionettes), 2012; Jacques Lipchitz, Study for Figure, 1926; Vincent Vulsma, WE 455 (IX), 2011. All works Collection Stedelijk Museum. Photo: Gert Jan van Rooij. Fig. 4  Overviews of exhibition How Far How Near. The World in the Stedelijk (19 September 2014 – 1 February 2015), showing the two walls with posters and photo’s from the Stedelijk Museum collection. Photo: Gert Jan van Rooij. Fig. 5   see Fig. 4 Fig. 6   Sinterklaas and Zwarte Piet, 2006. Photo: Michel Zappa / wikimedia commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Sinterklaas_zwarte_piet.jpg Fig. 7  Overview of exhibition How Far How Near. The World in the Stedelijk (19 September 2014 - 1 February 2015), showing Michael Tedja, If I Was Locked in a Prison…, 1999 (coll. Stedelijk Museum) and Godfried Donkor, Organized Creation of Dissatisfaction I (Short Boy Wallpaper), 2014. Photo: Gert Jan van Rooij. Fig. 8  Detail of Fig. 7 Fig. 9  Iris Kensmil, The Problem of Defense, 2007. Coll. Stedelijk Museum. Photo: Gert Jan van Rooij. Fig. 10  Overview of exhibition How Far How Near. The World in the Stedelijk (19 September 2014 – 1 February 2015), showing Koen Wessing, selection from the series Chile, September 1973, 1973. Coll. Stedelijk Museum. Photo: Gert Jan van Rooij. Fig. 11  Overview of exhibition How Far How Near. The World in the Stedelijk (19 September 2014  – 1 February 2015), showing Alfredo Jaar, Faces, 1982/2014. Coll. Stedelijk Museum. Photo: Gert Jan van Rooij. Alfredo Jaar, Faces, 1982/2014. Courtesy Alfredo Jaar. Fig. 12  Alfredo Jaar, Nothing of Very Great Consequence, 2008/2014. Coll. Stedelijk Museum. Courtesy Alfredo Jaar

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Of Maps, Nodes and Trajectories

Annette Bhagwati

Of Maps, Nodes and Trajectories: Changing Topologies in Transcultural Curating In the summer of 1989, the exhibition Magiciens de la terre opened in Paris. Hailed as “the first actually global exhibition of contemporary art” (la première exposition réellement mondiale d’art contemporain) (Gazette des Arts quoted in Belting / Buddensieg / Weibel 2013: 181), the exhibition promised to change the geography of international contemporary art from the ground up (Belting 2013: 180). Until then, the points of reference for contemporary art merely spanned the Western centres of London, Paris, and New York. Located at the periphery of this space were artistic practices outside of this frame of reference: practices that either did not correspond to the Western concept of modern art or were dismissed as inferior – as secondary forms of modernity, deriving from and imitative of the centre. While ethnographic museums and art circles continued to pay attention to a number of so-called ‘traditional arts’, most current developments in nonWestern ‘contemporary’ art remained almost completely invisible. With a curatorial concept that was as simple as it was effective,  Magiciens de la terre irrevocably and fundamentally questioned this centre / periphery model. “50 renowned Western artists were exhibited with an equal number of formerly excluded artists from the former colonies. Each artist was given equal treatment, two pages in the catalogue, giving only his or her name, work title, and place of birth.” (ibid.) In the catalogue, small icons of the earth were re-centred around the respective artists, mapping the world into ever new formations. Rather than being fixed by a central perspective, the centre was redefined through the artistic practice of each individual artist. This shift in perspective not only called into question the notion of art itself, including established distinctions between art and artefact. Harsh criticisms levelled at the curatorial realization of the show attest to the fact that Magiciens de la terre also posed new challenges to longstanding exhibition practices in the Western art context and set new developments in motion (Araeen 1989: 3-14; Buchloh 1989; O’Neill 2012: 57). Today, more than 25 years after Magiciens de la terre, I would like to review some of the curatorial strategies that emerged in the decades after 1989 and aimed at making ‘global’ – often just taken to mean ‘worldwide’ − contemporary art more visible. What exhibition concepts have been devised

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Annette Bhagwati / in the attempt to overcome the centre-periphery divide? Where have they succeeded? Where have such concepts fallen short? What was and is the relationship between visibility and invisibility today − not only from the point of view of the ‘former’ centre, but also from that of the ‘former’ peripheries? In and through which topography of transcultural exhibition practice does ‘global art’ construct itself, and where does it locate itself today? Before we enter into a discussion of these questions, a brief disambiguation regarding the term ‘transcultural’ appears to be necessary. Current debates in arts and humanities use the term to describe “processes through which forms emerge in local contexts within circuits of exchange” (Juneja 2013: 25). The concept can thereby “refer both to a concrete object of investigation as well as an analytical method” (ibid.: 24). In one way, the present paper provides corroboration for this discourse: the exhibition space can be seen as operating as a relational field, a contact zone, where a panoply of diverse expectations, aesthetical concepts, actors and ideas come together in a dynamic interplay, triggering transcultural processes in this first sense of the term. By contrast, in the context of curatorial studies, the term ‘transcultural’ can take on a different meaning. In analyses of transnational exhibition-making of the early 1990s, the term ‘transcultural’ referred to a curatorial stance or, simply, to a curatorial practice that included artistic expressions from another, most often non-Western, culture or from several contexts in one’s exhibition (Bhagwati 2011; Mosquera 1994). Often, it was used almost synonymously with terms such as ‘cross-cultural’ or ‘intercultural’ to denote a sensitivity to differences and the competences required within the exhibition context of a ‘multicultural’ society (Juneja 2013: 23). In the following discussion, both usages will appear at different times. I will use the term in its latter meaning whenever I discuss curatorial strategies during the early years of international exhibition making. Whenever the discussion turns to the wider effects and consequences of these exhibition practices, however, I will use ‘transcultural’ in the first sense, as an analytical method and framework.

Museological Narratives

Regional Survey Exhibitions One of the defining exhibition formats in the years following 1989 were regional or national survey shows. As if in a sweeping gesture, blank areas on the map of contemporary non-Western art were successively filled in. Curatorial interest shifted to the ‘other modernities’ of non-European and non-Western ‘cultures’, and by extension, to their diasporas. This roving attention also picked up ‘local’ young art scenes that had emerged since the mid-1990s precisely as a result of this new Western interest and the globalized art market that it had engendered. This new visibility laid the foundation for the reception of hitherto unknown and / or non-

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canonized art forms by ‘international’ (i.e. Western) publics – and, subsequently, for their economic success.1 Western curators travelled to the regions they had selected for survey, consulted local experts, visited artists’ studios and, drawing on this research platform, made a selection of works. However, even when they did take local recommendations into account, their selections were, in most cases, significantly influenced by the curator’s aesthetic preferences and their own singular appreciation of art, and, of course, by institutional requirements at home in the centre.2 A field note by André Magnin, one of the main curators of Magiciens de la terre, illustrates the implications of this kind of transcultural exhibition practice in a particularly illuminating manner (Fig. 1). It shows an extensive list of names that Magnin put together during his research trip through central Africa, after some preparatory research. The list formed a solid database, which he then narrowed down to a specific selection, having reviewed artworks and visited artists’ studios. A comparison between selected and rejected artworks clearly indicates the aesthetic preferences at work: he excluded modernist positions strongly oriented towards academic traditions as well as works of popular art (except those inspired by sign painting traditions). In contrast, the artists he selected – e.g. Chéri Samba, Bodys Isek Kingelez – tended to validate positions featuring a kind of artistic individuality that deviated from the metropolitan mainstream and, in concept and realization, also stood for an authentic local connection. This particular case aside, Magnin’s note demonstrates the potential and the significance of this form of transcultural curating – the Western recognition of existing non-Western (or non-canonized) art practices, and their increasing presence in and impact on an international art world, challenging established criteria and definitions of art. At the same time, Magnin’s note also illustrates some of its fundamental problems – problems which have since decisively shaped the perception and formation of ‘global art’. On the one hand, the variety of artists’ names alone makes it clear that curators consciously and actively deal with art milieus and practices of previously ‘peripheral’ regions, bringing new names into the international art 1  One of the major institutions shaping this process was the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin, founded in 1989 as a venue for contemporary non-Western arts. In numerous exhibitions it acquainted, often for the very first time, German and international audiences with current artistic positions from Latin America, Asia and Africa. Since its beginnings, the HKW’s exhibition practice has continually evolved in reaction to post-colonial criticism and the increasingly globalized art world. Its exhibition history can thus be read as a seismographic reflection of most of the shifts and changing perspectives discussed here.

2  Jean Hubert Martin was not only aware of this bias, but he took it to be his curatorial point of departure. In an interview with Benjamin Buchloh leading up to the exhibition, he clearly articulated how his individual and culturally determined perspective (including its critical reflection) determined his curatorial process: “I intend to select these objects from various cultures according to my own history and my own sensitivity. But obviously I also want to incorporate into that process the critical thinking which contemporary anthropology provides on the problem of ethnocentrism, the relativity of culture and intercultural claims.” (Buchloh 1989: 153)

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Annette Bhagwati /

Fig. 1   André Magnin, Fieldnotes from his      research trip to today’s Democratic   Republic of Congo, 1988

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scene. Since 1989, artists such as Frédéric Bruly Bouabré or Chéri Samba have become household names in the ‘Global Contemporary’, a term designating the environment and emerging canon of contemporary art after 1989.3 On the other hand, it highlights the fact that curators, by means of selection, determine what becomes visible and what remains invisible. This may be simple common sense, but in light of the curatorial claim to a global perspective it acquires a particular meaning: how can a global, de-centred curatorial model be reconciled with this act of selection? Who decides what selection criteria are appropriate when and where?4 On the other hand: did not certain selection criteria, in advancing the development of specific articulations of global contemporary art, inject important new momentum into local art milieus? Collaboration with Local Experts: Overcoming a Centralized Perspective Such inherent problems of transcultural curatorship by Western experts soon attracted substantial criticism, especially by critics from the former peripheries. The curator, art critic and co-organizer of the first Havana Biennial in 1984, Gerardo Mosquera, for example, observed that, despite all the good intentions, the centre-periphery model seemed to have not been overcome: “[T]he countries which host the art of other cultures are at the same time curating the shows; it is almost never the other way around, and it is regarded as the most natural thing to happen. The world is practically divided between curating cultures and curated cultures.” (Mosquera 1994: 135). In response to such reproaches, a number of Western institutions resorted to collaborating with local non-Western curators. By this approach, these institutions hoped to guarantee a local perspective and to facilitate the realization of diverse, yet equivalent (coeval), contemporary aesthetic practices worldwide. In many respects, this was a major step forward: the intimate knowledge of local curators about current developments in the 3  The term The Global Contemporary was proposed by the curators of a major exhibition and research project, which took place at ZKM, Karlsruhe, in 2012. Even if the authors do not explicitly use the term ‘canon’, they discuss a list of characteristic features of the ‘Global Contemporary’ that suggest an implicit, perhaps still evolving, canon: “Today’s art presents itself not only as new art, but also as a new kind of art, an art that is expanding all over the globe. Art no longer aims at the avant-garde position of modern art, but presents itself as contemporary, in a chronological, symbolical, and even ideological sense.” (Belting/Buddensieg 2013: 28) The concept of the ‘canon’ is important for the discussion here because it not only defines criteria for inclusion but also, by the same token, criteria for exclusion. These criteria determine which art becomes visible or

invisible within the global art circuit. As Terry Smith notes, “contemporary art [has] become an aesthetic category and a cultural force as powerful as modern art had been in its own time” (Smith 2011: 70). 4   Jean Hubert Martin was aware of this problem. He maintained that an “‘objective, unacculturated’ perspective” or a “decentered” point of view was impossible and, in any case, unhelpful. Instead, he argued that looking at the cultured object from the relative position of the West would incorporate a critical anthropological position into a transhistorical view. This position is representative of the generalized contemporaneous idea of pluralism, in which the lack of any agreed criteria for the judgement of art or the aesthetic is compensated for by a moral judgement (O’Neill 2012: 59).

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Annette Bhagwati / young art scenes promised to offer deeper insights than the short-term research by curators trained and socialized in a Western context. Such an approach was thus instrumental in enabling a perspective that was both more encompassing and more focused – and, in turn, provided substantial stimuli for the heightened international visibility of individual artists as well as the establishment of local art scenes. Nonetheless, as John Clark rightly observes, this approach also has its limitations and inherent biases and constraints. In this type of trans / crosscultural exhibition context, those so-called ‘local’ experts operate at the interface between different aesthetic traditions, expectations and understandings of art.  They are seen as mediators between different cultural and aesthetic traditions or as “doorkeepers” of a selective representation (Clark 1998: 998). The potential – but also the challenges and contradictions – peculiar to this form of mediation are aptly illustrated by the following example. In 2002 the HKW commissioned the widely renowned and internationally recognized Indian art critic Geeta Kapur to curate an exhibition on contemporary art from India. In subTerrain: Artworks in the Cityfold, Kapur examines “art practice in the social, political and psychic ‘subterrain’ of third world ‘global cities’” (Kapur 2003: 48). By focusing on the frictions between local reality and globalization, she proposes to “situate the artist (here, the Indian artist) in an uneasy ‘subterrain’, in the ‘dug-outs’ of the contemporary, where s/he reclaims memory and history; where the leveling effect of the no-history, no-nation, no-place phenomenon promoted by globalized exhibition and market circuits is upturned to rework a passage back into the politics of place” (ibid.: 47). Through her selection, she delineated a young scene of contemporary Indian artists, showcasing their highly individual approaches. For the exhibition, Kapur carefully selected specific works by these artists – works that appeared to be not only aesthetically compatible with the institutional exhibition context but also, and in particular, conceptually appropriate. Her selection included Nalini Malani’s work Hamletmachine, 2000. In this video installation, the artist examines the recent rise of Hindu fundamentalism by mixing text fragments from Heiner Müller’s play of the same title with sounds and images from riots in India and Pakistan as well as from fascist-era Japan and Europe. In discussing the work, Geeta Kapur explains its importance for the exhibition: “I put her at the start of an argument where I suggest that Indian artists typically continue to address national issues head-on – this is the politics of place that I speak about, and it goes beyond the space allocated to us in the local / global framework.” (ibid.: 53) By dealing with fascism not only in India but also in Germany and Japan, Malani transcends local references into an observation of a broader, transnational application.

Of Maps, Nodes and Trajectories Malini’s political stance – subtly or overtly – is not only apparent in Hamletmachine. It is a recurring theme in her work. In the reverse painting Varaha, 2002, for example, Malani deliberately suffuses her rendering of a classic Hindu narrative with associative meanings, thus celebrating the fundamental value of plurality and subverting the single canonical narrative that Hindu fundamentalism seeks to impose. Varaha would therefore have been equally consistent with the curator’s concern for this exhibition. European audiences or any audience unacquainted with Indian culture and history, however, would probably have had significant difficulties deciphering the numerous Indian cultural and socio-political references – and thus accessing its aesthetical and contextual meanings. Whether or not Kapur considered it, Varaha was not included in the show. Such cases suggest that, from a curatorial point of view and in a transnational exhibition context, some aesthetics or contents seem more compatible than others. Despite all endeavours to decentralise perspectives, then, certain art works or aesthetics will still remain invisible. Today, one could argue that, since 2003, a new aesthetic category of global contemporary art may have built itself through a process of selfaffirmation – propelled, amongst other factors, through exhibition projects like the one discussed above. In this process, local art scenes could be said to have been aesthetically subsumed within a more global transformation. If such a universal development truly was the case, then ‘local’ and ‘global’ would be congruent with one another, and the centre-periphery divide would, in fact, have been overcome. Some local art scenes have indeed changed remarkably through their international success, shifting their focus towards the global art market. This, however, does not imply abandoning ‘local’ practices or perspectives – quite the contrary: as a comparison between examples of Indian contemporary art selected in Indian survey catalogues, and the examples of contemporary Indian art shown in the West suggests, the understanding and definition of ‘canons’ are still strikingly different, not only in terms of content but also aesthetically. From the Indian perspective, one can observe a concept of art where contemporary art practice is considered to be a mainly temporal category. This means that recent folk art is considered on an equal footing alongside contemporary painting and conceptual art. In Western survey exhibitions on the other hand, the works presented are almost exclusively confined to internationally celebrated conceptual and installation artists such as Shilpa Gupta or Jitish Kallat. Traditional art practices seem to have little or no place in the Global Contemporary, unless they have a conceptual edge.

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Thematic Exhibitions As the map of global art continued to expand through the addition of new art scenes and cultural regions, and fostered by the rapid spread of worldwide biennials, this process was soon again faced with accusations of cultural essentialism / determinism: artists introduced as representatives of ‘a culture’ felt that this identification robbed them of their artistic individuality and biographical complexity – aspects that were attributed to Western Artists as a matter of course. Subsequent efforts to overcome this imbalance of power, and to attach importance to recognizing individual artistic positions, soon resulted in an evolution away from region-based perspectives, and towards themebased exhibitions. Now, the selection of works was no longer determined by the artist’s cultural heritage, but by his or her artistic personality and the specificity of the work. Such a dissociation of the individual from the cultural, however, cuts both ways. On the one hand, it signals an important emancipation from cultural essentialism. On the other hand, however, it entails considerable historical and cultural de-contextualizations, through which relevant references to the artistic and content-related layers of meaning within both the work and the artist’s perspective may well be lost. One could argue that, in a global art world characterized by complex transnational biographies and permanent fracturing, references to specific local contexts are increasingly irrelevant. However, this position presumes an artistic global reality that takes a permanently mobile, placeless artist with no commitments as its norm. Yet every artist inevitably relates to the dynamic process of cultural conditioning and aesthetic socialization somewhere. I use the disputed term ‘culture’ in the broadest sense: a socialization that impacts individual artistic practice and is of significance for a deeper understanding of the artwork. However, such an individualized cultural context, necessary as it may be for those not familiar with it, can only inadequately be presented in thematic exhibitions. Indeed, some curators deliberately opt against comprehensive background information (e.g. by omitting captions that might unpack contextual information and individual positions), so as not to deprive the work of its aesthetic impact and artistic effect. The tendency towards a highly-defined focus on individual artistry (as opposed to cultural representativity) is reinforced by a tendency to commission works onsite in response to local surroundings. The result is a set of temporal, content-related and spatial parameters that refer only to the particular moment and site of the exhibition itself. This strong localization would be of no particular concern, were it not for the fact that a large percentage of such commission-based work continues to be funded and arranged by wellfinanced institutions of the (former) centres and the global art circuits they

Of Maps, Nodes and Trajectories influence. This leads to further questions: who sets the agendas that bring together artists and perspectives from around the world? Recalling telling titles of major thematic exhibitions, a tendency for questions of social or political concern can be noted, affording priority to conceptual work: Le parfait flâneur (Palais de Tokyo, 2015), Art In The Age Of…  Asymmetrical Warfare (Witte de With, 2015), Farewell to Post-Colonialism (Guangzhou Triennial, 2008) are just a few examples. Yet, can one really assume that these agendas are of similar central interest to art scenes and artists across the entire world? What about themes that focus on tradition, conceptual localization, or the pursuit of formal or aesthetic questions? Interestingly enough, a wide range of critiques of this form of thematic exhibition have emerged over the past years, again mostly from the so-called former peripheries. Hong Kong-based collector Pearl Lam draws attention to differences in standards in the understanding of contemporary art and its relevant themes and practices. In her eyes, thematic exhibitions are the result of a Western understanding of global art, which has admittedly created a global infrastructure for art, but is nevertheless neither able nor prepared to include particular forms of contemporary art from outside of its system: “Today everything, including the new markets, is measured according to Western perspectives and standards. From this Western perspective, one speaks of globalization. Globalization is actually nothing other than the propagation of a homogenous culture. For civilizations such as China, Iran or India, contemporary art has nothing to do with rebelling against tradition. Western contemporary art revolves around the conceptual […] our Chinese art arises out of our tradition.” (von Bennigsen / Gludowacz / van Hagen 2009: 240) In a similar vein, Korean curator Yoon Min Moon criticizes the increasing deterritorialization of art within the framework of thematic exhibitions, which “deprive her of the ability to consider the art on display in its most basic context” (Moon 2011: 211– 222). Moreover, to privilege a decontextualized perspective risks fostering neo-paternalistic misunderstandings. It misleads the viewer into taking on universal categories for observing and evaluating, engendering his or her aesthetic judgement across cultural boundaries even though the result might merely reflect aesthetic and conceptual similarities with his or her own familiar frames of reference. Such subjective certainty about one’s own transcultural aesthetic judgment makes it unnecessary to even attempt to seek a more integrated understanding of the work or the artistic tradition. To be quite clear: this is not a call for a more ethnographic approach to contemporary art. Rather, it is a call for a continual critical self-assessment with regard to one’s own preconceptions and one’s own role in analysing and evaluating art. This is particularly important vis-à-vis forms of art that, at first glance, seem very much like something that looks or seems familiar but which actually arose in a different context. Russian gallerist Marat

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Annette Bhagwati / Guelmann, for example, in distinguishing between Arte Povera and contemporary Russian ‘poor’ art, warns against any short-cut comprehension based on aesthetic resemblance (von Bennigsen / Gludowacz / van Hagen 2009: 223).

Museological Narratives

Biennales and the Global Contemporary Up to this point, the discussion has focused on curatorial strategies and how these translated the various existing ideological, structural and cultural concepts of (Western) modern and contemporary art into a new global perspective. As argued earlier on, these efforts – despite evident success stories – have also given rise to numerous contradictions. The primary target was the still prevalent mono-directional curatorial approach to art-making around the world, as described in its many facets above. It was argued that some of these approaches were aimed not so much at a true understanding of artistic traditions and contemporary practices, but rather at producing a superficial connectivity and compatibility (see above) – which then helped enable the subsequent incorporation of local art scenes into a global art circuit (Kravagna 2007: 205). Given all these complications, are there any formats of representation which, unlike any other, might afford an accurate glimpse into globalization processes in art – or even of global art itself? The biennale format (and, by extension, all perennial exhibition formats) has repeatedly raised such expectations. Has it been able to fulfil them? In 1989, a headcount of biennales would have yielded sixteen. This modest number has now risen to over 160, trending upwards. The format of the biennale appears to be one of the most successful global exhibition formats: more than any other, the biennale seems to fulfil the promise of a global and decentralized art world. In contrast to the individual thematic exhibitions mentioned above, the majority of biennales are located in, and financed from, the former peripheries. Biennales have become one essential cogwheel in a globalized art world; one that, thanks to new opportunities for communication and travel, is inextricably inter-linked with art fairs, globally operating galleries and auction houses. In the wake of each important biennale, names, images and works circulate worldwide at an unprecedented rate. Everything seems to be – at least in theory – accessible and potentially visible at any time. In biennales, the local is brought into an exchange with the global. Contemporary artists seem to meet one another on a level playing field. Do such art events not implement the vision of a decentralized, multifaceted geography for global art? Currently, the biennale format continues to be actively encouraged, financed and deployed by local governments or interest groups in Asia or Africa. Aside from economic motivations or implications for the status of

Of Maps, Nodes and Trajectories the host country, the ideal that is associated with many biennales is that through their presence, the cartography of contemporary art can be rewritten by and in those former ‘peripheries’. An international public has the opportunity to acquaint itself with local art scenes, while local artists and a local public are exposed to current tendencies in the work of invited international contemporary artists. One problematic aspect of many of these biennials is that, in order to attract an international audience, they often choose internationally known big-name curators. These curators, however, are usually members of the established circuits of the Global Contemporary. Such nominations therefore speed up the worldwide homogenization of artistic tendencies – and decisively contribute to the formation of a new canon. A further contradiction inherent to this aspiration is highlighted by a glance into the exhibition catalogue of the third Kwangju Biennale (2000) entitled “Man  +  Space”. The biennial was curated by Kwang-su Oh. A comparison of the special exhibitions illustrated in the catalogue reveals not only the potential but also the dilemma of an exhibition form that admittedly – in aiming to overcome the distinction between centre and periphery – propagates the idea of ‘contemporaneity’ in art as a common thread. Its concrete curatorial implementation, however, affords ample evidence of the great challenges posed by divergent understandings of ‘contemporary art’ in local canons: The section Art and Human Rights and Human Beings and Gender comprised art works which met the criteria of the ‘global contemporary’, as defined by Hans Belting: art which differs from Modern art by evincing “a new proof of professionalism such as a contemporary subject matter and a contemporary performance” (Belting 2009: 52-55). Two other sections, by contrast, were distinctly local or regional. The exhibition The Facet of Korean and Japanese Contemporary Art. The Voice of Silence – Towards Nature, curated by Yoon Jin-Sup, offered, for the first time, a comparative view of two major art movements: Dansaekhwa, a monochromatic style of painting that emerged in the late 1970s in South Korea, and Mono-ha, a movement or tendency associated with a group of Japanese artists who were active in the late 1960s / early 1970s and attempted to reconfigure art through the reduction of objects to their primary form. The exhibition was a world premiere, remarkable not only from an art history perspective, but also in the context of the still strained relationship between Korea and Japan. A fourth section was dedicated to modern and contemporary art from North Korea – highly relevant for South Koreans, but rather less so for the international visitors who perceived this exhibition less as evidence of a flourishing ‘contemporary’ art scene and more as a curious aberration, a case apart.

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Annette Bhagwati / Such aesthetic diversity in one show again underlines the point that not all aesthetics seem to be cross-culturally compatible – and this in both directions. If one compares this early example with today’s leading biennales such as Shanghai, Taipei or even later editions of the Kwangju Biennial, one can discern a marked tendency towards more universalizing concepts. There are manifold reasons for this: it is precisely the large biennales that are conceptualized by a cycle of international (star) curators who cannot deny their own thumbprint. Their preferences and close collaboration with artists worldwide encourages particular tendencies which, through the biennales and the rotation system of curators, are also viewable worldwide. Is it possible then, in fact to deal with an exhibition format that is “really global” (“réellement mondiale”) – the claim articulated already by Jean-Hubert Martin for Magiciens de la terre? Worldwide and global are not necessarily identical. ‘Worldwide’ simply refers to a factual description of the space of action. ‘Global’, however, always denotes an aspiration, a silent assumption harboured by players within the worldwide art system. The common point of reference seems to be a mutually shared understanding of contemporary art, which influences the selection criteria and shapes expectations, thus guiding the production of art in particular directions. In opposition to the purported “rise of new art worlds” observed by the authors of The Global Contemporary (2013), I would prefer to diagnose the rise of the ‘global’ as the growing formation of a ‘monoculture’, one ‘art world’. The basis for this art world is, paradoxically, globalization: the global allocation and distribution of a shared understanding of contemporary art (both aesthetically and in terms of content) – a canon of The Global Contemporary. Next to this omnipresence, locally specific canons are in danger of being eclipsed.5

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Documenta 12 Before concluding these deliberations on changing topologies in transcultural curating, I would like to elaborate on one particular approach to curating that went beyond the examples mentioned previously. For documenta 12, 2007, its curators Roger M. Buergel and Ruth Noack seemed to try a new way of thinking through and about exhibition-making. Under the banner of Migration of Forms the exhibition united a vast diversity of positions, styles and formats of art from around the globe. Based on the premise that “over the course of human history, visual culture has had only a limited number of basic forms with which to work” Buergel’s 5  The work of the Ghanaian born and Nigerian

based sculptor El-Anatsui might serve as an example here. His work addressing social, political and historical concerns and embracing a diverse range of media was ground-breaking and

influenced an entire generation of West African artists. Globally, however, he only became visible when he shifted to an installation-based practice, which was clearly ‘contemporary’ in the canonical sense of the word (see discussion above).

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and Noack’s interest was “to reveal both historical lines of development in art and unexpected concurrences” between “works of art from different decades and cultures in which similar formal patterns have emerged” (Buergel / Noack quoted in Haase 2007: 43). The visitor was invited to an “experience of radical contingency” (ibid.). Contradictions about “global position” seemed resolved. Captions contained the names of the artists, the year of production, credits and a reference to the catalogue entry. As “citizens of the world”, Grace Gardner observed, the works were thus all equal, differentiated only through their individual artistic styles and their year of production (Gardner 2007). Moreover, even canonical classifications and possible limitations resulting from notions of contemporaneity were suspended through the radically inclusive curatorial principle: historical exhibits were displayed alongside modern and contemporary artworks and in conjunction with works otherwise associated with folk or pop art. The co-valence of the exhibits was maintained by a unifying interest in form, mirroring the co-valence of the artistic positions and the artists themselves. This was accented through an additional strategy: the idea of migration, the trajectories and traces that connected the exhibits to one another. Ideally, the works should not be perceived through a central (e.g. Western) perspective. Instead, the prevailing idea was to seek out paths leading from one work to the other following the idea of a migration of form(s). The curators enunciated this strategy by way of their stated intention to “play out the ignorance of Europeans before their very eyes, to confront them with their completely false consciousness that they still, in some way, were at the center” (Buergel / Noack quoted in Haase 2007: 47). However, even this supposedly radically de-centred model proved, upon closer observation, to be one of the most individualistic examples of a curatorial position. In one radically inclusive gesture, works from the most diverse aesthetic, cultural, historical contexts were placed into a common space. Labels with supplementary information about artists and works were reduced to a minimum. Visitors were encouraged to substantiate the central idea of the Migration of Forms by making new, individual connections between the works in the space, assuming an unmediated aesthetic experience – and thereby arrive at their own unique interpretation largely unfettered by historical or contextual limitations.6 From the perspective of transcultural 6  This argument relates primarily to the unmedi-

ated perception of the exhibition consciously intended by Buergel and Noack and staged through a variety of curatorial and structural techniques (hanging, arrangement, colours, labels, lighting) with the aim of creating an aesthetic experience. Further information, for example about the context of the work or artistic intention, was generally removed and displaced from the direct viewing context. An essential source of information was

the exhibition catalogue. However, historicalpolitical context at least partially took a back seat to formal-aesthetic considerations (Marchart 2007: 210). Additionally, documenta 12 offered an extensive education programme which ran over the course of 100 days. The events took place not only inside the exhibition (spaces in the form of direct encounters with the artworks themselves), but also externally, and were offered to a broad range of groups and in various languages.

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Annette Bhagwati / exhibition practice, this approach evidently has some serious flaws. By choosing to put their focus on one of the most elementary aesthetic categories – i.e. form – the principal connection between the works was their appearance. Through a formal-aesthetic system of reference, disparate events, histories, experiences and objects were placed into a-historical, decontextualized correlations with one another – an approach Susanne Leeb describes as the attempt to “dissolve similarities of content by way of formal analogies” (2007: 168). The flow of lines in Canadian-American artist Agnes Martin’s paintings was seamlessly connected with the abstract flight paths of forms of angels in the work of Pakistani artist Nasreen Mohamedi, which in turn were aligned with the striped patterns of a marriage curtain from Mali. A Western, modernist, “syntactical structure”, which, according to art critic Grace Gardner, attempts to emancipate itself from representationalism, was compared with a symbolically and semantically significant form of Eastern ornamentation, where abstraction is perceived as an abbreviation for representation. Lines of connection are therefore privileged over the formal-aesthetic level and the status of the work is established at the expense of – and partially in contradiction with – far more fundamental layers of comparison, such as historical context and artistic intention. This curatorial dilemma lies in a confusion between phenotype and genotype. The irritation provoked by this confusion is richly documented (see Joseph /  Heiser in Leeb et al. 2007: 121, 116; Kravagna / Egenhofer 2007: 200-206). Moreover, a curator’s declared aim of relinquishing their own interpretational prerogative clearly contradicts the very act of curating. The selection of exhibits and their placement in a space is always an act of choice and decision making – and therefore an act of interpretation. Last, but not least, the contexts and their trajectories were not imagined by using the object as a starting point, but came into being through the curatorial, and, by extension, the viewer’s eye – and this privileged and powerful eye was also where their relevance ended. Through such a highly individualized perspective, curators found themselves in a marked conflict with their own aspiration to “play out the ignorance of the Europeans before their very eyes” (Buergel 2007). In fact, if anything, they helped re-inforce a neocolonial mindset in which all the forms and ideas of the entire world are available for interpretation by the (mostly Euro-American) visitors of this exhibition, however ignorant they may be.7 Hence, in spite of its radically inclusive approach, the concept ultimately failed. 7  The inherent contradiction between the push to generate (viewer-based) interpretations and the broader intention of the exhibition is reflected in the critique of André Rottmann when he describes Buergel‘s curatorial standpoint: “Buergel, while talking about form in a very authoritative manner, is reinstalling the curator as the uber-artist.

When you think about the way he talks about the education of the public, he falls back into this intentional fallacy of wanting the audience to see what he has seen, so that the rise of the spectator to competence […] is turned against itself.” (Rottmann in Leeb et al. 2007: 171)

Of Maps, Nodes and Trajectories Conclusions Let us return to our initial question: how might we evaluate and account for the diverse new approaches and strategies since 1989 through which curators have reacted to the challenges of a new global perspective? And, more concretely, how might ‘Global Art’ be positioned in the exhibition landscape today? As I have argued, new curatorial strategies and a shifting exhibition landscape contributed significantly to expanding the map of global contemporary art, accompanied by an important new momentum for the formation of new art scenes. Nonetheless, as the discussion has also shown, any exhibition practice that aims for a de-centred and multifaceted perspective will encounter a variety of resilience and inherent limitations: institutional, aesthetic, structural. Each of these limitations will inevitably engender curatorial results in which particular aesthetics and indeed curatorial positions, however present they may be on the global map, will disappear out of focus or remain altogether invisible. Given this insight, what can be done at all? Firstly, each curatorial decision should be accompanied by critical self-reflection: what is the aspiration, what are the premises in using the word ‘global’? Is it all about the most comprehensive representation of worldwide art? If so, such an approach will, as suggested above, face limitations and constraints, as discussed earlier. Or is it about a process of understanding? A gesture of acknowledgement? An actual sensitivity to coeval art realities existing in parallel and / or intertwined with one another? If the curatorial intention is focused on this last aspect, then the curatorial approach should no longer be aimed towards overcoming resistances and limitations to a global movement towards further homogenization / standardization / canonization. Quite the opposite – in order to fulfil the aspiration for globality, why not accept (those) resiliences and work with local / cultural particularities, and not against them? To do so would mean to abandon the ideal of sweeping inclusiveness. Instead, it would mean to shift the focus to certain specific details of the global landscape – to their traces, their links, their diversity and “radical copresence” (De Sousa Santos 2007: 207). Not an all-encompassing authority over the map of global art, but rather, the dynamics and specifications of its junctions, nodes and interconnections. The panoptic tableau would be replaced by a distributed, rhizomatic ‘nodal network’ of various positions in the field of global art. To think in nodes means to think in non-hierarchical positions that are equal to one another. Thinking in nodes also, and above all, means to direct one’s attention to the cross-connections, sources of friction, points

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Annette Bhagwati / of intersection, and networks with other nodes, and to analyse and align these elements in a productive fashion. In a nodal system, there can be no central perspective, no dominant narrative. Instead, it is (above all) formed and sustained by exchange and dialogue engaged at eye level. What does this changed perspective entail for curatorial practice? First of all, such a shift enjoins every curator to always look beyond the dominant surfaces of the commonly visible and seemingly homogenous ‘Global Contemporary’: to visualize the diversity and particularity of (diverse) various traditions, swarming with the complexity (and equally broad diversity) of local narratives, emerging from and linked by a multitude of geographical and historical cross-connections, trajectories, traces. In order to be a match for this dynamic reality, any curatorial approach can only be understood as a position within a network of other positions, never as a universal(ist) narrative. This has several consequences:  for one, it frees the curator from any aspiration towards totality, and eliminates the need for forcing unrelated contradictory positions into some kind of consistent curatorial Gestalt. Any position can thus be valid, so long as it is clearly demarcated as a distinctive curatorial position – and so long as this is made transparent to the viewer. In such a way, a far broader depth and variety of perspectives might become acceptable: formats such as the controversial regional survey show might once more become possible; multiple, even conflicting narratives can be told at the same time; and traditions and aesthetics that seemed incompatible with the dominant discursive canon might become visible. In practice, this means that communication and moderation gain much greater significance. Contradictions should not be overcome, but rather be addressed in order to provoke a dialogue about particularities and localized differences. Curators could specify their vantage point and name works that, for particular reasons, were NOT included in the final selection; or they could signpost the difficulties and discussions that took place within the team when, for example, the issue of compatibility or translatability of works arose in a transcultural exhibition context. In a nodal system, curating becomes less about counterbalancing positions, but rather about allowing them to become capable of dialogue with one another. Only through permanent exchange – moving away from defendable positions – can one create the basic conditions towards an actual appreciation of the complexity and diversity of global traditions and narratives. Interestingly, the demand for clear curatorial positions, accompanied by a strengthened particularization, has earned increasing support from the former peripheries, which express themselves in a subversion and exploitation of the global biennale format. For instance, the Singapore Biennale: If the World Changed (2013) defied fundamental principles of the

Of Maps, Nodes and Trajectories biennial format. The Biennale consciously contextualized itself through its specific focus on the Mekong Region; international celebrity therefore became a criterion for exclusion, opening access to the global art circuit to positions not yet exhibited at a biennale. The curatorial stance was guided by the idea of a maximal multiplicity of perspectives: more than 20 co-curators contributed their knowledge on regional art practices.8 Another example is the first Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2012, whose explicit focus on engagement with the local – the city with its history, its present conditions – critically distinguished it from the global contemporary mainstream format. In the Ghetto Biennale of Haiti “defiance” even became the fundamental curatorial principle – and, paradoxically, also proved to be its access strategy into the international art circuits. Finally, not only the position of the curator, but also the works or objects themselves might be conceived as a system of nodes, and their potential significance might be used to provide a deeper understanding of globality in contemporary art. As mentioned above, artworks and objects have usually been used in curatorial concepts as examples or representatives for a topic or issue, and therefore affixed to a predetermined layer of meaning. However, one could also consider an exhibition model based on the different levels of meaning within an object, placing these multiple meanings in relation to other objects. According to this, it seems essential that such relationships arise from the objects themselves, their context, their histories, their properties. One insightful example for this approach can be seen in the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver, whose presentation of its permanent collection implements a post-narrative concept. The exhibits are presented in the entirety of their meaning: their functional, symbolic, and political contents are invoked through a variety of curatorial strategies. (Fig. 2) Through this, a complex web of rhizomatic relationships and lines of connections are formed with other objects and discourses. A complex and non-hierarchical mode of viewing is established, in which multiple modes of viewing and interpretation overlap, expand upon, and confront one another without excluding any one particular perspective (Bhagwati 2014: 398-400). Another example could be the exhibition Santhal Family (Antwerp 2008) which focused on unfolding the multiple perspectives, temporal layers and transcultural references emanating from a single sculpture (Dasgupta / Szewczyk / Watson: 2009). Last, but not least, in such a model of thinking, the concept of permanent exhibitions would be difficult to sustain. Taking all these considerations into account, it seems to become increasingly urgent that museums with a large inventory should view their collections not as a repository of quantifiable value. Rather, they should see 8  Personal communication with Tan Boon Hui, Director of Asia Society museum and former director of the Singapore Art Museum (SAM) 2009–2013.

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Fig. 2   Installation view, Multiversity   Galleries, Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver

Of Maps, Nodes and Trajectories them as a dynamic archive, an inexhaustible resource for nodal networks – one that can be continually interpreted anew, and placed into the most diverse of contexts, where contemporary and historical works and objects can be connected and brought into dialogues, both within a culture and transculturally. Only in this way – through the investigation and representation of infinite possibilities, particular positions and viewpoints, as well as through the acceptance of difference which alone enables exchange and dialogue – can a truly global art come into being through exhibition practice: perhaps, at last, the kind of global art that Jean-Hubert Martin wanted to introduce us to for the first time in Magiciens de la terre. •

This text is an edited transcript of a talk delivered on 14 February 2015 as part of the “Situating Global Art”- conference at the Literaturwerkstatt Berlin.

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References Araeen, Rasheed (1989): “Our Bauhaus, Others’ Mudhouse.” In: Third Text Vol. 3, Iss. 6, pp. 3–14. Belting, Hans (2009): “Contemporary Art as Global Art. A Critical Estimate.” In: Hans Belting and Andrea Buddensieg (eds.), The Global Art World. Audiences, Markets and Museums. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, pp. 38–73. Belting, Hans (2013): “From World Art to Global Art: View on a New Panorama.” In: Hans Belting, Andrea Buddensieg and Peter Weibel (eds.), The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds. Karlsruhe/Cambridge, MA: ZKM/MIT Press, pp. 178–185. Belting, Hans and Buddensieg, Andrea (2013): “From Art World to Art Worlds”. In: Hans Belting, Andrea Buddensieg and Peter Weibel (eds.), The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 28–34.

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Bennigsen, Silvia von, Gludowacz, Irene and Hagen, Susanne van, eds. (2009): Kunst Global. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz. Bhagwati, Annette (2011): “Curating Outside In.“ Lecture, Freie Universität Berlin, 5 July 2011, unpublished manuscript. Bhagwati, Annette (2014): “Art History versus Cultural History. Art and Artifact. The Plural Nature of the Object at the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver.” In: G. Ulrich Grossmann and Petra Krutisch (eds.), 33rd Congress of the International Committee of the History

of Art, Nuremberg, 2012, Congress Proceedings, Part 1, The Challenge of the Object. Die Herausforderung des Objekts, pp. 398–400. Buchloh, Benjamin (1989): “The Whole Earth Show. An Interview with Jean-Hubert Martin.” In: Art in America, Vol. 77, N° 5, pp. 150–159. Buergel, Roger M. (2007): “documenta 12. Die Migration der Form.” In: FAZ, 23. April 2007, http://www.faz.net/ aktuell/feuilleton/kunst/documenta12-die-migration-der-form-1435445. html, last accessed 20 June 2016. Clark, John (2006): The Master Plan of Seoul Towards 2020. Seoul: Seoul Metropolitan Government. Clark, John (2011): “Doing World Art History with Modern and Contemporary Asian Art.” In: World Art, Vol. 1, Iss. 1, pp. 93–99. Dasgupta, Anshuman, Szewczyk, Monika and Watson, Grant, eds. (2009): Exhibition catalogue. Santhal Family. Positions around an Indian Sculpture. Antwerp: MuHKA. Gardner, Belinda Grace (2007): “Beauty Documenta.” In: artnet.com, http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/ news/gardner/gardner3-31-06.asp, last accessed 19 June 2016. Haase, Amine (2007): “Gegen das triumphale Unheil – Rückzug in den Elfenbeinturm.” In: Kunstforum International: Die Documenta 12, Heft 187, pp. 41–63.

Of Maps, Nodes and Trajectories Juneja, Monica (2013): “Understanding Transculturalisms.” In: The Model House Research Group (eds.), Transcultural Modernisms, Publication Series of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Vol. 12, Berlin: Sternberg Press, pp. 22–33. Kapur, Geeta (2003): “subTerrain. Artworks in the Cityfold.” In: Indira Chandrasekhar and Peter C. Seel (eds.), body.city. Siting Contemporary Culture in India, New Delhi/Berlin: Tulika Books/ Haus der Kulturen der Welt, pp. 286– 303. Kravagna, Christian et al. (2007): “Shortcuts. Betrachter- und Formschicksale in Kassel – Berichte von der Documenta 12.” In: Texte zur Kunst, Heft Nr. 67 “Gespräche / Conversations”, pp. 197–211. Kwang-su, Oh (2000), Man + Space Kwangju Biennale 2000. Kwangju: Kwangju Biennale Foundation. Leeb, Susanne et al. (2007): “We Need to Talk. A Roundtable Discussion on documenta 12 with Monika Baer, Jörg Heiser, Branden W. Joseph and Susanne Leeb, moderated by André Rottmann.” In: Texte zur Kunst, Heft Nr. 67 “Gespräche / Conversations”, pp. 166–176. Marchart, Oliver et al. (2007): “Shortcuts. Betrachter- und Formschicksale in Kassel – Berichte von der Documenta 12.” In: Texte zur Kunst, Heft Nr. 67 “Gespräche / Conversations”, pp. 197– 211. Moon, Young Min (2011): “The Politics of Curating ‘Contemporary Korean Art’ for Audiences Abroad (2008).” In: Melissa Chiu and Benjamin Genocchio

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(eds.), Contemporary art in Asia: A Critical Reader. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 211–222. Morley, Simon (2013): “Dansaekhwa.” In: Third Text Vol. 27, pp. 189–207. Mosquera, Gerardo (1994): “Some problems in Transcultural Curating”. In: Jean Fisher (ed.), Global Visions: Towards a New Internationalism in the Arts. London: Kala Press, pp. 133–139. O’Neill, Paul (2012): The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rottmann, André et al. (2007): “Wir müssen reden / Ein Roundtablegespräch zur documenta 12 mit Monika Baer, Jörg Heiser, Branden W. Joseph und Susanne Leeb, moderiert von André Rottmann.” In: Texte zur Kunst, Heft Nr. 67, “Gespräche / Conversations”, pp. 108–128. Smith, Terry E. (2011): Contemporary Art. World Currents. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall. Sousa Santos, Boaventura de (2007): “Beyond Abyssal Thinking. From Global Lines to Ecologies of Knowledges.” In: Review, XXX, 1, pp. 45–89.

Copyrights Fig. 1   André Magnin, Fieldnotes from his research     trip to today’s Democratic Republic of         Congo, 1988 Fig. 2  Installation view, Multiversity Galleries,     Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver     Photo: Annette Bhagwati   

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Curating as Transcultural Practice

Barbara Lutz

Curating as Transcultural Practice. documenta 12 and the “Migration of Form” As migration increases and different ways of life evolve around various cultural affiliations, art needs to be considered within a global discourse. Given the complexity of the social, cultural and economic exchanges and dependencies that accompany globalization, universalizing criteria cannot do justice to the diversity of interrelated stories about people and things. Postcolonial and subaltern studies have shown that in the age of globalization art can no longer be monopolized by a Euro-American culture. It follows that “art history can no longer afford its national narrow-minded point of view”, as Susanne Leeb points out (2011), especially as art has always reflected, articulated and interpreted global transformations of socio-political conditions and cultural relations. Besides, the trajectories and trade routes of artworks cannot be traced back to a single – allegedly homogeneous – culture. Artistic traditions and symbols have been exchanged across national and cultural borders and between inherently different cultures since ancient times, and have thus always been highly heterogeneous and intertwined in various ways. With this in mind, the use of the term ‘global art’ is highly ambiguous, for it expresses neither the multifarious cultural approaches to art nor the dynamics of art and the mobility of its producers. Rather it suggests a unifying approach to art that provokes an even more specific identification and mapping of art and artists, reflecting the way art histories have divided the world from a regional standpoint based on geographical, national, federal or cultural criteria, and predicated generally on difference.1 But if the discourse on ‘global art’ aims to break away from defining and classifying art in terms of universalistic or particularistic concepts, then the result has to be a revision and renewal of (still Western-dominated) art historiography and its localizing criteria. According to art historian Monica Juneja, 1  According to art historian Hans Belting, the global age not only tends to restore its unity on another level than art history has divided the world, but it also shows “a new mapping of art worlds in the plural, which claim geographic and cultural difference” (Belting 2013: 184).

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Barbara Lutz / a global context calls for investigating the transcultural dynamics in the arts, which means sharpening awareness for a more dynamic definition of culture that emerges from the cross-border mobility of ethnic, religious and national constellations and is engaged in a permanent process of becoming. She sug­gests a transcultural perspective that provides new impulses for rethinking concepts of culture, identity and nation (2011). This not only raises the question of how to approach art theoretically, but also requires rethinking the modalities for presenting and mediating art. But first of all, what exactly constitutes a transcultural understanding in the arts, and what kind of historiography or narratives can it draw on?

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From a Transcultural Perspective to a Transcultural Understanding in the Arts Focusing on a transcultural perspective in curating,2 it is art historian, critic and curator Gerardo Mosquera who first applied the term transcultural to this activity in 1994, seeking from the Latin American vantage point of Cuba to expose the problems of universalizing tendencies in the conception of interna­tional exhibi­tions. In criti­cizing how “ex­hibitions showing one or more cultures to another, take place along the vertical axis from the centres down to the peripheries”, he addresses the dichot­omy and power imbalance between the “curating cultures” of the Western art world and the “curated cultures” of the non-Western art world (Mosquera 1994: 135). In his view, this critique is con­nected with an imperialistic function of Western curators and played a dominant role in the discourse on curating in the early 1990s.3 He argues that this situation would improve “if the transcultural projects emanating from the centres were collegiate, including the participation of specialists from the curated cultures right from the moment of conception”, by which Mosquera means the participation of “at least one representative of the culture or cultural region being curated” (ibid.: 137). Even if this kind of participation appears to be a fundamental step towards intercultural cooperation between peers, it is quite obvi­ous that the effort to include and hence to make visible artworks and artists from parts of the world that are usually ignored by the Western art world automatically implies the exclusion and non-visibil­ity of many others. Taking a critical view of this perspective, the common practice of many Western museums and exhibitions – selecting artworks, artists and curators for an exhibition by criteria like territory or cultural region and applying a quantitative and additive approach to participation based on national iden­tity – seems 2  For topologies in transcultural curating emerging with exhibitions at the turn of the 1980s in Europe, see for example the contribution by Annette Bhagwati in this book.

3  For more on this discourse see, for example, the chapter “Biennials and Global Curating from the 1990s Onward” in Paul O‘ Neill‘s book “The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s)” (2012: 60–70).

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highly question­able and misleading. This is not only because cul­ture is attrib­uted to a supposedly homogene­ous geopolitical area or local community, but also because the inclu­sion of participants is still based on an established system of power which deter­mines the integration of others to ensure a balanced cultural representation 4 on a global scale. In con­trast to this, transcultural curating has to con­sider first and foremost the propensity of people and things to associ­ate with multi­ple cultural affiliations at the same time and hence to con­sider art through a critical reflection of different but equal cultural perspec­tives beyond geopolitical per­spectives. But this raises questions about how to understand and how to deal with the com­plex interrelationships within and between cultures. A transcultural under­standing that takes into account social interrelationships was initially conceived by anthropolo­gist Fernando Ortiz in 1940. He introduced the Spanish term transculturación when he was researching the cultivation of tobacco and sugar cane through different migrant workers and local people in the context of the Cuban economy. (Ortiz 1995) Rejecting the notion of accultura­tion (i.e. the cultural adaptation of migrants to the host culture) predominant at the time, Ortiz argues that encounters between dif­f erent populations lead to new social and cultural formations of mutual give and take that pro­foundly change everyone involved. As the term was only picked up later on,5 transculturality is mostly familiar today as a comprehensive philosophical concept developed by Wolfgang Welsch and first published in 1992. Welsch goes beyond a specific geopolitical history by including current as well as former cross-border conditions of cultures, also with respect to the arts. At the heart of his con­cept is the idea that – especially due to increasing global migration in the 1990s – people identify with more than one way of life, lan­guage or tradi­tion. As he argues, the question of iden­tity is therefore no longer linked to steady, monolithic categories of nation, class or race, but set within the dynamics of multiple cultural affilia­tions. (Welsch 1999: 194-213) While Welsch’s concept follows an understanding of culture that ought to be free of any predefined cultural categories and demands for homogeneity, it also responds to social realities, as he points out with reference to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s pragmatically-based con­cept of culture. According to Welsch, Wittgenstein’s philosophical notions are an excellent basis for a transcultural concept of culture, because they focus on situations 4 In accordance with the critique of representation in the field of visual culture, this notion is criticized for neglecting the fact that representation can no longer be defined as mimesis of a concrete reality. In constructivist approaches, representation must be considered as a production of reality, always raising the question of who is represented (or excluded from representation) by whom and how.

5 Ortiz’s concept first spread in the 1980s in Latin America and French Canada before it also took root in the USA and Europe as a cross-disciplinary concept primarily applied in linguistics, and in literary and cultural studies (cf. Rama 1982; Lamore 1987; Pratt 1992).

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Barbara Lutz / of interaction, when “practices in life are shared” (Welsch 1999: 202).6 As Wittgenstein subscribes to the idea that practices are the fundamental social phenomenon and focuses on how they function as vehicles for understand­ing, the notion of culture to which Welsch relates here can be characterized as neither bound to an intellectual concept of knowledge nor to representations of an independently exist­ing reality. Instead, this notion comes close to an understanding of practice in social theory that emerges in the intercon­nection of human forms of acting and living as well as symbolic and cognitive structures of knowledge. According to Andreas Reckwitz’s detailed characterization of practice theory, knowledge is thus not only a form of cog­nitive understanding or restricted to a mental activity, but bound as well to bodily activities.7 As such it “enables a socially shared way of ascrib­ing meaning to the world” (2002: 246). This practical understanding of culture also opens the door to approaching art in a transcul­tural way. It is reflected in Welsch’s idea of providing “a fuller picture of cul­tural aesthetic approaches, one not modelled on European ideas alone, but encompassing and doing justice to the richness of […] arts and cultural traditions” (Welsch 2002: 89). He refers to the personal encounter with artworks and points to the situation of “fascination” or “primary attraction” that, in his view, does not necessarily depend on the viewer’s familiarity with the work’s cultural affiliations, but is effected by a “context-transcendent connectedness on the aesthetic and cognitive level” (ibid.: 91). Thus he stresses the need to take artworks, “whatever the distance in time or space may be, to be present challenges” (ibid.: 89, with original emphasis) and to recognize their activating potential, triggering a greater openness and sensitivity to various concepts of cultural life, and indeed to everyone’s own way of being. In this approach he underlines the potential of artworks to be “transculturally effective” and in this way he is also criticizing the modernist understanding of contextualism, for he exposes the problems of cultural determinism with its tendency to restrict all experience and cognition to “their cultural framework” and hence to con­sider all works or conceptions of art to be “limited to a specific cultural context”, generally the one they originate from (ibid.: 90). Drawing on this practice-based approach of transculturality in order to rethink the aforementioned problems of transcultural curating and to examine its current meaning for staging an exhibition implies revisiting 6  In relation to this, he points at the need to overcome an understanding of culture that is based on “hermeneutic conceptualizations with their beloved presumption of foreignness on the one hand and the unfortunate appropriat­ing dialectics of understanding on the other hand”. Instead he suggests focusing on “pragmatic efforts to interact”. (Welsch 1999: 203)

7  Knowledge is also a certain way of wanting and feeling that does not belong to individuals, but emerges as a spe­cific form of social practice. (Reckwitz 2002: 254)

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some essential questions. The first is about how art can be contextualized transculturally, taking into account the definition of knowledge and its sharing. The second, closely related, is about how to realize a transcul­tural approach in the process of encountering art, which then begs the third question of how to present and medi­ate art, focusing on the production of meaning. Returning to my earlier point about the need for transcultural thinking in the arts, I will refer to Welsch’s practical understanding of transculturality and relate it to the curatorial concept underlying documenta 12, which was known as the “migration of form”.8 Understanding and Approaching Art Transculturally at documenta 12 The twelfth edition of documenta took place in 2007 in Kassel 9 and was curated by artistic director Roger Martin Buergel and curator Ruth Noack. As part of their curatorial approach to documenta 12 they posed three questions which emerged in their en­counter with contemporary art and served as leitmotifs 10 that structured the entire pro­gramme and theoretical discourse. Even though neither the term transcultural nor the concept of transculturality were cited explicitly by the curators in the context of docu­menta 12, I will argue that a practical understanding of transculturality is particu­larly evident in the concept of the ‘migration of form’. This concept was harshly criticized by many professional viewers, such as art historians, art critics and curators, for its decontextual­izing formalism that allegedly ignored the artists’ intentions and the cultural specificity of the social contexts in which the works were produced.11 I will adopt a different per­spective below by exploring the curators’ decision to deliberately withhold authorized informa­tion and knowledge, to supply subjective narratives rather than an allegedly authentic context for the exhibits and to encourage viewers to produce their own readings by actively participating in the exhibition. As the curators pointed out, the concept of the ‘migration of form’ was “the orga­nizing principle of the show” (Buer­gel / Noack 2008: 5), 8  This approach is part of my dissertation on the paradigm of transculturality in relation to exhibition practice. Within a multidimensional analysis of documenta 12, I am investigating how specific structures of knowledge emerge in different forms of curatorial practice, which are not only considering transcultural entanglements in the arts, but are also manifested in the discourse and the display of the exhibition and its associated formats for a heterogeneous public. 9  documenta has been held for one hundred days every five years since 1955 (with some irregularities in its early life), based principally in Kassel, Germany.

10  While the first leitmotif “Is modernity our antiquity?” asks whether and to what extent our thinking and way of life are related to modern forms and visions of modernity, the second leitmotif “What is bare life?” concerns the existential nature of the human being as a creature continually threatened by torture, terrorism and other disasters in the postmodern era. The third leitmotif “What is to be done?” points to art edu­cation and the question of how to bridge the gap between art and public understanding. 11 See, for example, Enwezor 2007: 384; Holert 2007: 414; Egenhofer/Kravagna/Marchart 2007.

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Barbara Lutz / reflecting an approach to art which is neither dominated by an overriding topic that then has to be illus­trated by the artworks in some way nor bound to “a coherent rule or strict concept that could be generalised to a universal law independent of the works of art that were shown or of the specific encounters between the works and the audience” (ibid.). The concept thus demon­strated the curators’ spe­cific interest in the phenomenon of migration and “the long history of globalization” (ibid.: 6) that goes back much further in time than the so-called global turn, which is described as the rise of economic, socio-political and technological entanglements around the world since the end of the 1980s. Since migration implies the movement of people or entire populations from one place to another with an uncertain length of stay, there was a recognition here of different cultural per­ spectives and intertwined histories that could not be denied by a subjectinde­pendent, universal truth. This transcultural approach to art becomes even clearer in the cura­tors’ claim to neither “suc­cumb to all-encompass­ ing con­cepts”, nor to favour “geopoliti­cal identity (à la ‘art from India’)”. (Buergel / Noack 2007a: 11) In this regard, the ‘migra­tion of form’ was used to avoid the nation-based identification of artists and artworks. At the same time, it indicated the curators’ strong inter­est in overcoming estab­lished criteria of cultural difference that are tradi­tionally used to organize and classify art collec­tions in Western museums. Accord­ingly, the curators started their work by tracing back the multifari­ous migratory routes of artists and art­works across national borders and across established peri­ods of art history. They were not only prompted to “reconstruct the fates of certain forms” by tracking the migratory dynamics and aestheti­cal transformations of forms through various parts of the world, but also to consider how forms were enriched locally, inter­preted or rejected, and to rec­ognize “how the result has been an interrelation that is today rather dialecti­cal” (Buergel 2007a: 97–98). In the show, this approach became visible, for example, in the selection of drawings and paintings from the Berlin Saray Albums (DiezAlbums) of the 14th up to the 16th century, the oldest works shown in the exhi­bition. Taking these as orientation for their pre­paratory work, the curators especially focused attention on one drawing that shows a land­ scape.12 It was drawn by an artist from Persia who went to China with a dele­gation of Persian dip­lomats and integrated some Chinese forms in his conception of the world (for example, a specific form of rocks), which were later used as for­mulas in different cul­tures. (Buergel / Noack 2007b: 173 /177; Buergel / Noack 2008: 6) Recog­ nizing such inter­ relations in 12  It is called “Herbstlandschaft am Fluss” (Autumn Landscape by the River) and shows a miniature on paper measuring 20.3 by 29.1 cm.

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the arts and the heteroge­neous cultural connectedness of artistic forms, the curators arranged works in diverse constellations with regard to, for example, historical, genealogical, biographical or formal considerations. Their intention was to realize “an expansive layering of cor­rela­tions that work thematically as well as aes­thetically on chang­ing lev­els of complexity” (2008: 5). To demonstrate how the ‘migration of form’ reveals a transcultural approach to art, I will reflect on a specific exhibition situation in the documenta-Halle.13 I will take a closer look at two exhibits: The Zoo Story, produced by artist Peter Friedl for documenta 12 in 2007, and the Garden carpet, anonymously pro­duced in the late 18th cen­tury in the North-West of Iran. Both works are part of an arrangement of several exhibits which are staged in the grand main hall on the lower level of the venue.14 Entering the rectangu­lar hall by walking down the stairs on one of the short sides of the room, the carpet appears on the right. It is placed on a breast-high slanting plate that projects from the long blue wall. At a cer­tain distance and in contrast to this high-mounted object, The Zoo Story, a life-sized stuffed giraffe nearly four metres high, stands on the dark green floor at the other end of the elongated hall. (Fig. 1) Obviously, all the works in this room are different in many ways. First of all, they present different media − painting (Davila), drawing (Stollhans), installa­tion (Bonin), sculptural wall hang­ings (Konaté and Osmolovsky), textile traditions (Anonymous) and the stuffed animal (Friedl) – that would usu­ally go on display in a wide range of different museums, such as a museum of contem­porary art, a museum for applied arts or, in the case of the animal, a natural science museum. Secondly, they differ in the dates of their creation. While most art­works were made at the beginning of the 21st century, the ancient carpet and the painting by Davila are linked to other periods. And thirdly, as the works, their titles, and the names of their producers – but without explicit national identification – suggest, they relate to different geog­raphies, including Africa, Russia, Germany, Israel, Palestine, Chile and Iran. Taking all this into account, what could have been the reason for choosing and arranging the works in this way? How could the various differences and idiosyncra­sies of art be set in relation here? 13  The construction of this building shows a sequence of rooms, starting from the main entrance on the ground floor with a long and narrow entry space and some lateral cabinets on the left, continuing downstairs in the main hall in an elongated shape with a huge interior height that ends in a little separate, slightly tapering room.

14  Besides the two chosen works in the hall, the arrangement consists of a work by Cosima von Bonin (“Relax, it’s only a ghost”, 2006) in the centre and works by Abdoulaye Konaté (“Gris-Gris pour Israël et la Pal­estine”, 2005 and “Symphonie de bleu 8R”, 2007), Juan Davila (“The Lamentation: A Votive Painting”, 1991), Anatoli Osmolovsky (“Bread”, 2006), and Jürgen Stollhans (“w_2037405: Caput Mortuum”, 2007) hanging on the walls around it.

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Fig. 1   Exhibition view: documenta 12:        Peter Friedl, The Zoo Story (2007)

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Rethinking Knowledge through Contextualization documenta 12 gave no direct instructions or guidance for making sense of this constellation and arrangement of works in the exhibi­ tion. Besides the labelling of each exhibit with the name of the artist, the title, the year of production and its funder or lender, there was little further text or informa­tion about the works on the walls of the room.15 For many critics it was uncomfortable, confusing or embarrassing not to know what histo­ries, inten­tions and significance these works were all about.16 Walking through the exhibition at documenta 12 could thus induce a strong desire for comprehen­sive information about the specific contexts of the works.17 However, this moment of uncer­tainty and irri­tation was intended. It was in line with the documenta 12 idea of art mediation and edu­ca­tion, as Noack points out: “Dis­pensing with explanatory exhibi­tion texts played a vitally impor­tant role in furthering the view­ers’ own visual literacy skills. We pre­ferred the painful exposure of knowledge gaps, lest the text-knowledge regime be played off against aes­thetic experience.” (Noack 2009: 315) Obviously, the curators avoided any kind of information – expressed verbally or in writing – which might impose an explanation or determine the meaning of the exhibit and compete with the viewers’ indi­vidual read­ings of artworks at the moment of experi­encing them in a particular exhi­bition situation. Moreover, this implies the curators’ conviction that the eyes of the viewer do not have to be glued to wall texts in order to acquire allegedly true or original knowledge about art. This withholding of knowledge on the works differs fundamentally from traditional art historical conventions. Moreover, the critique of knowledge transfer through contextualization that is raised by Noack indicates a critical rethinking of his­torical paradigms. According to cultural theorist Mieke Bal, “contextualism was art history’s answer to the need to open art up to the world”, and thus “one of the most powerful move­ments in art theory of the late twentieth century” (Bal 2006: 86): Context proves to be a “tenacious dogma”,18 because “sticky from the single-temporality determinism out of which it emerged, [it] wrongly sug­gests that the ‘text’ – the work of art – is both protected and delimited from, yet dependent on, its con-text” (ibid., with origi­nal emphasis). Since for Bal the work of art itself can be understood as text, her notion clearly shows the need to doubt the general validity of any additional text that usually explains the meaning of 15  As Bonin’s work took centre stage in the arrangement of works in this room, there was a text plate hanging freely from the ceiling to the body height of the viewer. 16 See, for example, Egenhofer / Kravagna / Marchart 2007. 17  For example, Okwui Enwezor, artistic director of Documenta 11, complained about documenta 12

that the viewer was left to proceed through the venues “from one decontextualization to the next” (Enwezor 2007: 385). 18  From a transcultural point of view, Welsch is also criticizing “the typically modern axiom – or dogma – behind the contemporary relativism, contextualism and culturalism dominant in the humanities and in cultural studies today” (Welsch 2002: 90).

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Barbara Lutz / an art­work primarily or exclusively with respect to its specific period of origin. This obviously also points to traditional forms of presenting art divided into, for exam­ple, ancient art and contem­porary art, as well as into artefacts (any object manufac­tured by human beings) and artworks (belonging to the Western canon of art). From this per­spective, the critical notion of context also funda­mentally questions the production of meaning in terms of culturally coded power relations in space and time. In a detailed examination of Friedl’s The Zoo Story at documenta 12, curator Marco Scotini even notes a way to disarm power configurations: in an aesthetically autonomous object without any additional information or visual clarification he acknowledges the attempt to reset all things, pictures or statements to a state of potentiality that is not exhausted by a concrete expression, but articulates the absence of prescribed rules and the capacity of signs, forms of narrating and forms of being. (Scotini 2013: 183) In terms of power relations, the avoidance of comprehensive data about the exhibits at documenta 12 corresponds to the transcultural argument about overcoming the authoritarian status of predefined knowledge and the chance to approach art with an open mind. This, however, does not necessarily mean that approaching art is or can ever be free of any preconceptions. But rather than providing additional text on the works, the curators of documenta 12 created a situation which draws attention to the allegedly natural order of things – that is, in a Foucauldian sense, always bound to a historical set of power relations with no simple centre but within complex networks and diverse relations of society.



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Enabling Multiple Narratives Simultaneously The question of an adequate contextualization of artworks was not answered by documenta 12 in general. However, the curators were not trapped in a simple denial of context, as many critics claimed in their accusation of formalism. Instead the curators tried to realize “a cosmology of micro-stories told at multiple levels” (Noack 2009: 315). Rather than leaving behind all (art) historical narratives, this implied considering artistic phenomena in relation to various cultural perspectives and histories. In the documentaHalle, visitors were obviously not left alone to read artworks, as the ‘literacy skills’ suggest. The wall label of each exhibit con­tained a reference to a page in the exhibition catalogue. This provides texts on each work in chronological order (by the date of its making) that were written by different authors, such as art historians, curators, art critics, or theorists. Moreover, the catalogue includes biographies of the artists and a list with information about all the works shown or involved in documenta 12. Since the catalogue was “meant to be used as a reference tool” (ibid.), the texts on the exhibits provided theoretical reflections.19 (Fig. 2)

Curating as Transcultural Practice

Fig. 2   Exhibition view: documenta 12:       Garden carpet (ca. 1800)

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Barbara Lutz / In the catalogue text for Peter Friedl’s The Zoo Story it is the artistic director himself who acquaints the reader with the biographical fate of the giraffe and the artist’s idea of triggering stories beyond scientific knowledge of the object. The giraffe was called Brownie and was once a resident of the zoo in Qalqilya, a city in Palestine, before it died during the second Intifada in August 2002, when it panicked at the bombing and ran against an iron bar. After preparation, the animal was exhibited in the zoo’s museum. Earlier, Brownie had been brought as a gift to Qalqilya in 1997 when it was still a prosperous city and had not yet been cordoned off by the Israeli Security Wall. (Buergel 2007b: 246) Thus, at first sight, the giraffe could be seen as a symbol or a documentation of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is also a widely known fact from many media pictures. But as Buergel points out finally, the essential aspect for Friedl lies in the notion of Brownie as an image that would hopefully trigger “a narrative distinct from the stereotypical impotent media images of the conflict and occupation zone, which bloodily offend any political rationality” (ibid.). For the carpet, in contrast, there is no such biography of the object. But neither is it catego­ rized as an artefact with reference to manufactur­ing methods. Instead, the text on the carpet by art historian Friedrich Spuhler focuses on a description of its visible patterns connected to its use in garden culture. As he outlines in the catalogue, “[l]ovingly tended gar­dens were a luxury in the generally barren landscapes of the Near East” and thus the culti­vation of gardens “established a contrast between wild, danger­ous nature and the idyll tamed by humans and enclosed within garden walls” (Spuhler 2007: 32). What is relevant here is how the texts are articulated: these interpretations of works by authors with different professional backgrounds underline that there is no universally valid truth about the works. Like in the case of the labels, the works are not categorized by tradi­tional methods of classification centred on Western modernity (for example, by nation, era or style). Moreover, the integration of the texts in the catalogue did not neces­sarily establish a direct comparison, contrast or compe­tition with the viewer’s own readings. Rather, the texts offered a further, more specific reason to discuss different readings of each work, even when considering them as part of the arrangement in the exhibition. This again highlights the curators’ aforementioned idea of ‘furthering the viewers’ own visual literacy skills’ by inviting every viewer to participate in the process of producing meaning in order to open up different and multiple narratives. Placing exemplary readings in the catalogue enabled 19  With the handy size of approx. 23 x 17 x 3 cm the catalogue could be read not only before or after, but also during a visit to the exhibition.

When the curators realized that not everyone was buying it, they also provided copies within the different exhibition spaces (Noack 2009: 315).

Curating as Transcultural Practice viewers to encounter art in an open situa­tion, where they were not obliged to fol­low specific, culturally coded knowledge, but instead could rely on their own cul­tural affiliations and knowledge as a first step to approaching the art. While this can be related to Welsch’s transcultural approach to providing a ‘fuller picture’ of arts and culture, it also indicates the potentially uneasy situation or, at the same time, enriching experience evoked by the ‘present challenge’. The Production of Meaning as a Shared Practice of Mental and Bodily Activities Closely associated with this approach to art, the curators were propagating the notion of ‘aesthetic experience’, derived from their idea of taking into account the vari­ety of multiple narratives on different levels and in different formats in the exhibition, where the meaning of an artwork is not yet sanctioned by the truth claims of an authoritarian interpretation. Besides, in keeping with a practical understanding of transculturality it no longer seems appropriate to decode an artwork by extracting one, allegedly authentic, meaning from the exhibit (see also footnote 4). Rather its meaning is produced in the personal interaction of the viewer with the artwork, which is, according to Reckwitz’s notion of knowledge, based on the intercon­nection between both mental and bodily activi­ties and suggests a process of understanding that emerges as ‘a socially shared way of ascribing meaning to the world’. According to the definition by the research team for docu­menta 12 educa­tion, ‘aesthetic experience’ occurs when a viewer is forced to make sense of an artwork. By referring to Juliane Rebentisch’s Aesthetics of Installation Art (2012 [2003]), however, they claim that the read­ing of a work can never be completely fulfilled for the viewer, so that he or she is repeatedly confronted by something new as a potentially unresolvable proc­ess (Ballath / Gressel / Landkammer / Ortmann / Settele 2009: 333). The approach to art formulated here con­nects the analytical process of reception with a generative process of pro­duction, dissolving the rigid boundary between them. Moreover, it implies that the meaning of artworks can never be deter­mined definitely or comprehensively, but is always open to changing interpreta­ tions in the process of the production of meaning by each viewer. Looking back at documenta 12 in a lecture in 2009, Buergel contemplated how this process might evolve: “The migration of form is noth­ing but the very passage of subjective transformation that may turn a giraffe into a carpet, or […] not. It is an activity of the mind, of the imagination”. Accord­ing to this idea, the display of works was intended to trigger movements of thought that require a certain kind of individual engagement. This seems all the more in line with Welsch’s view of artworks as a ‘present challenge’, as the

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curators make it clear that ‘aesthetic experience’ is less about immediate per­ception, but rather something which “challenges immediacy, and enables us to rethink the terms, which guide us through the present.” (Buergel / Noack 2007c: 3). Thus it seems that the ‘migra­tion of form’ not only envisages connecting artworks by virtue of their outer or vis­ual appearance, but also by drawing on the potential of imagination, which is closely connected to the cul­tural and social affiliations of every viewer. Buergel argues that viewers can make links with their own present if “the function of memory is getting activated that way, that is by reviving the chain of things that once mattered and still matter to us” (Buergel 2009).20 Different meanings can emerge when viewers use their own imagination to set heterogeneous exhibits from a wide range of artistic forms of presentation in relation to one another. But participating in the production of meaning as an ‘aesthetic experi­ence’ also involves all the senses. According to Buergel, this occurs when “memory is allowed to travel, to experience a passage, moving back and forth – at least if a human subject makes itself available to precisely this exchange” (2009). In this sense, mental activity goes hand in hand with the physical movement of people, and thus, in the figura­tive sense, the visitors to documenta 12 could also be imagined as people cross­ing different bor­ders and living in a transitory space 21. Even though they are located on the safe or institutionally secured ground of the exhibi­tion space, the duration of their visit is lim­ited to a particular time of access. Moreover, exchanges happening here are provided through various constellations that enable cultural and social interactions and are thus characterized by mental and bodily activi­ties. These activities are not only related to the encounter with artworks, but also with their specific arrangement, with the display and the architec­tural styles22 of the venues, and in particular, with the differ­ent understandings, languages and cultural 20 Similarly, for Scotini the giraffe shows a method for revealing internal con­nections that serves as a way to study the outer phenomena and as an instrument to activate imagination (2013: 188). Looking at the silent and motionless body of the giraffe he reveals different stories: they are linked, for example, to the wall that encloses nearly the whole city of Qalqilya in the West Bank, or to the ghettos and enclaves that are created by the security wall. Besides this, he refers to apartheid in South Africa, where Brownie origi­nates from and, moreover, to the history of zoos, invented in the early 19th century when the first living giraffe came to Europe in 1827 as a gift of the Egyptian viceroy to the French king, decisively triggering the development of zoological, ethnological, and later colonial exhibitions. (ibid.: 185-186) 21  Hilde Van Gelder also speaks about a transitory space with regard to the production of meaning around Friedl’s artistic work. Although this space is primarily conceived as imaginative, it also offers

a cer­tain poten­tial for activity that is based on the in-between: “There is always a gap between the in­tended and the pro­duced meaning of an artwork. But that exactly is a fascinating void. It is in the transitory, fragile space where the work of art produces its own meaning – or releases its reflexive image – that new political insights, new philosophies, new ways of living together can be imagined.” (Van Gelder 2013: 152) 22  The architecture of the five different main venues of documenta 12 conveys in­herent concepts of the public sphere prevalent at the time of their construction. Built at the end of the 20th cen­tury, the documenta-Halle reflects concepts of modernity. For Noack “[t]he modernist docu­menta - Halle seems to assume a ready-made public, its glass façade signifying transparency and the ab­sence of barriers – though we know, of course, that the decisive barriers (class, social background, edu­ca­tion, etc.) are in­visible.” (Noack 2009: 315)

Curating as Transcultural Practice affilia­tions of the visi­tors, who are participating in or even generating these con­stellations for a certain time in this space. It was the curator’s inten­tion to encourage viewers to make indi­vid­ual choices and to play an active part amidst the vari­ous constellations of the exhi­bition. This was sup­ported in many different ways by the exhibition design. In the documenta-Halle, for example, the colour scheme for the rooms, like the blue wall and the green floor, was designed to avoid the “apparent neu­trality” (Noack 2009: 315) of the White Cube 23 that today not only constitutes a histori­cal para­digm but still denotes the ideal vision of a space for exhibiting art based on the princi­ples of European and North American modernism. Hence the visitors to documenta 12 were placed in a posi­tion to examine their own specific relationships to things and people, and thus to the world. This practical understanding of transculturality becomes all the more apparent from the fact that visi­tors were not obliged to follow an arranged pathway or to recon­struct a specific knowledge about art. Instead they were offered several con­stella­tions that might correspond to multiple cultural affiliations and in very different ways. Accordingly, visitors were treated as self-empowered viewers who could take cen­tre stage in the pro­duction of mean­ing in the here and now of the particular exhibition situation. This practical production of knowledge was specifically taken up and devel­oped by the public programme documenta 12 education, which was understood as an integral part of the curatorial concept, but also critically reflected on it within a separate research project. With their claim to share several approaches to art and to generate different formats for a diverse range of visitors and groups of varying interests, the programme team applied a participatory approach to art that was oriented towards the third leitmotif of documenta 12 and the question “What is to be done?” It was dedicated to aesthetic education and based on formats of discourse and communication, rather than on the mere acquisition of facts and information as imparted in the traditional lecture style. Thus, documenta 12 offered a variety of interactive formats designed to encour­age direct engagement with art, inviting visitors to share their experiences and explorations at special locations in- and outside the exhibition space. While critically complementing and at the same time extending the curatorial approach to art, the activity of documenta 12 education was much less concerned with transmitting knowledge about the art on dis­play than with enabling and using the activity of the visitors to create situations for reflecting on art as a transcultural medium. • 23  For the concept’s historical development see O’Doherty [1976] 1986. For the incorporation of the White Cube ideology in the context of biennials and large-scale exhibitions see, for example, Filipovic 2005.

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References Bal, Mieke (2006): “De-centering. The Fragility of Mastery.” In: Bartomeu Marí (ed.), Peter Friedl 1964-2006. Barcelona: MACBA (Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona), pp. 79–108. Ballath, Silke et al. (2009): “Glossary.” In: Carmen Mörsch (ed.), documenta 12 education II. Between Critical Practice and Visitor Services. Results of a Research Project. Zürich and Berlin: Diaphanes, pp. 333–347. Belting, Hans (2013): “From World Art to Global Art. View on a New Panorama.” In: Hans Belting, Andrea Buddensieg and Peter Weibel (eds.), The Global Contemporary and the Rise of the New Art Worlds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 178–185. Buergel, Roger M. (2007a): “Roger M. Buergel, away from Miami.” Interview by Joachim Bessing. In: 032c, issue 13 /  2007, pp. 96–99.

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Buergel, Roger M. (2007b): “2007, Peter Friedl.” In: documenta 12. Catalogue. Cologne: Taschen, pp. 246–247. Buergel, Roger M. (2009): “Into the grey zone (between museum and exhibition).” Lecture held at the conference d documenta – a conference towards dOCUMENTA (13), Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin, 19 September 2009. Buergel, Roger M. and Noack, Ruth (2007a): “Preface.” In: documenta 12. Catalogue. Cologne: Taschen, pp. 11–13. Buergel Roger M. and Noack, Ruth (2007b): “What Is to Be Done? Jennifer Allen talks with the curators

of Documenta 12.” In: Artforum, May 2007, pp. 173–174, 177 and 392. Buergel, Roger M. and Noack, Ruth (2007c): “About the exhibition.” documenta 12 Press Kit, Press Conference before the opening, June 13 2007, http://www.documenta12.de/ index.php?id= pressemitteilungen&L=1, last accessed 25 January 2016. Buergel, Roger M. and Noack, Ruth (2008): “Some Afterthoughts on the Migration of Form.” In: Afterall, Issue 18, pp. 5–15. Egenhofer, Sebastian, Kravagna, Christian, Marchart, Oliver et al. (2007): “Betrachter- und Formenschicksale in Kassel. Berichte von der documenta 12.” In: Texte zur Kunst, “Gespräche / Conversations”, No. 67, pp. 197–211. Enwezor, Okwui (2007): “History Lessons.” In: Artforum, September 2007, pp. 382–385. Filipovic, Elena (2005): “The Global White Cube.” In: Elena Filipovic and Barbara Vanderlinden (eds.), The Manifesta Decade: Debates on Contemporary Art Exhibitions and Biennials in Post-Wall Europe. Brussels and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 63–84. Holert, Tom (2007): “Failure of Will.” In: Artforum, September 2007, pp. 404–415. Juneja, Monica (2011): “Das Konzept der Transkulturalität.” Lecture held at the conference Kulturerbe – Denkmalpflege: transkulturell, University of Heidelberg, 29 September 2011, http://www.asia-

Curating as Transcultural Practice europe.uni-heidelberg.de/en/research/ d-historicities-heritage/d12/konferenzkulturerbe-denkmalpflege-transkulturell. html#c6336, last accessed 6 January 2016. Lamore, Jean (1987): “Transculturation. Naissance d’un mot.” In: Vice Versa 21 (“Revue transculturelle et multilingue”), pp. 18–19. Leeb, Susanne (2011): “Hegemonial Revenge.” In: Kulturrisse. Zeitschrift für radikaldemokratische Kulturpolitik, 03/ 2011. http://kulturrisse.at/ausgaben/ ganz-draussen-sozialreportagen-ausdem-abseits/kosmopolitiken/hegemonialrevenge, last accessed 7 January 2015. Mosquera, Gerardo (1994): “Some Problems in Transcultural Curating.” In: Jean Fisher (ed.), Global Visions. Towards a New Internationalism in the Visual Arts. London: Kala Press in asso­ciation with the Institute of International Visual Arts, pp. 133–139. Noack, Ruth (2009): “Exhibition as Medium. Education at documenta 12.” In: Carmen Mörsch (ed.), documenta 12 education II. Between Critical Practice and Visitor Services. Results of a Research Project. Zürich and Berlin: Diaphanes, pp. 311–316. O’Doherty, Brian (1986 [1976]): Inside the White Cube. The Ideology of the Gallery Space. Santa Monica: Lapis Press. O‘Neill, Paul (2012): The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ortiz, Fernando (1995 [1940]): Cuban Counterpoint. Tobacco and Sugar, transl. by Harriet de Onis. Durham and

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London: Duke University Press. (Spanish original: Ortiz, Fernando (1940): Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar. La Habana: Jesús Montero). Pratt, Mary Louise (1992): Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation. London and New York: Routledge. Rama, Ángel (2012 [1982]): Writing across Cultures. Narrative Transculturation in Latin America, transl. by David Fryre. Durham: Duke University Press. (Spanish original: Rama, Ángel (1982): Transculturación narrativa en América Latina. México D.F., Buenos Aires and Barcelona: Siglo Veintiuno Editores). Rebentisch, Juliane (2012 [2003]): Aesthetics of Installation Art. Berlin: Sternberg Press. (German original: Rebentisch, Juliane (2003): Ästhetik der Installation, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp.) Reckwitz, Andreas (2002): “Toward a Theory of Social Practices. A Development in Culturalist Theorizing.” In: European Journal of Social Theory 5(2). London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi: Sage Publications, pp. 243–263. Scotini, Marco (2013): “Die Reise der Giraffe.” In: Dirk Snauwaert (ed.), Über Peter Friedl. Brüssel: Wiels Motto Books, pp. 166–190. Spuhler, Friedrich (2007): “Ca. 1800, Gartenteppich.” In: documenta 12. Catalogue. Cologne: Taschen, pp. 32–33. Van Gelder, Hilde (2013): “Intermediality, for the Sake of Radical Neutrality, in Peter Friedl‘s Work.” In: Raphaël Pirenne and Alexander Streitberger (eds.), Lieven Gevaert Series, Vol. 15, Heterogeneous objects. Intermedia and Photography after Modernism. Leuven: Leuven University Press, pp. 149–174.

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Welsch, Wolfgang (1992): “Transkulturalität – Lebensformen nach der Auflösung der Kulturen.” In: Information Philosophie, No. 2, pp. 5–20. Welsch, Wolfgang (1999): “Transculturality – the Puzzling Form of Cultures Today.” In: Mike Featherstone and Scott Lash (eds.), Spaces of Cul­ture: City, Nation, World. London and Thousand Oaks: Sage, pp. 194–213. Welsch, Wolfgang (2002): “Rethinking identity in the age of globalization – a transcultural perspective.” In: Aesthetics & Art Science (Taiwan Association of Aesthetics and Art Science), No. 1, pp. 85–94.

Copyrights

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Fig. 1          Fig. 2          

Exhibition view: documenta 12: Peter Friedl, The Zoo Story (2007), Photo: Ines Agostinelli / documenta Archiv Exhibition view: documenta 12: Garden carpet (ca. 1800), Photo: Ines Agostinelli /  documenta Archiv

Exhibiting Contemporary Moroccan Art

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Sarah Dornhof

Exhibiting Contemporary Moroccan Art: Situated Curatorial Narratives and Institutional Frames of Globalization Along with the expansion of thinking contemporary art in relation to globalization, a new interest has arisen in the particularities of art scenes in nonWestern local contexts which are tackling the challenge of how to narrate entangled art histories around the globe. This chapter considers different ways of presenting contemporary art from Morocco, both as a historically specified social field and as part of global circuits of concepts. At the crossroads between Africa, Europe and the ‘Arab World’, with a long history of transcultural encounters, Morocco offers some pertinent examples of global, transcultural art discourses and practices. It is also a country of tensions between traditions and (post-)modernity, authoritarianism and neoliberal capitalism, postcoloniality and globalization. In the following, I would like to demonstrate how these tensions, and the contradictions they imply, are constitutive for the particular visibility of Moroccan artists. I will consider two recent exhibitions of contemporary art from Morocco that are differently situated in relation to global discourses on art, cultural imaginaries, and the persistence of postcolonial conditions. The two large-scale events opened almost simultaneously in late 2014: “100 ans de création au Maroc” (100 Years of Creation in Morocco), the inaugural exhibition at the Musée Mohammed VI (MMVI), the Museum for Modern and Contemporary Art in Rabat, and “Le Maroc Contemporain” (Contemporary Morocco) at the Institut du Monde Arabe (IMA) in Paris. By describing the curatorial narratives and visual pathways through these exhibitions, I will address the different ways in which each attempted to identify contemporary art from Morocco while inscribing it within a global art discourse. Underlying both these exhibitions there seems to have been a common problematic: the difficult negotiation between curators and art institutions in Morocco and France over the role contemporary artists play in attempting to define, decolonize or decentralize the historical present of art and culture in Morocco. Each of the exhibitions in question follows a distinctive approach to the history of Moroccan art. The Rabat exhibition “100 Years of Creation” at the newly constructed Museum for Modern

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Sarah Dornhof / and Contemporary Art that opened its doors on 7 October 2014 presented a periodization of Moroccan art based on a universalized European art history. The exhibition in Paris, “Contemporary Morocco”, which opened on 24 October 2014 at the Institut du Monde Arabe, displayed works by “living Moroccan artists” as part of a global, culturally diverse art scene which was credited, within this context, with extensive critical potential and socio-political positioning, avoiding any historiography or particular contextualization of the works on display beyond a mere idea of ‘being Moroccan’. In this way, both exhibitions created specific frames for presenting Moroccan artists as global artists: embedded in Western concepts of modern and contemporary art, and culturally defined by recent narratives of Morocco’s history as a history of cultural diversity and transcultural encounter.

Museological Narratives

The Colonial Legacy The question of how to present and define art from Morocco can hardly be separated from the colonial legacy of art institutions and discourses in the country. Museums and art schools in Morocco were founded under the French and Spanish protectorates and were informed by a European perspective on art history and a functional understanding of applied arts 1. The historiography of Moroccan art usually begins after independence (1956) and often employs narratives of the birth or sudden emergence of a young modern art scene in Morocco in the 1960s, and with it a new artistic search for a Moroccan identity. Such narratives of the belated emergence of a Moroccan avant-garde need to be seen, as Toni Maraini and others have pointed out, as part of a colonial ideology in which colonized countries did not have a history prior to colonization and were helped by this colonization to establish a national history of (modern) art (Maraini 2014: 99-101). In addition, Morocco’s art history is, in many regards, marked by an emphasis on absence and lack rather than by positive accounts of artists’ biographies, art spaces, institutions, markets and education programmes. This topos of lack ascribed to national art institutions and critical art discourse still persists among artists, curators and critics in Morocco. The experience of structural insufficiency may explain why so many Moroccan artists study, live and work outside of Morocco and why artistic initiatives 1  From 1912 to 1956 two thirds of Moroccan territory was under a French Protectorate, while Spain controlled the remaining parts of the country in the north and the Sahara in the south, the city of Tangier being an international city. In his book “Art in the Service of Colonialism: French Art Education in Morocco 1912–1956”, Hamid Irbouh demonstrates how the French colonial

administration imposed their domination through the systematic modernization and regulation of local arts and crafts as well as through the creation of educational institutions like the Casablanca School of Fine Arts, where students were channelled into applied art to learn the skills that were needed for developing the ‘new cities’ (see Irbouh 2005).

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in Morocco itself often remain ephemeral, or address only a very small audience, something which has recently undergone slow transformation. In her book “Imagined Museums: Art and Modernity in Postcolonial Morocco” (2010), Katarzyna Pieprzak argues that the obvious lack of efficient museums, cultural institutions and structures in post-independence Morocco have led artists and intellectuals to organize alternative spaces where they can show, circulate and discuss their work. Pieprzak therefore approaches the museum in the Moroccan context as an “imagined, discursive, or portable technology through which one can muse on art, society, and memory”, thereby reaching beyond any physical architecture or material collection (Pieprzak 2010, xxii). In the 1960s and 1970s, an “imagined museum” was enacted primarily in the intellectual, artistic and political sphere of cultural journals, such as Souffles / Anfas, Integral and Lamalif. The concept of a particular Moroccan modernity and questions of cultural renewal were debated in these journals along with other cultural, political and social issues2 (Sefrioui 2012). In the 1970s, at the height of the repression under King Hassan II, Souffles / Anfas were forbidden and their founders incarcerated3. According to Pieprzak, in the cultural void left after the disappearance of these journals, the 1990s and 2000s were characterized by cultural festivals, “ephemeral outdoor museums” and “nomadic cultural practices”, such as the annual art festival in Asilah, the art collective and atelier La Source de Lion in Casablanca founded in 1995, and Abdellah Karroum’s project space L’Appartement 22 in Rabat. (Pieprzak 2010) Unlike André Malraux’s idea of an imaginary museum4, the imagined museum that Pieprzak sketches for different periods in Moroccan postindependence history designates a counter-public to both the state-run museums at that time and the dominant art discourse shaped by Western notions of modernity, avant-garde and progress. The imaginary aspect of institutionalizing art in the Moroccan context was, according to Pieprzak’s account, not so much a matter of public structures or technological reproduction, but a heterotopia of identity struggles, educational projects and the creation of critical publics. Even with recently established art institutions, these struggles and projects are still relevant today. While large exhibitions in Morocco and in Europe advanced the international visibility of contemporary art from the region, many artists in Morocco still complain not only 2  Kenza Sefrioui published a book about the review Souffles: “Souffles, (1966–1973), Espoirs de revolution culturelle au Maroc” (2012), with detailed information about its history, contributors, topics and aesthetics. An anthology with English translations was published in 2016: “Souffles-Anfas: A Critical Anthology from the Moroccan Journal of Culture and Politics”, edited by Olivia C. Harrison and Teresa Villa-Ignacio. 3 The founders of the review Souffles and its Arabic counterpart Anfas, Abdellatif Laâbi and Abraham Serfaty, were imprisoned in 1972, Laâbi

for eight years, Serfaty for seventeen years. The film “La moitie du ciel” (2015) by Abdelkader Lagtaâ tells the story of Laâbi’s imprisonment, narrated from the perspective of his wife, Jocelyne Laâbi. 4 The Imaginary Museum (“Le musée imaginaire”) began as a long-term project in 1947 to archive and montage photographic reproductions of art from around all world and different historical periods, based on a universalist notion of the likeness of art across cultural, geographical and historical particularities.

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Sarah Dornhof / about the continuous lack of support and infrastructure, but also about the absence of an audience and of critical discourse on art 5. The National Museum for Modern and Contemporary Art in Rabat

Museological Narratives

In 2014, the Moroccan government inaugurated the first National Museum for Modern and Contemporary Art in the capital Rabat. The Museum, which is named after the present king Mohammed VI, is the first major museum built since Morocco gained independence from France in 1956. It is run by the National Foundation of Museums in Morocco, founded in 2011, and has partnered with the Louvre Museum in Paris and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. At first glance, this building does not look like other modern and contemporary art museums around the world: its outer façade is designed in a neo-Moorish style with a doublearch ornamented colonnade, revealing behind it a second façade covered by large reproductions of paintings 6 (Fig 1). The interior likewise mixes elements of modern architecture and traditional ornamentation, supplemented by signs of royal sovereignty, such as portraits of the king. It was the king himself who inaugurated the museum on 7 October 2014 7. The museum opened with an exhibition entitled “1914–2014: 100 ans de création au Maroc” (1914–2014: 100 Years of Creation in Morocco), which showed about 300 works by 150 Moroccan artists 8. The museum was launched without a collection of its own, and all the works on display were loans or donations by artists, collectors and gallery owners. As the title suggests, the aim was to trace Morocco’s recent art history throughout the 20th century to the present day. Its curator, Mohamed Rachdi 9, explained this choice of timeframe by the fact that works from earlier periods in Morocco did not enjoy the status of an artistic image (Rachdi 2014a): they took the form of ornament, craftwork, poetry or music, but not of 5  This information is the result of my research in Morocco since 2014, involving lengthy stays and dealing with questions of contemporary arts and public spheres in Morocco. 6 This ambivalent appearance is ultimately the result of conflicting interests during the long period of construction. The architect Rachid Andaloussi, who had won the competition run by the Moroccan Ministry of Culture to design the new building, turned down the Ministry’s later demand that he modified the outer façade in line with a more traditional, Arab-Moorish style, and as a result he did not complete the project. The architects Chakor continued the construction, fulfilling the Ministry’s wishes (Souid 2015: 25; ALM 2003). 7  Following the first exhibition of Moroccan modern and contemporary art, the MMVI presented “Le Maroc mediéval – Un empire de l’Afrique à l’Espagne” (2015), which had already been shown

at the Louvre in Paris; an exhibition of street art called “Main Street / Jidar” (2015), which included major façades in the city space; a solo show by the French sculptor César, “César, une histoire méditerranéenne” (2015–16); a retrospective of Alberto Giacometti (2016); the exhibition “Volumes fugitifs. Faouzi Laatiris et l’Institut national des beaux-arts de Tétouan” (2016); the exhibition “Femmes, artistes marocaines de la modernité 1960–2016” (2016–17); and, most recently, the exhibition “L’Afrique en Capitale” (2017) and a retrospective devoted to Pablo Picasso, “Face à Picasso” (2017). 8 This category included artists living in Morocco as well as in the diaspora. 9  Following continual conflicts and disagreement with the Fondation Nationale des Musées du Maroc, Mohamed Rachdi stepped back from his position as main curator shortly before the exhibition opened.

Exhibiting Contemporary Moroccan Art

Fig. 1  Musée Mohammed VI d’Art Moderne et       Contemporain, Rabat  

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Sarah Dornhof / autonomous pictures. The exhibition identifies the beginning of national artistic creation as the point when Moroccans appropriated the modern techniques of image making – techniques they learned from Western artists – to create their own views and visions10. Sultan Moulay Abdelaziz (1878–1943) is presented as the first Moroccan to take photographs. He learned photographic techniques and skills from the French photographer Gabriel Veyre, whom he had invited to his palace in Marrakesh. He then primarily took pictures of his harem women in different poses and decors (Rachdi 2014b, 12; see also Crétois 2012). As an early Moroccan painter, the exhibition presents Mohammed Ben Ali R’bati (1861–1939). Rachdi explains how Ben Ali R’bati taught himself, taking guidance from an Irish painter who had moved to Tangier and for whom he worked as a cook. He painted everyday scenes from the city of Tangier: a Qur’anic school, the palace, a wedding celebration, the interior of a house, etc. The narrative of this exhibition thus sought to trace the origins of Moroccan modern art neither in traditionally embedded art practices nor in the avant-garde movement of the post-independence era, but placed them at the heart of colonial encounter, reproducing not only modern concepts of artistic authorship, realism and authenticity, but also a privileging of certain themes: the harem, sequences from everyday life and private interiors. Disregarding many recent contestations of a linear and homogeneous history of modernity, the exhibition thus reproduced a Western epistemology of art history, in which modernity is clearly distinguished from tradition and oriented towards the future, valuing art’s newness, originality and autonomy. Many works shown in the exhibition “100 Years of Creation” would in themselves challenge these ideas, which are at the foundation of Western conceptions of modernity, in particular the distinction between the traditional and the modern. Yet they were absorbed through the presentation into an art history narrative that tended to erase complex, entangled and conflictual histories within this period of creation. The narrative of identifying certain artists as original figures of Moroccan modern arts further imitates the assumption in Euro-American art history that an artwork is an object with an ‘author’ who functions as a principle for unifying a corpus of work (see Preziosi 1989: 22; 31–32). By suggesting that a particular Moroccan modernity originated at a point where Moroccans were copying or appropriating Western technologies and using them to express their own subjective views, the exhibition acknowledged the colonial entanglements and the transcultural character of a Moroccan history of modern art, while relying on Western art historical conventions of authorship, originality and progressive development. 10  See also Nuha N.N. Khoury’s critique on the framework for studying modern Arab art, in which modernity merges with the adoption of easel painting, resulting in a definition “in which modernity is trapped within Western modes of (artistic) produc-

tion […] while other forms of art that do not conform to the definition are relegated to ‘craft’ status or historized as ‘Islamic’ – a categorization that is itself decidedly modern” (Khoury 2009: 56-57).

Exhibiting Contemporary Moroccan Art This definition of modern Moroccan arts as subjective visions informed by Western concepts and technologies runs through the chronological narrative of the exhibition, organized around four periods described in the exhibition catalogue as follows. The first period from the early 20th century to the late 1950s, marked by the kind of visual appropriation described above, is subdivided into the categories realism, expressionism, fantasy (oneirism) and abstraction. The second period, the 1960s and 1970s, was characterized by an awareness of modernity and an interrogation of cultural identity. The categories chosen for this section were abstractions (gestural and lyric abstraction; schematism and geometrical abstraction; writing and calligraphy, sign and symbol); materialist and informal exploration; figurations; realism and naturalism; expressionism and fantasy; and spontaneous expression. The 1980s and 1990s were defined as the third period, the hallmarks here being individualistic approaches and a quest for singularity. This period was subdivided into: the body and its representations; sign, writing and calligraphy; fantasy and symbolism; materials and material effects; nature and landscape; construction and architecture. Finally, the late 1990s until today constituted the fourth period, describing a kind of global contemporary art scene. This was organized around six themes: mystic experiences; memories and references; bodies and figures of the body; socio-political views; borders and territories; urban experiences and visions (Exhibition catalogue 2014). Although presented in a neat chronology in the exhibition catalogue, the content was not ordered so systematically in the exhibition itself. The large number of period sub-categories, with their many overlaps and repetitions, was difficult to follow, partly because they were defined in a short and generalized manner on movable walls without relating to the works on show. For visitors, the route through the exhibition usually began on the ground floor with the third period (1980s and 1990s) in a white cube setting. From there, they were guided back in time to the earlier periods. As they wandered along the two floors of the museum, the walls grew closer together and turned dark grey, suggesting a greater intimacy between the exhibits and the visitor. After passing large-scale photographs by Lalla Essaydi in the first room, showing women in re-enacted Orientalist iconography whose bodies are covered in Arab calligraphy applied in henna and who return the observer’s gaze, they reached a small dark niche with a few tiny black and white photographs by Sultan Moulay Abdelaziz depicting, among others, his harem women. The last period, designated as contemporary, departed from the exhibition’s historical narrative, as it revealed a greater thematic association with global politics, migration, and new technologies and media. This section seemed concerned neither with a common visual culture and formal similarities, nor with shared objectives, comprising instead of a variety of forms,

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media, subjects and cultural positions. It was as if all the effort undertaken by the exhibition makers to identify a typical Moroccan avant-garde and a modernity defined by shared formal aspects and identity factors had dissolved when it came to the contemporary art scene. The presentation of this last, open-ended period also differed in the design of the display and the architectural space. It was set apart from the historical sections in a large hall on the downstairs level, originally conceived as an underground parking deck for the museum. The decision to transform this space into a display area was made only a few weeks before the museum opened, so that this section had an unfinished, improvised air at the building’s inauguration, and it remained this way throughout the exhibition (and following exhibitions). The opening of the new Museum for Modern and Contemporary Art in Rabat and the inaugural exhibition “100 Years of Creation” were in many ways emblematic for today’s cultural politics in Morocco. In contrast to his predecessor Hassan II, the present king Mohammed VI has declared the cultural development of the country to be one of his major aims. Recently, important investments have been made in prestigious projects such as the national library in Rabat and new theatre buildings in Rabat and Casablanca. The construction of the new Museum Mohammed VI was also part of this cultural development programme. Its point of departure was not an urgency to preserve, host and build upon any existing collections, but rather the mere wish to have a museum for modern and contemporary art in Morocco. Grand projects like these are intended to convey the image of a modern and liberal state, which often contrasts with the needs and desires of artists or potential audiences11, for whom a museum might serve other purposes. Compared to Katarzyna Piepzrak’s analysis of the imagined museum which lacked infrastructural support from the government but drew life from productive imaginaries at the ground level, the making of the new museum for modern and contemporary art in Rabat seemed to be driven by imposed infrastructures but lacked strong imaginaries about the role and potentials of such a museum in Morocco: imaginaries that would go beyond both the traditional representation of power in Morocco and the postcolonial trap of copying Western normative standards. 11  For example, Rabat already has one major theatre (Théâtre Mohammed V) that is far from working to full capacity, both in terms of audiences

and productions. Nonetheless, an enormous new theatre building (designed by Zaha Hadid) is under construction.

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The “Contemporary Morocco” Exhibition at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris The exhibition “Contemporary Morocco” which took place at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris from October 2014 to March 2015 seemed to be inspired by an imaginary that correlated both with official Moroccan rhetoric about the country’s cultural diversity and with a narrative of global contemporary art. In the following, I will describe how this exhibition presented contemporary Moroccan artists as global artists: global not so much because they could travel and show their work worldwide as participants in global art circuits, exhibitions and markets, but rather because they appeared to be in a privileged position whereby their artworks, locally embedded as they might be, were presented as critique or comment on seemingly universal issues. I will argue that the exhibition followed two different but compatible arguments which both ended up in an integrative approach to global art: a representation of a politicized or engaged contemporary art scene on the one hand, and an abstract presentation of cultural diversity on the other. The first argument becomes visible in the choice of thematic arrangements which are not explicitly named in the exhibition but paraphrased by the curators in personal interviews as socio-political resistance, religion and spirituality, body and gender, and migration and conf lict. This politicized representation of the contemporary Moroccan art scene has to be understood in the context of post-2011 views on Arab countries, according to which artists are expected to sustain a certain criticality which, today, can no longer be held aloft by political movements in these countries. In Morocco, the protest movement of 2011 was more or less suspended after only a few months when the king instituted a minor constitutional reform, granting a number of superficial liberties by way of appeasement. While there is still censorship and prosecution of critics who argue against the monarchy, Islam, or the national unity that includes the Western Sahara12, visual artists are probably least affected by such restraints. Even though this situation does not necessarily lead to critical art practice and discourse, the exhibition in Paris presented “living Moroccan artists” (Martin 2014) as a young art scene 13 which of itself raised the abovementioned themes – resistance, Islam, gender, and migration. These themes 12  Critical, independent journalists risk being arrested and given long sentences. For example, the journalist Ali Anouzla, founder of the news website Lakome.com, was arrested for “advocating, supporting, and inciting terrorism” because he wrote critically about a video on Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. He is also charged with “threatening national integrity” because he allegedly used the

term “occupied Western Sahara” (amnesty international 2016). Activists, citizen journalists or rappers like Mouad Belghouat (alias El Haqed) also risk or have already faced arrest (Errazzouki 2013). 13  Contemporary art was defined as art by living artists. The exhibition presented around 80 artists from different generations living in Morocco and in Europe.

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Sarah Dornhof / appeared critical in the Moroccan context and were at the same time universally shared issues of social critique, challenging authoritarian, nondemocratic conditions. In this sense, the “Contemporary Morocco” exhibition was a global art show which focused on a country taken to represent the demands and hopes of the ‘Arab Spring’ and, on a larger scale, a critical stance against authoritarian, patriarchal and fundamentalist forces in the name of universal human rights. The second argument was more explicit in the exhibition’s official presentation, which characterized the Moroccan art scene as thriving and diverse, mirroring the country’s cultural diversity, ethnic plurality and religious tolerance (Morin / Abouessalam 2014: 10; Martin / El Aroussi /  Metalsi 2014: 15). Jacques Lang, the initiator of the exhibition and director of the Institut du Monde Arabe since 2013, suggested in his Foreword for the catalogue that this art event should be tagged with the preamble to the new Moroccan constitution14, which proclaims the kingdom’s unity out of the convergence of its Arab, Islamic, Amazigh and Sahara-Hassaniya elements and its African, Andalusian, Hebrew and Mediterranean inf luences. Lang praised the openness and tolerance of this constitution and recommended that its humanism and modernity should inspire other nations, not least France (Lang 2014: 8) 15. Jacques Lang conceived this exhibition as a counterpart to the already planned Louvre exhibition “Medieval Morocco” which was held in parallel in Paris (and later transferred to the Museum Mohammed VI in Rabat). This synchronicity suggested that contemporary Moroccan culture is as thriving today as it was thought to be under the medieval dynasties in the region, who ruled over large empires, eventually including parts of Spain. In a certain analogy to the image of these medieval dynasties as supporting the arts and sciences and defending religious tolerance, the “Contemporary Morocco” exhibition was portrayed as testimony to a f lourishing art scene enabled by the vivid and diverse culture of Morocco (Morin / Abouessalam 2014; Evin 2014) and supported by the monarchy. Jacques Lang asked Jean-Hubert Martin to curate “Contemporary Morocco”. Martin, who curated the exhibition “Les magiciens de la terre” (1989) and other programmatic exhibitions, has been a leading and controversial figure in establishing a global art discourse. He agreed to work on “Contemporary Morocco” on condition that he would be allowed to work 14  The Moroccan constitution was changed on 30 July 2011 after it officially received 98% of the votes in a referendum. It declared Tamazight, the language of the Berber, an additional official language, recognized the Hassaniya dialect as part of the cultural identity, and shifted a little more of the king’s power to the prime minister.

15  “Aussi, avons-nous souhaité placer l’événement sous les auspices d’un texte exemplaire et unique au monde: le préambule de la Constitution marocaine. Il revendique une ‘unité amazighe et saharo-hassanie […] nourrie et enrichie de ses affluents africain, andalou, hébraïque et méditerranéen’. Ce message d’ouverture et de tolérance est un hymne à la diversité. L’humanisme et la modernité de cette démarche pourraient heureusement inspirer d’autres nations, et notamment la France.” (Lang 2014: 8)

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with Moroccan curators and would have a free hand in putting together the exhibition without any diplomatic intervention or compromise (Martin 2015b). This last point was equally essential for Moulim El Aroussi, who joined Martin as the main curator on the Moroccan side (El Aroussi 2015). Mohammed Metalsi became the third curator in the team, mainly responsible for the accompanying programme of debates, films, performance and music. Jean-Hubert Martin and Moulim El Aroussi emphasized that the guiding themes of the exhibition had not been set in advance but ref lected the issues artists around the country were working on. Their principle for selecting exhibits entailed a large range of artist portfolios and personal encounters during their travels across the country. By their own account, they travelled together three times in different parts of Morocco to meet artists in their everyday context – to the north, to the far south, and to the central and eastern part of the country – and selected some well-known but also a number of less prominent artists. The Franco-Moroccan curator tandem thus developed their own transcultural approach, combining knowledge and expertise about Moroccan artists 16 with the idea of ‘discovering’ an evolving and f lourishing young art scene17. The curators highlighted their interest in showing works which were embedded in local discourses and responded to problems at hand, rather than imitations of Western contemporary creation (Martin / El Aroussi / Metalsi 2014: 17). By including three of the most important modern Moroccan painters (Farid Belkahia, Mohamed Melehi, Abdelkébir Rabi’), they also aimed to show that contemporary Moroccan art has a genealogy that goes back to the 1950s – 1960s, when painters began to interrogate identity, decolonization and modernity (Martin 2015b; El Aroussi 2015). In his book “Zoom sur les années 60 – Identité et Modernité dans la peinture marocaine” (2012), Moulim El Aroussi draws a direct line between debates about cultural renewal in the 1960s and the political upheavals in 2011. At present, he sees a crisis of identity which poses questions about how Moroccans see themselves and their cultural and artistic projects in relation to tradition and modernity – questions that were already discussed throughout the 1960s and 1970s (El Aroussi 2012: 8). On the other hand, the inclusion of these painters from another generation points to a caesura between modern and contemporary art, a caesura prompted not only by a shift in techniques, media and materials – from painting and sculpture to installation, video, photography etc. – but also, in Moulim El Aroussi’s words, from a quest about issues of one’s own interiority, identity and 16  Moulim El Aroussi, working as an academic, critic and curator in Casablanca, has a sound knowledge of and connections with artists in Morocco. Since the 1990s, he has organized various exhibitions of young Moroccan artists.

17  The idea of discovering non-European contemporary art through travel and personal contact mainly comes from Jean-Hubert Martin, who developed this method of travelling and visiting artists’ studios during his long years as a curator, beginning with the paradigmatic exhibition “Les magiciens de la terre” (Martin 2012: 22).

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Sarah Dornhof / individuality to an interrogation of social and interpersonal relations. He goes on to reflect that the contemporary artist could be seen as a sort of prophet, someone with a certain susceptibility to sense, translate or provoke social change (El Aroussi 2015). In the exhibition itself, this latter idea of seeing art as social and political critique outweighed the second proposition about the cultural diversity of contemporary Moroccan art. The 80 artists in the show were neither selected nor presented in terms of their ethnic or religious origins (Arab, Berber, Jewish, etc.), nor was cultural belonging a central concern of most of the works. Rather, the construction of a contemporary Moroccan art scene was implicitly based on transnational, diasporic and imaginary ideas of cultural identity without further defining the local and cultural context of production. A cultural framing was nevertheless created by presenting works (and an accompanying cultural programme) which played on regionally specific traditional art practices, such as teapots in innovative designs, a selection of carpets displayed as art, or individually designed ‘Moroccan salons’ where visitors could rest. A large tent apparently in Berber style was placed in front of the Institut du Monde Arabe, where traditional products, tea and food from Morocco were sold during the exhibition. Nevertheless, the majority of works not only used forms, formats and media that are prevalent in today’s contemporary art world, but also focused on social and political issues that circulate throughout art exhibitions worldwide: political and social injustices, global migrations, gender roles, and Islam. The pathway through the exhibition descended continuously downstairs through nearly the entire IMA building, and began by passing through a room completely covered with tilework in traditional patterns and colours. Unlike the exhibition in Rabat, the “Contemporary Morocco” exhibition in Paris thereby signalled the value of traditional Moroccan art and visual culture as an important source for contemporary practices. This first room was followed by a display of photographs and videos which, in a humorous or satirical way, played on social imaginaries and their confrontation with improbable events, such as the series “Âne situ” (2012–13) by Hicham Benohoud, which portraits donkeys in middle-class living rooms in Casablanca, to which the artist had added constructions of brick and other building materials. Among abstract paintings by Farid Belkahia, Mohamed Melehi and Abdelkébir Rabi’, the exhibition then showed mainly contemporary works addressing social, economic and religious questions as well as relations between Moroccan traditions and modernity. Some examples might serve to illustrate how the “Contemporary Morocco” exhibition presented Moroccan artists as critically engaged with social and political issues that transmitted a global urgency and created a kind of post-2011 criticality. The installation “Créer c’est résister, résister c’est créer” (2014) by Faouzi Laatiris, for example, set up an architectural

Exhibiting Contemporary Moroccan Art space that was entered through another installation by Laatiris, “Porte de l’enfer”. Both works combined political associations with traditional imaginaries: at the centre of an otherwise empty room, the first placed a coloured figure of a Ghoul, a kind of demon or devil that features in Morocco’s popular religious iconography. In a possibly iconoclastic gesture, the Ghoul seemed about to beat his stick against a wall covered by projections of mythical and religious imagery, such as the Buraq (a heavenly creature that carried the prophets, most notably the prophet Muhammed on his “Night Journey” from Mecca to Jerusalem and back), Adam and Eve and other representations of the Ghoul. A second wall bore the mirrorlettered inscription “Créer c’est résister, résister c’est créer”. The work “Porte de l’enfer”, through which visitors had to pass, contained glass vitrines with images and figures of fire extinguishers, pirate f lags, pocket lighters with different national f lags, and, again, figures of the Ghoul. While Laatiris called his work a homage to Auguste Rodin, and thus introduced references to Rodin’s “Porte de l’enfer” (1880–1917), to Dante’s Divine Comedy and, more generally, to contemporary re-interpretations or re-creations of traditional, mythical imaginaries, the curator JeanHubert Martin, in his interpretation of the work, associated this “Gate of Hell” with war, violence and imperialism. He also mentioned a possible link between the lighters and the self-immolation of Moahmmed Bouazizi in December 2010 that had triggered the uprisings in Tunisia and subsequently in other Arab countries (Martin 2015a) (Fig. 2). A later section of the exhibition showed works around spirituality and Sufism. The light and sound installation “Zahra-Zoujaj” (Flower-Glass) (2010) by Younès Rahmoun, for example, created a closed octagonal space roofed by a kind of dome consisting of illuminating glass f lowers. Visitors entered through a small door after they had taken off their shoes. Inside, they found themselves in a dark space with f loating sounds and changing light emanating from the 77 glass f lowers suspended at seven different heights from the ceiling, giving off light in different forms, frequencies and intensities. With this work, originally produced for the opening of the Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Qatar, Younès Rahmoun references Islamic architecture, where the octagon and the circle are frequently used to represent perfection, God, or the divine. Like the dome, the circle, or the octagon, he also interprets the f lower as a “modest form”, because it touches the earth but reaches towards the sky. The seven circles of glass f lowers symbolize the seven skies, or the seven branches of Islam. The number 77 corresponds to the 77 ways of practising Islam, but the f lower also has a universal meaning of joy and beauty, life and fertility (Rahmoun 2016). While Younès Rahmoun stresses the symbolic dimensions of his work, for Jean-Hubert Martin, his art, like other works in the exhibition, represents the inf luence of Sufi traditions on Islamic practice in Morocco,

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Fig. 2  Créer, c’est résister. Résister, c’est créer, Faouzi Laatiris, 2014, Installation in the „Contemporary Morocco“ exhibition at the Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris, October 2014 – March 2015

Exhibiting Contemporary Moroccan Art which neglect neither the body and its corporeality nor the senses and pleasures (Martin 2015). At the same time, the exhibition contained other artworks that critically investigated religious forms and rituals in their contemporary contexts, such as the photographic work by Said Afifi showing a black cube sinking into the sea (Le Naufrage du Cube, 2013), a brainteaser in black with a white line that might represent the Kaaba by Mounir Fatmi (Casse-tête pour musulman modéré, 2009), and a white bust balancing a large black cube on its head (Équilibre à la Kaaba, 2013) by George-Mehdi Lahlou. Further down the exhibition, other artworks focused on the body, in particular the female body, often depicted as vulnerable and objectified in the male gaze. Here, a number of female artists were on show, but the majority (about three quarters) of the 80 artists included in the “Contemporary Morocco” exhibition was male. Randa Maroufi, for example, in her photo series “Reconstitutions: Gestes dans l’espace public” (2013), reconstructed scenes of street harassment. The artist asked boys from the street to re-enact the violent gazes and gestures in photographs taken from the internet. Rather than questioning the status of women in public spaces, Maroufi’s work interrogates ways of relating to and consuming images and ref lecting one’s own behaviour through the inquisitive eye of visual culture (Maroufi quoted in Saliou 2014). Fatima Mazmouz, in her photo series “Super Oum” (Super Mom) (2009), took pictures of herself when pregnant re-enacting images and performing gestures in the manner of a dominant superwoman, thus humorously interrogating her body in this reproductive and creative, but also diversely culturally encoded and stereotyped condition. Even though these examples adopted a critical, self-ref lexive and ironic stance towards various culturally and gendered norms, the thematic focus on the female body in a state of vulnerability or motherhood conveyed a sense that Moroccan women artists were present – or represented – on the contemporary art scene only in conjunction with a victimized and objectified status of women. Issues of migration and violent conf lict were at the centre of works shown in the basement of the exhibition, where dim light and colours created an uncanny atmosphere. Migration from Sub-Saharan Africa features in the video installation “Crossings” (2013) by Leila Alaoui, portraying different people and their personal stories of migration in an audio-visual and allegorical collage of images. The work “Âobour” (Transit) (2010) by Mohamed Arejdal is a collage of different pieces of fabric collected during a journey from Morocco to Mauretania and Senegal. The display of these and other pieces in this section dedicated to migration and conf lict largely disregarded the particular contexts of creation, producing a dark and dense exhibition space that subsumed various works within a setting of urgency and violence. This form of display was appropriate for some of the works

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in this section, while for others it seemed rather to indicate a Western projection of migration, focused on the dramatic situation of crossing the Mediterranean Sea or the Saharan desert. The thematic sections in which the exhibition presented contemporary art from Morocco reflected the dominant issues associated with a Muslim, North African country in the European, and, in particular, French context: a close and entangled relation between modernity and tradition; the search for individual, secular forms of belief; a problematic status of women; and the ambivalent presence of the migrant as both victim and potential threat. Framing contemporary Moroccan art in this way establishes a sense of criticality that does not necessarily correspond to the particular political and social situation in Morocco, but rather addresses general issues that fall within global discourses on cultural diversity and human rights, with critical points of intersection on questions of secularism, the recognition of minorities and women’s rights. The works in the exhibition offered a wide variety of positions and aesthetic forms, and it might have been this very plurality and variety – partly picking up social and political issues, partly reworking Moroccan arts and traditions – which not only attracted a broad public to the exhibition in Paris, but which also translated easily into an expression of cultural diversity and a post-2011 political spirit without either requiring further specification. Conclusion In their own different ways, the two exhibitions of contemporary art from Morocco in 2014, “100 Years of Creation” and “Contemporary Morocco”, constructed a local art scene within a global context. The inaugural exhibition in Rabat’s new Museum for Modern and Contemporary Art (MMVI) traced a history of modern art in Morocco by reproducing a model of periodization based on Western art history concepts such as the binary distinction between tradition and modernity and a linear narrative of art’s progressive emancipation and autonomy. Contemporary art, in this exhibition, appears as another, most recent time period, but one that seems to be cut off from earlier periods, marked primarily by the use of different media and artistic inquiries into a range of new subjects. In contrast to this chronological narrative in Rabat of a distinct Moroccan modernity, ultimately not so different from Western modernities, followed by an unspecified contemporaneity, the “Contemporary Morocco” show in Paris instead constructed a global present which, by localizing and simultaneously generalizing the contemporary, corresponded to global capitalism’s commodification of cultural diversity, and also underlay the official cultural politics shared by the Moroccan and French governments. The curators’ choice to organize the exhibition around themes that addressed the

Exhibiting Contemporary Moroccan Art political expectations Western spectators would have about a Muslim country made it easy to perceive the exhibition in Paris as a kind of reverberation of the ‘Arab Spring’, not as a political uprising but as an artistic critique. Both exhibitions, even though based on different discursive premises, presented a large variety of artists and works in an aesthetically appealing and professionally constructed scenography that refrained, in both cases, from contextualization of the artworks in favour of an impressive abundance of works and artistic practice. This reveals the curators’ choice and power to assemble artworks into a scenography and display which made it easy for the visitor to have, or to consume, an idea of the modern and contemporary Moroccan art scene which ultimately integrates well into existing discursive frames, whether predicated on periods in art history or on recent, essentially abstract socio-political narratives about ideological contestations in Arab countries. Based on their curatorial and institutional framing of a generalized representation of Moroccan modern and contemporary art, both exhibitions therefore tended to subsume specific positions, politics and histories under an abstract narrative of modernity and contemporaneity. Following Rasheed Araeen’s argumentation about the need to include non-white artists into the history of modernism, this might be seen as an important shift towards inscribing Moroccan artists into the contexts and frameworks of modern art history from which they have been hitherto excluded as its ‘other’. Araeen’s point is that only by becoming a subject within modernism can the non-white artist critically and historically engage with the grand narratives and epistemological structures of art history. The constitutive historical relationship between modernism and colonial discourse, which continuously leads to the exclusion or marginalization of ‘other’ artists, can, with the end of colonialism, only be proven dysfunctional and invalid when these ‘other’ artists enter and redefine the modernist discourse (Araeen 2005: 57–58). The exhibition “100 Years of Creation” in the Museum Mohammed VI in Rabat can, of course, be read as such a move to inscribe Moroccan artists into the history of modernism, and in so doing it marks an important step in recent attempts to revise the euro-centricity of modernist discourse. Yet, by relying mainly on the mere seductive power of an amplitude of images which, following the exhibition’s narrative, gradually developed out of the first encounter with Western concepts and technology, the exhibition failed to open a discussion about the specific conditions and histories of Moroccan art within a modernist discourse. Simply presenting works by Moroccan artists and artists from the Moroccan diaspora under abstract modernist categories without any accounts of their cultural, socio-political and geographical contexts, their historical influences and interrelations, and their situatedness within certain schools, collectives and national as well

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Sarah Dornhof / as international debates might be appealing for a connoisseur of abstract Western art, but is not apt for establishing an overdue and necessary discussion about a Moroccan art history which, in the first place, should address a Moroccan audience. The “Contemporary Morocco” exhibition in Paris deliberately did not inscribe Moroccan artists into modern art history but instead, in a certain analogy to the “Medieval Morocco” exhibition staged in Paris at the same time, constructed an ahistorical contemporaneity of Moroccan art as flourishing, culturally and religiously tolerant as well as critically engaged with socio-political issues. The merit of this exhibition certainly was to present a large number of Moroccan and diaspora artists in a prominent show in Paris and to emphasize the connectedness of contemporary artists to modern as well as traditional art practices. Yet its institutional framing within the Institut du Monde Arabe and within diplomatic cultural policies, as well as its discursive de-contextualization from both modern art history and the contexts of production, reception and debate in Morocco, took the risk of reproducing Western projections of a cultural other, even though this cultural other is today no longer primarily characterized by negative stereotypes but instead associated with an abstract humanism or universalism (see also Chubb 2015). By the choice of works and their curatorial display along thematic contexts in the “Contemporary Morocco” exhibition, the Moroccan artist remains framed as different in terms of culture and religion from Euro-American contemporary artists, while his or her artistic practice is presented out of its specific conceptual, socio-political and historical frameworks. Coming back to the role of art institutions in the revision, decolonization and decentralization of art history discourse, these two examples of exhibiting contemporary art from Morocco have shown that today’s postcolonial problematic does not simply consist in the exclusion or marginalization of non-white artists from a global contemporary art scene, but rather in the persistence of a hegemonic art history discourse which, by globalizing itself, includes non-Western artists under the condition that they conform with, or that their works can be subsumed under, its normative expectations and categories. While Moroccan artists are more visible today, both on a national and a global level, there is still a lack of plurality and critical debate about the historical and contemporary contexts and frameworks in which their practices are embedded and circulated. Merely copying Western norms and categories of modern art history, or decontextualizing Moroccan art practice in the name of cultural diversity and universal humanism, in the end perpetuate a postcolonial logic, as central concerns remain questions of authenticity and representation addressed at an abstract Western interlocutor. If we follow Hamid Dabashi’s concept of post-Orientalism, a negotiation about contemporary art in Morocco would

Exhibiting Contemporary Moroccan Art not only require more attention to the specific socio-political contexts and transcultural connections that have shaped and continue to shape art practices in Morocco, but also a new partner in the conversation, so as to address immediate audiences instead of people in power, to speak with a voice that foregrounds the political and moral concerns of this community instead of assuming individual agency, and to build on creative agency that defies sovereignty instead of claiming it (see Dabashi 2015: 279-80). Presenting Moroccan artists today should not, therefore, be limited to displaying the variety of modern and contemporary art, but should also take into account the role of art within the intellectual and cultural history of the country. •

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References 1914-2014: Cent Ans de Création. Exposition inaugural au Musée Mohammed VI, Art Moderne & Contemporain. Exhibition Catalogue. Casablanca: Fondation Nationale des Musées.

Crétois, Jules (2012): “Histoire. Sultan of Swing”, TelQuel, 19 October 2012, http://telquel.ma/2012/10/19/HistoireSultan-of-swing_540_4632, last accessed 18 January 2016.

ALM (2003): “Une curieuse renunciation.” In: Aujourd’hui Le Maroc, 5 September 2003, http://aujourdhui.ma/ culture/une-curieuse-renonciation-1226, last accessed 18 January 2017.

Dabashi, Hamid (2015): PostOrientalism. Knowledge and Power in a Time of Terror. New Brunswick & London: Transaction Publishers.

Amnesty International, Morocco ramps up crackdown on press freedom with trial over citizen journalism, 26 January 2016. https://www.amnesty. org/en/latest/news/2016/01/moroccoramps-up-crackdown-on-press-freedomwith-trial-over-citizen-journalism/, last accessed 26 March 2016. Araeen, Rasheed (2005): “Eurocentricity, Canonisation of the White / European Subject in Art History, and the Marginalisation of the Other.” In: Irene Below and Beatrice von Bismarck (eds.), Globalisierung /  Hierarchisierung: Kulturelle Dominanzen in Kunst und Kunstgeschichte. Marburg: Jonas Verlag, pp. 54–61.

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Binder, Pat and Haupt, Gerhard, Musée Mohammed VI d’Art Moderne et Contemporain. September 2014, Nafas, http://universes-in-universe.org/eng/ nafas/articles/2014/museum_ contemporary_art_morocco, last accessed 26 March 2016. Chubb, Emma (2015): “Differential Treatment: Migration in the Work of Yto Barrada and Bouchra Khalili.” In: Journal of Arabic Literature, 46 (2015), pp. 268–285.

El Aroussi, Moulim (2012): Zoom sur les années 60 – Identité et Modernité dans la peinture marocaine. Casablanca: Loft Art Gallery. El Aroussi, Moulim (2015): Interview with Sarah Dornhof, 24 March 2015, Casablanca. Errazzouki, Samia (2013): “Free speech sidelined in Morocco”. Index on Censorship, 9 July 2013, https://www.indexoncensorship.org/2013/07/free-speechsidelined-in-morocco/ last accessed 26 March 2016. Evin, Florence (2014): “L’art marocain se decouvre à Paris”, Le Monde, 15 October 2014, http://www.lemonde.fr/ acces-restreint/arts/article/2014/10/15/ 6d6a629c686871c5956961656 39d71_4506539_1655012.html, last accessed 18 January 2016. Irbouh, Hamid (2005): Art in the Service of Colonialism. French Art Education in Morocco 1912-1956. London and New York: Tauris Academic Studies. Khoury, Nuha N.N. (2009): “Modernity in Arab Art.” In: The Middle East Institute Viewpoints: The State of the Arts in the Middle East. http://www.mei.edu/ sites/default/files/publications/state-

Exhibiting Contemporary Moroccan Art arts-middle-east.pdf, last accessed 23 October 2016. Lang, Jacques (2014): “Préface”, in the Catalogue “Le Maroc Contemporain”, Éditions Snoeck, p. 8. Malraux, André (1965): Le musée imaginaire, Paris: Gallimard. Maraini, Toni (2014): Écrits sur l’Art. Casablanca: Éditions Le Fennec. Martin, Jean-Hubert (2012): L’art au large. Paris: Flammarion. Martin, Jean-Hubert, El Aroussi, Moulim and Metalsi, Mohamed (2014): “Le Maroc contemporain – Effervescence et diversité.” In: Catalogue “Le Maroc Contemporain”, Éditions Snoeck, pp. 14–19. Martin, Jean-Hubert (2015a): Video presentation of the exhibition “Le Maroc Contemporain”, YouTube 7 January 2015, https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=xiouZPSWt9I, last accessed 20 January 2016. Martin, Jean-Hubert (2015b): Interview with Sarah Dornhof, 24 April 2015, Paris. Morin, Edgar and Abouessalam, Sabah (2014): “Le Maroc, un héritage multiple et une histoire millénaire.” In: Catalogue “Le Maroc Contemporain”, Éditions Snoeck, pp. 10–11. Pieprzak, Katarzyna (2010): Imagined Museums: Art and Modernity in Postcolonial Morocco. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Preziosi, Donald (1998): The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Rachdi, Mohamed (2014a): Interview with Sarah Dornhof, 14 October 2014, Casablanca. Rachdi, Mohamed (2014b): “Entre Références et Errances. Parcours d’une production artistique modern et contemporain au Maroc. In: Catalogue Musée Mohammed VI. Art Moderne & Contemporain, Rabat: Fondation Nationale des Musées, pp. 11–20. Rahmoun, Younès (2016): Interview with Sarah Dornhof, 9 October 2016, Tétouan. Sefrioui, Kenza (2012) La revue Souffles (1966 – 1973): Espoirs de révolution culturelle au Maroc. Casablanca: Éditions du Sirocco. Saliou, Bérénice (2014): “Le Maroc Contemporain.” In: Nafas Art Magazine, http://u-in-u.com/nafas/articles/2014/ le-maroc-contemporain/, last accessed 5 April 2017. Souid, Béchir (2015): “Témoignage.” In: Archibat. Revue maghrébine d’aménagement de l’espace et de la construction. 34 / 04-2015, 25, http:// apculture.fr/contenu/uploads/2015/ 05/ARCHIBAT_34_article-BS.pdf, last accessed 25 January 2017.

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Musée Mohammed VI d’Art Moderne et    Contemporain, Rabat, Photo: Sarah Dornhof Créer, c’est résister. Résister, c’est créer, Faouzi Laatiris, 2014, Installation in the „Contemporary Morocco“ exhibition at the Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris, October 2014 – March 2015, Photo: Sarah Dornhof

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The Art of Globalization /  The Globalization of Art: Creating Trans-national, Interethnic, CrossGender and Interspecies Identities in the 3D Work of Miao Xiaochun Since the year 2005, internationally acclaimed new media artist Miao Xiaochun 缪晓春 (born in 1964 in Wuxi, China) has been using a 3D visualization program to recreate famous paintings from European art history which he subsequently enters, migrates through and inhabits in the form of a 3D avatar.1 By traversing and interacting with canonical Western painterly icons in a 3D virtual environment, Miao’s avatars enact the global crossing of cultural and visual boundaries, illuminating the condition of contemporary art as marked by migratory and transcultural flows. In the course of their transpictorial movements, Miao’s virtual clones display increasing mobility and flexibility, resulting in the modification of their physical forms. As different aspects of their virtual bodies intertwine, heretofore unknown identities coagulate and re-emerge in novel intervisual landscapes. This essay examines interpictorial migration and its resultant aesthetic transformations in Miao’s 3D environments, as well as its relation to the intersecting narratives of space, digital technology and identity. It will ask questions about practices and forms of visual representation that cannot be easily accommodated by categories such as style, school and national origin, which are typically adopted in an art historical context and which complicate current disciplinary norms and debates. If one of the many and varied effects of developing media technology is the removal of physical and spatial barriers, what possibilities and perspectives emerge for 1  Miao Xiaochun’s recent solo exhibitions include: Miao Xiaochun: Metamorphosis, Klein Sun Gallery, New York, NY, USA (2016); Miao Xiaochun 2015, Art Museum of Nanjing University of the Art, Nanjing, China (2015); Miao Xiaochun: The Real in the Virtual, The Dennos Museum Center, MI, USA (2012); Miao Xiaochun – Macromania, Ludwig Museum, Koblenz, Germany (2010). Recent group exhibitions include: The Shadow Never Lies, Shanghai 21st Century

Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai, China (2016); A New Dynasty – Created in China, ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, Aarhus, Denmark (2015); Transfiguration, 55th Venice Biennale, Chinese Pavilion, Venice, Italy (2013); 7th Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art – Mountains and Waters: Chinese Animation Since the 1930s, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia (2012).

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Isabel Seliger / re-positioning identity and experience? Do these developments recreate national spaces, or do they envision translocal and transnational terrains? What type of images are generated, and what criteria serve to understand their modifications and new forms? My discussion will begin with a short overview of Miao Xiaochun’s early creative practice in order to position his general artistic intent on the global cultural map. Next, I will turn the focus to the form and content of Miao’s 3D scenarios, their evolution, and how they have been critically received. After this, I will specifically examine the formation of hybrid national, ethnic and gendered identities in Miao’s 3D works, seeking to understand the roles and meanings of these phenomena both within Miao’s œuvre and with respect to the geographically, culturally and art historically complex meanings of the term ‘global art’.

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A Survey of Miao Xiaochun’s Early Photographic Work During his stay as an exchange student at the School of Fine Arts in Kassel from the mid- to late 1990s, Miao developed a series of black-and-white photographs in which, for the first time, he thematized the subject of cultural border crossing, to a large extent mirroring his own transnational movements between China and Europe. Entitled A Visitor from the Past (Guoqu dui xianzai de fangwen 过去对现在的访问, 1999-2004), this series centres around a statue-like figure of a Chinese king or sage, dressed in ancient Chinese costume, upon his arrival in present-day Germany. This stately gentleman – a fibreglass statue modelled after the artist himself – critically but patiently observes his new surroundings, acting simultaneously as witness and participant in the dualistic encounter between over two thousand years of advanced Chinese scientific knowledge and artistry and a modern European, i.e. Western world. In the photograph As a Guest of a German Family (Zai deguo pengyou jia zuoke 在德国朋友家作客, 1999), the same ancient gentleman sits awkwardly at the table with what appears to be his German host family, whose members look in turn intrigued, confused and embarrassed by his presence. (Fig. 1) A similar web of gazes is performed in the photograph Image (Xingxiang 形象, 2001), taken after Miao’s return to China and depicting a scene at a men’s fashion store. This motif plays on the tension between a Western-clad male Caucasian fashion model, displayed in two of the company’s print advertisements, and Miao’s alter ego, starring as a customer once again clothed in the traditional garb of an ancient Chinese king or scholar. This time portraying the clash of tradition and modernity, East and West in a contemporary Chinese setting, Miao’s alter ego continues to bear the weight of China’s ancient culture while appearing to counteract immanent threats to his cultural identity – in this case the homogenizing

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Fig. 1   Miao Xiaochun, As a Guest of a German Family (detail), 1999, (black-and-white photograph).

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Isabel Seliger / tendencies of the global fashion industry. A photograph from the same series – No Hostility (Budi 不敌, 2001) – records the failing constitution of the ancient Chinese gentleman, who has perhaps fainted or even suffered a heart attack during his visit to the Great Wall. In a subsequent image, Miao’s alter ego appears to be undergoing medical treatment, as the title of this image – Therapy (Liao 疗, 2002) – seems to suggest. Here, Miao’s fibreglass statue is seen lying prone on a medical examination table, intimating that the embodiment of paradoxical local and global subject positions in an artificially fixed state causes dysfunction and immobilization. Regardless of the actual geographical location or its situational context, each photograph from this series lacks a clear preference for one cultural realm over the other, as evidenced by the ancient king’s vacillation between his nostalgia for, and alienation from, his own cultural roots, and by his ambivalent attraction to Europe. This strategy highlights the fact that Miao’s visual practice is informed by multiple locations in Asia and Europe at once, so that his identity is not as mono-culturally defined as the figure of the Chinese king or scholar ostensibly pretends to suggest. After his early black-and-white photographic series, Miao produced a large number of mural-scale digital colour photographs depicting the accelerated pace of China’s economic growth and urban development, all of which are characterized by multiple-shot images merged by the artist into expansive tableaus. In many of these works, Miao continues to enunciate the perspective of the passive ancient observer who goes on to probe the contradictory facets of traditional Chinese culture and the abrupt transformations in contemporary China. After 2004, however, the ancient scholar disappeared from Miao’s photographic work.

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Miao Xiaochun’s Work in a 3D Environment In 2005, Miao Xiaochun expanded his creative practice from photographic processes to high-end 3D computer technology, thereby improving his technical means with which to visualize transcultural contacts and the surmounting of civilizational frameworks. However, in his new approach the artist departs from the photographic staging of the fibreglass statue in contemporary, ‘real life’ scenes and instead recreates cardinal paintings from European art history in a 3D virtual space where all the characters are replaced by an identical nude avatar, a virtual rendering of the artist’s physical self. Miao first implemented his new method in The Last Judgment in Cyberspace (Xuni zuihou shenpan 虚拟最后审判, 2005-2006), which is a virtual replica of Michelangelo’s late Renaissance fresco The Last Judgment (1533-1541) at the Sistine Chapel, depicting the second coming of Christ and the Apocalypse. Miao captured individual scenes of the rebuilt fresco in a series of five large-scale digital photographs of the 3D model

The Art of Globalization taken by a built-in virtual camera. In addition, Miao created a 3D video animation, entitled The Last Judgment in Cyberspace – Where Will I Go? (Xuni zuihou shenpan – Wo hui qu nar? 虚拟最后审判–我会去哪儿?, 2005-2006) based on the same digital motif (Seliger 2011: 174-193). After The Last Judgment in Cyberspace, Miao produced the series H2O – A Study of Art History (Yishushi yanjiu 艺术史研究, 2007), including the works H2O – Landscape with Diogenes (F) (Lin xi tu 临溪图, 2007), a virtual replica of Nicolas Poussin’s painting Landscape with Diogenes (1647), and H2O – Fountain of Youth (F) (Fanlaohuantong tu 返老还童图, 2007), a complex re-staging of Lucas Cranach the Elder’s painting Fountain of Youth (1546). This series was followed by another cycle of works, entitled Microcosm (Zuo tian guan jing 坐天观井, 2008), which is based on Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (1503-1504). Miao’s initial conceptual approach in the 3D realm underwent a significant change when, between the years 2008 and 2010, he produced a 3D video animation based not on a singular painting from European art history, but on several famous masterpieces at once. Among these are Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Triumph of Death (1562-1563), Raphael’s Parnassus (ca. 1510), The School of Athens (1510-1511) by the same painter, and also some lesser known works – in total twenty-one paintings and frescoes by fourteen painters – all of them appearing in quick succession within a single 3D universe. In this novel space-time continuum entitled Restart (Cong tou zai lai 从头再来, 2008-2010) – the Chinese title of which denotes the act of starting over, but whose English transliteration also implies the rebooting of a computer – numerous iconic painterly scenes are simultaneously animated, linked, inhabited, traversed and even destroyed by various communities of avatars. (Fig. 2) As the video progresses, seemingly unrelated and indeterminate contemporary occurrences – often involving airports and airplanes – are interspersed with the paintings’ entangled art historical narratives and with several presumably fictitious scenes, such as the playful interaction of two avatar toddlers inside a porcelain church. By integrating formerly independent paintings, simulated real-life incidents and dream-like episodes into a shared pictorial field, Miao’s expanded approach in this video engenders an art history that is no longer constituted by self-contained images originating from individual genius artists or societies, but by a multitude of deframed pictorial information merging into a continuous visual stream. Commenting on his work approach as a never-ending process constituted by a succession of individual acts, Miao explains: Everyday when we wake up, we can start over again and that makes me excited. It would be great if we can live once and again; it would be great if we can create art once and again. Thus I have this simple and naive yet strong aspiration: to

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Fig. 2   Miao Xiaochun, Restart, 2008-2010, (3D Computer animation).

The Art of Globalization forget everything and restart.2 […] There are many destructing images in Restart: destruction of civilization, such as the collapse of The School of Athens; there are also the destruction of human body, willpower and nature. At the end, we are surrounded by a pessimistic and struggling atmosphere. Maybe starting over again does not result in a better outcome; maybe we still need to face death and destruction. However, the idea of restarting makes me excited and exhilarated.  (Huang 2010: 1-2)

The Reception of Miao’s Early 3D Work: The Tension Between Ethnocentric, Eurocentric and Transcultural Perspectives on Miao’s Artistic Practice Miao Xiaochun’s 3D works are processual, open-ended and ephemeral. They challenge traditional art scholarship because they differ in content, structure and form from other genres. For example, while Western concepts of the image have predominantly been informed by the traditional rectangular and framed pictorial space reserved for a single-master artwork in a single-society context, Miao’s virtual worlds generate cross-cultural and intermedia dialogues that put knowledge about images into relative terms. The resultant unstable status of these artworks can be inferred from the critical reviews of his early 3D work, specifically The Last Judgment in Cyberspace, by art historian Wu Hung and media theorist Siegfried Zielinski. Wu Hung rationalizes Miao’s visual approach as an extension of indigenous Chinese cultural techniques, specifically strategies in early Chinese painting as illustrated by the artist’s desire for increased and unrestricted vision which, according to Wu, is analogous to early attempts in Chinese painting at expanding the visual field. At the same time, Wu locates the work’s contemporary context in time-based media, i.e. recent video and performance art that re-examines iconic motifs in European art history (Wu 2006a: 4-11). However, despite the various transnational elements identified by Wu, such as the “visual translation” of extant historical images by “artists from different countries and art traditions” that potentially marks the beginning of a “transnational sub-category of new media art” (ibid.: 9), as well as the virtual scenes’ lack of any explicit Chinese symbolism, the author emphasizes the uniqueness of Miao’s early 3D work as contemporary Chinese art in an international arena. 2  Miao’s statement echoes the Confucian dictum of self-renewal espoused in the Great Learning (Daxue, ca. 500 B.C.E.): “If you can renew yourself one day, then you can renew yourself every day, and keep renewing yourself day after day” (Tu 1979: 90).

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Isabel Seliger / By contrast, Siegfried Zielinski locates Miao’s 3D environments between competing discourses in contemporary art history and image science, the central narratives of which, Zielinski argues, are significantly complicated by the diachronic and transcultural re-creation of seminal European masterpieces by a non-Western artist (Zielinski 2006: unpaginated). However, despite the transvisual accomplishment that the author describes in Miao’s inaugural 3D series, The Last Judgment in Cyberspace, such as the “dissolution of the Renaissance ideal” including that of the classical subject (Zielinski 2010: 60), as well as the artist’s determined focus on European art history, Zielinski ultimately interprets Miao’s artistic trajectory as having emerged from “a culture rooted so deep in time like that of China – despite all the references to the European […]” (ibid.: 62). Both Wu and Zielinski advance significant arguments, with Wu constructing a genealogy of Miao’s artistic intent from a discipline-based, i.e. internalist, art historical perspective, while Zielinski provides a nonlinear, media historical account of early twenty-first century media objects. Despite their seemingly irreconcilable conceptual frames, however, both claims point to an implicit desire to understand the artist and his art form in terms of his national and cultural identity, activating the hidden antithesis of ‘East’ and ‘West’ as well as its submerged narratives of essentializing and ‘othering’ their object of study. As a consequence, the momentous overall theme of the encounter of, and interaction between, different geographical hemispheres and their respective ideals of art becomes de-emphasized: considering these would have challenged the culturally monolithic conclusion arrived at by Wu, as well as the culturally unspecified, yet heavily Western-biased framework implemented by Zielinski. Acknowledging the difficulty of discerning, describing and evaluating the neglected processes of transcultural and intervisual contact and exchange, the following discussion, then, sets out to investigate this topic, for the purpose of which meaningful research units and frameworks do not yet exist.

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Alter- (Euro-) Asian Identities in a Global Visual Matrix In their capacity as virtual agents, Miao’s avatars initiate contact, exchange and transformation in their host images. Moving from one painting to another, they become conduits for the negotiation and resolution of contact, i.e. difference, tension, desire and conflict, which leads to a new integration of their virtual shapes and identities. During this process, the avatars progressively intermix physiological markers, moulding virtual forms into complex displays of assimilation, resistance and self-enhancement. For example, in Miao’s series H2O – Landscape with Diogenes (F), the avatars gradually assume a Caucasian body type that has a more rectangular

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Fig. 3   Miao Xiaochun, H2O – Landscape with Diogenes (F) (detail), 2007, (C-Print).

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Isabel Seliger / musculoskeletal system with broad shoulders, strong hips, and elongated thighs as well as, overall, a seemingly more toned masculine physique than the earlier versions of Miao’s virtual alter ego. (Fig. 3) By contrast in H2O – Fountain of Youth (F) the avatars appear to undergo a change in skin colour as they swim through the waters of the fountain of youth. In this example, their alteration first and foremost reflects the symbolic movement from sickness and old age to healing and youth in accordance with the original painting’s title, Fountain of Youth. However, the display of health and restoration appears simultaneously to encompass a cosmetic correction from an ethnically-marked darker complexion to a lighter or Caucasian one, perhaps indicating a desire to blend with the aesthetic ideal of the Caucasian male in Western painting. (Fig. 4) In both cases, the demonstrative exhibition of the ethnically marked male nude body, which historically never registered as an aesthetic figure on the representational canvases of Western high art, intersects with the representation of gender, insinuating a critique of the universal ideal of Caucasian masculinity. Conversely, when considered from the perspective of traditional Chinese art, the orientation towards a sustained male presence in Miao’s 3D replicas evokes the status of the male nude body as a neglected representational mode in Chinese painting. Miao engages a similar strategy with regard to the condition of the female gender. By removing all the female figures from the original paintings for each of his 3D icons – a decision which stands out in contrast to the dominant role of the female nude in modern European painting – he simultaneously alludes to the absence of the female nude in Chinese art. Paradoxically, increasingly feminine-connoted gestures, postures and even body shapes can be detected among the avatars. For example, in H2O – Fountain of Youth (F) some of the avatars suddenly appear to have been modelled with narrower shoulders and a broader pelvis. This metamorphosis is especially discernible in a motherly looking clone that has replaced the Venus figure on the top of the column in the original painting, Fountain of Youth, and whose femininity is amplified through the addition of a baby held in its arms. The evolution of the avatars’ feminine forms is further magnified in the computer animation Restart, where Miao dissolves the demarcation between male and female clones. The abolition of gender difference is especially evident in Miao’s design of an avatar that floats through the air displaying a full, seemingly pregnant belly, intimating fecundity and pregnancy as part of the masculine avatar experience. (Fig. 5) Puzzlingly, however, this avatar is not carrying a humanoid foetus or an avatar foetus, but a formation of small vegetables or fruit, suggesting a flexible interspace between the drive for satiation, procreation and expansion through multidimensional corporal relationships between humans and plants. Finally, in

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Fig. 4   Miao Xiaochun, H2O – Fountain of Youth (F), 2007, (C-Print).

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Fig. 5   Miao Xiaochun, Restart, 2008–2010, (3D Computer animation).

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a later part of the video Miao introduces a cluster of seemingly female-gendered avatars which, however, have retained the facial shape and features of the artist’s original male avatar. Following this scene, the same group of avatars is seen oscillating back and forth between differently gendered physical characteristics, creating limitless expressions of gender on the virtual gender matrix (Seliger 2013: 135–149). Apart from dissolving borders between male and female clones and between the human and vegetal realm, the successively disintegrating European masterpieces also release historical representations of humananimal connections. One such example is the heroine of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Dull Gret (1562) who, depicted as a humanoid with an animal head, effectively destabilizes the human figure, pointing perhaps to transgressive physical relations or the heightening of female power in a post-human condition. (Fig. 6) Virtual hybridization here appears to serve as a tool with which to mimic natural hybridization in animal and plant species, i.e. to increase variability within a population of virtual creatures seeking to adapt to an altered future environment. Miao’s creation of interspecies formations may thus signify a stimulus for a new overall biodiversity in a continually pluralizing art history. Considering the transformations of the avatars’ physical forms as outlined above, one may deduce that the artist conceived of the virtual human body as an ontologically non-fixated place whose non-hierarchical lines of transmutation and cross-fertilization act as facilitators in the bridging of segmented cultural and visual fields, and therefore in the obliteration of binary categories of difference. “Chinese Aesthetic Sensibility”, “Hyperculture” or “‘Global’ Art (History)”? Based on the above discussion, the question as to the nature and meaning of the avatars’ transient identities, as well as that of the cultural situatedness and ‘global’ constitution of Miao’s 3D works, may now be more productively revisited. As already demonstrated, the overall condition of Miao’s 3D œuvre is marked by a pursuit of revision and flexibilization – a work method which prevents the production of a finished artwork in a finite form, including that of its assorted characters. This defining trait gains weight when contextualizing it with some of the ideas of philosopher and media theorist Byung-Chul Han, specifically his conceptualizations of “Chinese aesthetic sensibility” and “hyperculture”. Han states that the privileging of “endless process” and “perpetual transformation” over a “singular act of creation” resulting in a “definite identity” are the markers of “Chinese aesthetic sensibility” (Han 2011: 19). He refers to this aesthetic preference as the decisive difference between Plato’s ideal of the “beautiful” and the “good”, i.e. an unalterable state that

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Isabel Seliger /

Fig. 6   Miao Xiaochun, Restart, 2008–2010, (3D Computer animation).

The Art of Globalization “resembles only itself” (Gr. monoeides, uniformity of appearance or type) (Herrmann 2007: 206), and Chinese artistic practice. Due to the Chinese proclivity for “continual creation” developed in a culture that does not believe in the concepts of “being” (Ger. Sein) and “nature” (Ger. Wesen) (Han 2011: 20, 43-44), creativity, according to Han, is understood as an evolutionary process in which the combining, intermixing and modifying of elements and forms plays a fundamental role (ibid.: 72–73, 84–85). Accordingly, the preoccupation with transformation in traditional Chinese art in fact constitutes its method of creation, meaning that Chinese art history is ultimately made up of “post creations” and “continual creations” (ibid.: 83) that persistently change the work of a master and adjust it to a new reality (ibid.: 23). Han adds that the generative behaviour of nature as perceived and visualized in traditional Chinese painting serves to illustrate this ideal in that it emulates the natural process of perpetual variation, mutation and hybridization (ibid.: 84–85). When seen in light of Han’s thought, Miao’s virtual art history lends itself to the notion of “creation after creation” or “on-going creation” (ibid.: 83) as it visualizes a kind of post art history that ceaselessly empties and re-inscribes pictorial content (ibid.: 21, 25, 41–42). As such, the artist’s design of transitory and cross-fertilizing identities echoes the concept of a self-generative nature and its interaction of forms in traditional Chinese art. Miao’s own observation concerning European aesthetic conventions, namely that “[…] the consideration of differences from the original is a view absent from art history” (Wu 2007: 9), seemingly complements Han’s deliberations on the specificity of “Chinese aesthetic sensibility”. In contrast, the distorted and undisciplined pictorial register that is the outcome of Miao’s 3D vision is more meaningfully contextualized with Han’s analysis of the constitution of present-day culture: “Borders or enclosures that are imprinted with the illusion of cultural authenticity or originality come undone. [...] Heterogeneous cultural contents huddle side by side. Cultural spaces become superimposed and interpenetrate each other” (Han 2005: 16-17). In this scenario, “cultures between which inter- and trans- take place become un-bounded, de-localized and re-moved towards hyper-culture” (ibid.: 59). According to Han, “not the sentiment of trans-, inter-, or multi-, but that of hyper- more accurately conveys the spatiality of today’s culture” (ibid.: 17). He emphasizes that “hyperculture” first and foremost connotes “placelessness” (ibid.: 41–43). This “placelessness”, including the loss of the category of place as a site that establishes particularity, has consequences for the concept of identity, which, as per Han, is now pieced together from the “hypercultural stock of life forms and practices” (ibid.: 55). Han’s viewpoints are useful for exposing the double nature of Miao’s 3D œuvre, as it is at once deeply informed by aesthetic principles in Chinese

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Isabel Seliger / traditional painting (Wu 2005: 84-86), cultivating multiplicity through uninterrupted imitation and variation, while also reflecting the unrestrained and non-dialectical, contemporary side-by-side existence of movable pieces of art and culture, such as shown in Restart, as described by Han. Concerning experiences during which borders and time cease to exist, Miao himself points to the role of advanced technology in the changing cognition of physical reality, citing international air travel and the use of the internet as facilitating “cultural integration” and “new ways of thinking”. This new awareness, according to Miao, is significantly amplified in a 3D environment, underscoring the role of virtuality as a phenomenon in the unmaking of spatial units and physical entities:

Practices of Self-Cultivation

First, in our times, the development of new technology brought new ways of thinking which cancels out a lot of things: geographical difference and time difference. Some barriers that could not be surpassed before are being conquered by us. […] Second, such differences are being further eliminated in a 3D virtual world. Directions, stories and circumstances are offset by technology. So when we think about those core issues, we use a new way of thinking. This is very interesting and it is very different from my works 10 or 20 years ago. Before I was interested in ‘identity’ and ‘western and oriental cultural conf licts’; looking back, is it important?  (Huang 2010: 6) If one were to apply the above ideas onto the contested definition of “contemporary art forms in China” (Wu 2006b: 35), it soon becomes evident that Miao’s work is neither expressly intent on making “traditional Chinese concepts and forms part of global contemporary art” nor on “retain[ing] the authenticity of non-western contemporary art”. By the same token, his work can neither readily be categorized as “a local imitation of western contemporary art” nor as an extension of the historically earlier phenomenon of “‘Western’ style dominated Chinese art” (ibid.: 36, 35). Instead, Miao’s work seems to aim for an overarching revision of artist and art historical narrative by way of non-representational visualization in dematerialized and ‘globally’ constituted spaces beyond the East-West dichotomy. Miao’s own commentary on Restart echoes this exact dimension: One thing is very important: these paintings all represent independent stories. Theoretically speaking, they cannot be connected; but I eliminated their independent narrations and replaced them with the same model. I removed identities, ethnic groups, time and space concepts to form a new story. This new story is more poetic, more dreamy and different

The Art of Globalization from the traditional original stories. This is how these paintings are combined.  (Huang 2010: 2) But the difficulty of assessing the ‘local’ versus the ‘global’ in Miao’s 3D works, and thus the patterns of entanglement and interpenetration of the avatars, stems not only from the modalities of contemporary Chinese art, but from concepts and terms in general. As Han notes, the term ‘culture’ as it came to be used in Northeast Asia is itself an import from Europe in the late nineteenth century, when it became transliterated into Chinese, Japanese and Korean language (Han 2005: 57, footnote no. 70), revealing the artificial nature of a seemingly universal concept. As an extension, the concepts of interculturality and multiculturality derive from predominantly Western phenomena and are historically linked to Western forms of nationalism and colonialism (ibid.: 56). By contrast, intercultural movement in Northeast Asia does not philosophically presuppose an essentializing of culture, just as the concept of the ‘human being’ in East Asian philosophical traditions does not imply a “clearly defined, substantial or individual unit, i.e. a ‘person’”. Rather, the latter denotes a relationship, expressed by the Chinese characters for ‘man’ and ‘between’ (ibid.). Han therefore points out that ‘inter-’ is not a notion or a term that describes a relationship between persons or subjects retrospectively – which is the implication of Western terms such as ‘intersubjectivity’ – but is always already a constituent of the notion of being human (ibid.: 56–57). If one were to follow this logic and perceive Miao’s avatars through the broader lens of East Asian culture and thought, it would mean that his clones were to a certain degree predisposed to a state of Han’s “mutual interpenetration” (ibid.: 56) rather than representing the synthesized outcome of juxtaposed, fixed cultural traits – a constellation which historically did not have an analogous parallel in Northeast Asian cultures. This, in turn, would mean that in order to do justice to nationally and culturally specific differences in Asian arts, the theoretical models and master narratives in Western research methods ought to be deconstructed. However, as the concepts of “Chinese aesthetic sensibility” and ‘human being’ demonstrate, these immediately re-ethnicize the artist and his work, undermining the powerful and potent tropes of transcultural encounter and connectivity in Miao’s global image space: […] My attitude towards other artists from different countries is different. Before, I felt it’s their culture, their history and what they inherited; now I can look at this in a more relaxed way. I can even look at their works as our common property. I often visit different museums in different countries to look at

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Isabel Seliger / all kinds of artworks; and now I would not distinguish which one is ours and which one is theirs. It seems like this ownership distinction is also diminishing; […]. Then everyone will start to think about issues of common concern. Westerners are thinking about it; Orientals are thinking about it; and we have more common ground to communicate with each other.  (Huang 2010: 6-7)

Conclusion

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In his 3D environments, Miao Xiaochun generates an intervisual activity that extends from the proximate standpoint of individual European paintings to a more abstract, all-inclusive and ‘global’ art historical perspective. These movements cast alternative perspectives on the history of art and artistic production, including the very concepts of ‘art’ and ‘culture’, the application of which is not adequate to most non-Western contexts. Thus ‘globality’ in the context of Miao’s 3D œuvre does not refer to a unified conceptual characteristic, but to the deeply complex, intertwined and contradictory operations of image, actor and world in which “simulation technology” is used to restore, renew, connect as well as “to deconstruct history, reality and virtuality” (ibid: 7). Ultimately, this means that “3D technology – or technological aesthetics – can transform, deconstruct, localize and internalize historical stories or cultural legacies to create a new language” (ibid.: 3).2 It is in this context that the changeable shapes and increased variety of Miao’s avatars become relevant as they represent a new form of code or expression, pointing to key functions in future conditions that will increasingly require the crossing of cultural, spatial and chronological systems (Barak 2008: 3-9). For this purpose, the avatars’ immediate outward appearance suggests new egalitarian and transcultural modes instead of nationalist and universalist attitudes, their pictorial register enrichment, not decline – a global imaginary that art historians can learn from.3 •

3  The last two quotes constitute Huang Du’s assessment of Miao’s “core concept” in the artist’s 3D works.

4  Here I am expanding on a comment made by Wu Hung about Miao’s series H2O – A Study of Art History : “In fact, I think that art historians can learn quite a lot from your series” (Wu 2007: 10).

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References Barak, Azy, ed. (2008): Psychological Aspects of Cyberspace: Theory, Research, Applications. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Han, Byung-Chul (2005): Hyperkulturalität: Kultur und Globalisierung. Berlin: Merve. Han, Byung-Chul (2011): Shanzai: Dekonstruktion auf Chinesisch. Berlin: Merve. Huang, Du (2010): “Restart.” Unpublished interview by Huang Du with Miao Xiaochun. Translated by Hao Yanjing. Miao Xiaochun Studio, Beijing: March 25, 2010. Herrmann, Fritz-Gregor (2007): “The Idea of the Good and the Other Forms in Plato’s Republic.” In: Douglas Cairns, Fritz-Gregor Herrmann and Terrence Penner (eds.), Pursuing the Good: Ethics and Metaphysics in Plato’s Republic. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Ltd, pp. 202–239. Seliger, Isabel (2011): “The Aesthetics of Transcultural Desire: Borderline Interventions in Miao Xiaochun’s The Last Judgment in Cyberspace and The Last Judgment in Cyberspace – Where Will I Go?” In: Hans Belting, Jacob Birken, Andrea Buddensieg and Peter Weibel (eds.), Global Studies: Mapping Contemporary Art and Culture. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, pp. 174–93. Seliger, Isabel (2013): “Geschlecht und globaler Bildraum: virtuelle Wanderungen und Wandlungen im Werk von Miao Xiaochun.” In: Annika McPherson, Barbara Paul, Sylvia Pritsch and Silke Wenk (eds.), Wanderungen. Migrationen

und Transformationen aus geschlechterwissenschaftlichen Perspektiven. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, pp. 135–149. Tu, Wei-ming (1979): Humanity and Self-Cultivation: Essays in Confucian Thought. Berkeley, CA: Asian Humanities Press. Wu, Hung (2005): “Phantasmagoria: Recent Photographs by Miao Xiaochun.” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 4: pp. 73–89. Wu, Hung 2006a: “Miao Xiaochun’s Last Judgment.” In: Miao Xiaochun and He Hao (eds.), Miao Xiaochun: The Last Judgment in Cyberspace. Chicago, IL: Walsh Gallery, pp. 4–11. Wu, Hung 2006b: “On Contemporary Forms in Chinese Art and the ‘Diachronic Approach’ of the 6th Gwangju Biennale 2006.” media-N 2: 35-39. Wu, Hung (2007): Miao Xiaochun: H2O – A Study of Art History. Chicago, IL: Walsh Gallery. Zielinski, Siegfried (2006): “Discovering the New Within the Old.” In Tian Yuan, Zhang Di and Zhu Di (eds.), Miao Xiaochun: The Last Judgment in Cyberspace. Beijing: White Space Beijing and Alexander Ochs Galleries Berlin / Beijing, unpaginated. Zielinski, Siegfried (2010): “Discovering the New in the Old: The Early Modern Period as a Possible Window to the Future? Neues im Alten entdecken: Die frühe Neuzeit als mögliches Fenster in die Zukunft?” In: Uta Grosenick and Alexander Ochs (eds.), Miao Xiaochun 2009-1999. Köln: DuMont, pp. 45–69.

274 Copyrights As a Guest of a German Family (detail), 1999, (black-and-white photograph), Miao Xiaochun, courtesy of Miao Xiaochun, Beijing, China. Restart, 2008–2010, (3D Computer animation), Miao Xiaochun, courtesy of Miao Xiaochun, Beijing, China. H2O – Landscape with Diogenes (F) (detail), 2007, (C-Print), Miao Xiaochun, courtesy of Miao Xiaochun, Beijing, China. Fig. 4  H2O – Fountain of Youth (F), 2007, (C     Print), Miao Xiaochun, courtesy of Miao     Xiaochun, Beijing, China. Fig. 5  Restart, 2008–2010, (3D Computer anima    tion), Miao Xiaochun, courtesy of Miao     Xiaochun, Beijing, China. Fig. 6  Restart, 2008–2010, (3D Computer anima    tion), Miao Xiaochun, courtesy of Miao     Xiaochun, Beijing, China.

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Fig. 1              Fig. 2           Fig. 3 

Isabel Seliger /

Transculturally Entangled

Birgit Hopfener

Transculturally Entangled – Qiu Zhijie’s Concept of Total Art Since 2003 the artist Qiu Zhijie, who is based in China but exhibits internationally, has been working with and through his concept of Total Art (Zongti Yishu 总体艺术). This concept is a subjective, historical and transcultural construction of “art as life”. As a socially engaged art practice, Total Art projects are combinations of cultural investigations, historical research and social work (Qiu 2006: 4). In my own role as a contemporary art historian who situates herself within a critical global discourse of art history that seeks to decentre the Eurocentric framing of contemporary art through the lens of Chinese histories and epistemologies of art, I argue that Total Art is a good example of how locally situated but globally engaged contemporary artists not only articulate their transcultural entangledness but also position themselves respectively. I will introduce Qiu Zhijie as an art historically informed artist, whose artistic self is “shaped” by and articulated through Chinese but also Euro-American and other regional histories and epistemologies of art. I will then explore how his Total Art addresses a local and global audience by interrelating and thereby critiquing modern Western and Chinese histories and epistemologies of integrated art discourses along with their respective social conditions and effects. Qiu Zhijie employs the concept of “expanded art” (Kuangzhan de yishu gainian 扩展的艺术概念), articulated in the context of European art history most prominently by Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) as a working mode to overcome the modern Western binary structure of art and society and to produce socially effective art (Beuys / Harlan 2004). He also re-invents the traditional Chinese concept of art as self-cultivation, which is based on the assumption rooted in Chinese art history that art must be conceived not as separate from society, but as an integrated element of it, in so far as it is not created for its own sake but is expected to serve broader social and ethical objectives. Qiu Zhijie’s works have the potential to create a critical awareness of blind spots in Chinese and European art histories and epistemologies, and they can potentially reshape dominant Eurocentric knowledge regimes of socially engaged art from a transcultural perspective. His subjective explorations of socially engaged art, with its multiple and entangled discourses and histories, reveal the spatial, temporal and epistemological

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Birgit Hopfener / pluralism of contemporary art. In this way, Qiu Zhijie challenges assumptions about universal global contemporaneity and the related concept of “global contemporary art”, a supposedly cohesive genre that remains rooted in a “Northern” historical and epistemological framework (Gardner / Charles 2013: 442-455; Sylvester 2005: 80-89; Simbao 2015: 216-286). Against this backdrop, I will offer a close reading of Qiu Zhijie’s Map of Total Art (Zongti Yishu Ditu 总体艺术地图) (Fig. 1), a cartographic drawing which makes the historical and transcultural constructedness of Total Art transparent from a production aesthetic perspective. Zooming into the multiple references that constitute Total Art, I will pay particular attention to “The Bridge of Zhuangzi Watching Fish”, the “Stadium of Self-Cultivation” and “Joseph Beuys”. I shall then discuss the meaning of the Chinese term Guantong Yishu 贯通艺术, which Qiu Zhijie chose as an alternative to Total Art in order to avoid the English connotation of totalitarianism and any authoritarian understanding of art, and to place the emphasis instead on the interrelational character of his concept. Guantong, which means “comprehensive understanding” (Cua 2003: 632), is a central term in Chinese cultural histories of learning and apprehending the world (ibid.). After explaining the cultural history of guantong, I will examine how Qiu Zhijie re-invents it as a critical practice. By combining production aesthetic with reception aesthetic perspectives, I will assess Qiu Zhijie’s map-making as a critical emancipatory practice that seeks to challenge and transform hegemonic histories and epistemologies transculturally.

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Map of Total Art The Map of Total Art (2012) is an ink drawing first created by the artist in 2012, when he started to make maps for his solo exhibition Prompts & Triggers: Blueprints 2012 by Qiu Zhijie at the Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam (Li 2016).1 Through combinations of words and images, he represents and interrelates multiple concepts, histories, forms, practices and institutions of Total Art. They are presented from an aerial perspective in the form of a radial urban structure. Their meaning can be inferred relationally from their position within an infrastructure of streets and their spatial and temporal relationship with each other. Another layer of meaning evolves through the motives the artist chose to illustrate the various concepts. Different architectural elements, such as houses, gardens and bridges, and elements of domesticated nature, such as parks, ponds and islands, constitute the landscape of Total Art. Emerging from the 1  The exact size of the map has not been recorded. This data is based on Christina Li’s review of Qiu Zhijie’s solo exhibition at Witte de With. See: Li (2016).

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Fig. 1   Qiu Zhijie, Map of Total Art, 2012,     ink on paper, c. 5 m length

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Birgit Hopfener / ‘Lake of Real Freedom’ in the centre of the map are the ‘Avenue of Reality’, the ‘Avenue of Enlightenment’, the ‘Avenue of History’ and the ‘Avenue of Return to Home’. A system of streets and bridges, with names such as the ‘Beuys Bridge’, the ‘Bridge of Zhuangzi Watching Fish’ or the ‘Bridge of John Cage’, connect buildings such as the ‘Theatre Bayreuth of Wagner’, the ‘Orchid Pavilion’, the ‘Stadium of Self-Cultivation’ and a building with an attached park called ‘Neo-Confucianism.’ Further elements include parks, such as the ‘Santiniketan University of Rabindranath Tagore’, lakes and rivers such as the ‘River of Fluxus’ or the ‘Sedimentary Pool’, and monuments, like the ‘Zhuangzi Monument’ and a cemetery symbolizing the ‘Study of a Transcultural Mortuary System’. Marcel Duchamp’s concept of the readymade is represented by the iconic ‘Fountain’, which is placed on an island. Other examples of elements that in their interconnection constitute the concept of Total Art are representations of ‘Personal Experience’ in the form of a chest of drawers, the ‘Square of Rethinking Media’ or the ‘Dock of Participation’, from which an ‘Icebreaker of Social Intervention’ departs. As the map illustrates, art as a life practice is the common global denominator for these multiple concepts, practices, philosophies, cultures and histories that make up Qiu Zhijie’s transcultural narrative of Total Art. In an essay on his concept of Total Art, the artist wrote: […] From the rethinking of modernity that extended globally in the twentieth century, from Rudolph Steiner to Rabindranath Tagore, from the Black Mountain College to Joseph Beuys, we can see the strength of the efforts to construct art as life. 

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(Qiu undated)

Interrelating different histories and concepts of art as life resonates with the context of production and the intended reception of the work. Firstly, the Map of Total Art together with a couple of other maps 2 was Qiu Zhijie’s artistic answer to the museum’s invitation to participate with his solo show in the exhibition series Prompts & Triggers (26 April 2012–6 January 2013), for which various artists were asked to critically engage with cultural differences beyond discursive frameworks of cultural essentialism, in order to analyse and consequently prevent social anxieties in a globalized world (Witte de With 2012). Secondly, the maps were also part of the conceptualizing process for the 9th Shanghai Biennial in 2012 entitled Re-activation, which Qiu Zhijie co-curated together with an international team. Probably for this reason, the map was made in English, the language spoken by everyone on the curatorial team, and not in Qiu Zhijie’s first language 2  Other maps Qiu Zhijie created in this context are: Map of 21st Century, Map of Utopia, Map of Chinese History, Map of Nanjing Yangzi River, and Map of Spirit Renew.

Transculturally Entangled Chinese. It is in these two reception contexts that the Map of Total Art served as medium of transcultural exchange on the problem of art’s relationship to life. By providing multiple and entangled historical and epistemological references of art as life practice, the map offered multiple possibilities of critical cultural and transcultural identification, and in so doing addressed global and local Chinese audiences alike. Mapping as Critical Practice In contemporary art discourses, critical examinations of mapping and the format and medium of the map have been a recurrent issue since the 1960s (Watson 2009: 293–307). Mapping as an artistic practice has often been used to contest dominant art historical narratives and to expose their subjective constructedness (Nataša 2010). In Qiu Zhijie’s case, the Total Art Map contributes to a (postcolonial) critique of Western modernity. The artist not only includes additional historical and cultural references that so far have been left out from dominant Eurocentric discourses and histories of socially engaged art. By adopting a cartographic approach to construct a spatially and temporally entangled history, he also critiques the linear and binary framework of modern Western history writing and its immanent effect of exclusion and “othering”. Moreover, it is the artist’s explicit concern to contribute to a global discourse of Total Art. By emphasizing that he is working through Chinese and Western as well as other cultures of art as life, the map has the potential to create critical knowledge and consciousness about the multiplicity and entangledness of socially engaged art concepts and their respective epistemological, (art-)historical and socio-political conditions. That this subjectively constructed transcultural historiography of Total Art is a negotiable construction is communicated by the map’s cropped edges, suggesting openness. When conceptualizing Total Art, he has stated: We knew quite clearly that we did not wish to and could not import the Euro-American concept of ‘Total Art’. Out of necessity, we stand on the foundations laid by Chinese and Western culture, looking to find our own way and to build our own methodology. Creating a framework to accompany the Mandarin-language notion of zongti yishu Total Art is not merely a way of stimulating art education in the domestic Chinese context, but a contribution to the entire global discourse of ‘total art’.  (Qiu 2006: 78) The map gives insights into the frameworks used to construct Qiu Zhijie’s concept of art as life practice. Viewers are invited to research into the

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Birgit Hopfener / concepts presented and to make sense of the artist’s suggestions for how different cultural and historical concepts of integrated art practices might relate to each other. They are welcome to draw on their own subjective knowledge, to reflect on their own particular discursive frameworks, and in so doing to enact their agency. As Denis Cosgrove has put it, for Qiu Zhijie the map is “[…] both the spatial embodiment of knowledge and a stimulus to further cognitive engagement” (Denis 1999: 2). In seeming contradiction to his claim that art should be emancipatory, Qiu Zhijie presents these combinations of concepts and histories, which are not conventionally compatible by adopting a static, centralized structure for the map. I argue that it is this very paradox of juxtaposing a hierarchical structure with an idiosyncratic approach that is potentially emancipatory. By trying to make sense of this structural contradiction, recipients can become aware of how they are constituted through the specific epistemological structures implied in representational systems. This is what motivates Qiu Zhijie’s interest in the format of the map as a representational tool of orientation. Talking about the practice of mapping, Qiu Zhijie has explained:

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I find it is difficult to make sense of this world. Creating maps is my way of resisting the madness of the world. We live in a world that makes us lost. Everyone has a map, or maps, that they carry within themselves and we should continuously create and recreate those maps. It is a proactive way of creating meaning, instead of passively accepting the meaning created by other people. The best result from my installation is for everyone to go and draw their own maps, perhaps of their interpersonal relationships, or just for the books and movies that they’ve read and seen. Draw a map and create a meaningful world for yourself.  (Li 2013)3 It is in this sense that map-making resonates with Qiu Zhijie’s concept of Total Art as Guantong yishu, or “Connected Art”, as Jennifer Dorothy Lee and Rebecca E. Karl suggest translating the term into English (Qiu undated).

Guantong from a Historical Perspective

Guantong is a central term in Chinese cultures of learning and apprehending the world. Literally translated, guantong 贯通 means “going through”. According to the Chinese dictionary Cihai Cidian, guantong generally 3  See: http://hk.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/ 903290/qiu-zhijie-making-maps-against-the madness-of-the-world, last accessed 6 September 2016.

Transculturally Entangled means achieving a wide and far-reaching comprehension through extensive learning. The term has varying connotations according to different worldviews in Confucianism, Neo-Confucianism, Buddhism and Daoism (Cua 2013: 632). The general precondition for guantong is the knowledge of many systems of knowledge, and its aim is to create one’s own coherent new knowledge system constituted by other systems. Since it does not demarcate different structures and fields of knowledge and does not refer to an understanding of specific content, but seeks to identify and probe interconnections in order to confirm and foster the mutual comprehension of different systems of knowledge, guantong can be called an interdisciplinary approach. Associative and creative thinking are vital for the practice of guantong. A more precise literal translation of guantong is “the thread that runs through things”, which as a metaphor, according to Antonio S. Cua, “[…] intimates the idea that understanding consists in having an insight into the interconnection of all things” (Cua 2005: 307). In Chinese cultural history, guantong plays a particularly prominent role in the context of Neo-Confucian4 ideology and its social practice of self-cultivation. According to the Neo-Confucian agenda, self-cultivation – i.e. the moral and spiritual process of becoming a moral human being – demands that human beings integrate themselves into a specific cosmological, social and political order and narrative through the study of the world’s phenomena according to a Neo-Confucian ontological framework and the learning of the Confucian historical literary canon as evidence of the Neo-Confucian order. In this context, guantong was not conceived as an end in itself but had further ethical implications. As the Neo-Confucian educational ideal of comprehensive understanding, achieved by investigating reality to the utmost, guantong was the constitutive precondition for self-cultivation’s function as a practice of social and political integration and unification.5 Qiu Zhijie’s Re-invention of Guantong as Total Art Qiu Zhijie has repeatedly talked about the difficulty of translating guantong into English. The following quote by the artist summarizes his understanding of Total Art as Guantong Yishu: 4  Neo-Confucianism was first formulated in the Song dynasty (960–1279). It is based on, but also differs from, worldly Confucianism by adding metaphysical thoughts. According to Barry Keenan, the three traits of Neo-Confucianism are: “1. Reshaping of what constituted the canon of Confucian Classics, 2. Philosophical doctrine that added metaphysical ideas to classical Confucian thought, 3. Elaborated program of self-cultivation.” (Keenan 2011: 7).

5  I have written about the concept of guantong in the context of Neo-Confucianism in more detail here: Hopfener (2017).

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What we need is actually an art that is related to free choice and the possibilities afforded by opening [to the world]. Total art would then be art without controls, or, that is to say, open art. Its objective is to connect individual practice with social responsibility; to link unrestrained fantasy with reality, to link labor with creation, and to connect everyday life with the barriers to art. Thus an even more accurate phrase would be: Guantong Yishu that is Connected art.  (Qiu undated) Guantong for him enables the practitioner to connect factors which, according to the modern binary structure of thinking, are conceived as contradictory. He particularly emphasizes the importance of integrating individual freedom and social responsibility, rational research and affectual actions (Bei / Le 2013). He furthermore stresses – seemingly in reference to his own interdisciplinary work practice as an artist, curator, writer and teacher – that to be active in different fields is not a weakness. On the contrary, each role and field will profit from the expertise one has achieved in others. Qiu Zhijie seeks to connect innovative art experiences with daily life, since it is his conviction that art serves the solution of individual and social problems. Moreover, he adopts the term guantong to highlight the need to understand the present as interconnected with the past and the future, since our present way of thinking is shaped by the past and will shape the thinking of the future (Bei / Le 2013). Reflecting the traditional understanding of guantong, Qiu Zhijie does not produce art and knowledge for their own sake, but underscores art’s obligation to act within social reality. However, in stark contrast to guantong as conceptualized within the traditional Confucian order of social reality, his understanding of guantong does not have a unifying perspective in terms of a holistic social ideal, but serves the generation of self-critical art and subjectivities. Qiu Zhijie’s re-invention of guantong unfolds various layers of meanings for different audiences and in different contexts. From a post-colonial perspective, the introduction of a Chinese concept can be seen as a strategy to decentre dominant Eurocentric critical framings of the world and its cultural articulations such as art (Dipesh 2007: 3–46). For an audience well versed in Euro-American art histories and epistemologies, the introduction of the alternative Chinese concept of guantong and art as self-cultivation has the potential to exert a critical and emancipatory effect, since it might initiate critical reflections on naturalized Eurocentric epistemologies. In the local Chinese context – keeping in mind that many (art) traditions and histories were destroyed during the regime of Mao Zedong in order to achieve progress as defined by a socialist, anti-bourgeois ideology

Transculturally Entangled – the re-activation of a historical concept such as guantong creates critical awareness and knowledge of the historical and ongoing effects of an understanding of art which, according to Neo-Confucianism, was conceived as an instrument for cultivating the self in tune with certain social hierarchies, and in this respect had to fulfil the function of social unification. In the contemporary Chinese socio-political context, the re-activation of a traditional concept from a contemporary and transcultural perspective can be read as an act of resistance and emancipation from the official national and cultural essentialist narrative and from the official agenda of denouncing any re-assessment of history as historical nihilism (lishi xu wu zhuyi) and a potential threat to the socio-political order (Schell 2016: 143). Self-cultivation as a Critical Practice of Examining Situated Knowledge It is in this respect that Total Art, Qiu Zhijie’s contemporary interpretation of art as self-cultivation, is conceptualized as a practice of examining situated knowledge. According to the artist, “through cultural investigation we transcend and free ourselves from the prejudice and set values that control our mind, to refresh our knowledge and sensibility” (Qiu 2006). The Map of Total Art seeks to inspire viewers to reflect on how they too are situated within certain structures, and encourages them to keep drawing new connections in order to make sense of the world from their own perspective. Based on Qiu Zhijie’s assumption that freedom is not given but has to be acquired (Chang 2008: 23), it is through continuous reflection upon one’s situatedness – that is, by critically intervening in given structures of knowledge and regimes of truth – that one achieves freedom in terms of personal emancipation (Hopfener 2014). In the Map of Total Art, the “Bridge of Zhuangzi Watching Fish” marks Qiu Zhijie’s programmatic claim to practice art as self-cultivation, which requires the examination of situated knowledge. The “Bridge of Zhuangzi Watching Fish” refers to a historical source: the famous story of “The Happiness of Fish” (Yu zhi le 鱼之乐) by Zhuangzi.6 If viewers invest the time to research, interpret and relate the story to themselves, it may serve as a trigger to fostering a critical attitude. “The Happiness of Fish” narrates the dispute between Zhuangzi, who claims to know that the fish are happy, and Huizi, who argues that Zhuangzi cannot know the fishes’ frame of mind since he is not a fish himself. The story about whether or not one is able to know if fish are happy recognizes that there is no single true way of knowing, and instead emphasizes the situatedness of knowledge. As Steven Shankman writes:

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For Huizi zhi 知 means certain knowledge from an intentionalist perspective. For Zhuangzi zhi 知 means the awareness however proximate and imprecise of his participation in the unity of the dao 道. Zhuangzi is clarifying the difference between the knowledge of the intentionalist thinker and the “wisdom” of the Daoist sage. How (an 安) does Zhuangzi know that the fish are happy? Zhuangzi chooses to understand an 安 as meaning ‘from what perspective’ (literally, ‘where’). He knows fish are happy, he concludes, from his perspective on the bridge overlooking the Hao River. A purely intentionalist thinker forgets that acts of intentionality occur within a comprehensive whole. There is no place to stand outside the process of reality. Zhuangzi is attempting to recover that insight, and his playful and ambiguous use of language ref lects this fact. Huizi’s question to Zhuangzi, ‘how do you know what the fish enjoy’ according to Zhuangzi, presupposes this participationist understanding of knowledge. ‘You already knew (zhi 知) I knew (zhi 知) it when asked the question,’ Zhuangzi replies. Whether we can know if the fish are happy or not depends on what is meant by knowing.  (Shankman 2002: 75–92; 80–81) This parable resonates with Qiu Zhijie’s central concern to be aware of the participatory constitution of knowledge, and to examine and critically intervene in frameworks through which truth claims are made. Qiu Zhijie’s contemporary interpretation of art as self-cultivation also has to be understood in this regard, which also explains the position of the “Stadium of Self-Cultivation” at the end of the “Avenue of Enlightenment”. On the one hand, Qiu Zhijie sticks to the traditional Chinese understanding of art as self-cultivation, a practice enabling the practitioner to become human, which in the Neo-Confucian understanding means a socially and culturally constituted human being. But unlike traditional interpretations of self-cultivation – generally considered as an affirmative practice7 despite diverging concerns and agendas in the Confucian, Buddhist and Daoist contexts – Qiu Zhijie pursues and encourages self-cultivation as a critical practice for questioning power structures. In other words, instead of 6  Zhuangzi and Huizi were strolling along the bridge over the Hao River. Zhuangzi said, ‘The minnows swim about so freely, following the openings wherever they take them. Such is the happiness of fish.’ Huizi said, ‘You are not a fish, so whence do you know the happiness of fish?’ Zhuangzi said, ‘You are not I, so whence do you know I don’t know the happiness of fish? ’Huizi said, ‘I am not you, to be sure, so I don’t know what it is to be you.

But by the same token you are certainly not a fish, my point about your inability to know the happiness of fish stands intact.’ Zhuangzi said, ‘Let’s go back to the starting point. You said, ‘Whence do you know the happiness of fish?’ Since your question was premised on your knowing that I know it, I must have known it from here, up above the Hao River.’ See: Zhuangzi (2009: 76).

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constituting one’s self according to normative aesthetic and moral premises and with an obligation to guarantee social and political unity, self-cultivation according to Qiu Zhijie’s critical practice means examining and transforming conditions and power structures, thereby constituting oneself as an emancipated subject in a plural and democratic society, and articulating resistance against the kind of subjectivation induced not only by local politics and institutions but also by global capitalism.8 According to Qiu Zhijie, “art serves the purpose to examine, develop and plan one’s self. It is an instrument for the artist as well as for viewers to cultivate (xiuyang 休养) and develop (fazhan 发展) one’s personality” (Bei / Le 2013). It is especially in this sense, by emphasizing art’s formative function in the process of constituting one’s emancipated social self, and by rejecting art as a medium of self-expression, that Qiu Zhijie relates his concept of Total Art to Joseph Beuys’ concept of art as “Social Sculpture”. At an event entitled “From Duchamp to Beuys: The Art History of the House of Oracles”, organized in conjunction with the House of Oracles retrospective for the artist Huang Yongping at the Ullens Centre of Contemporary Art in Beijing in 2012, Qiu Zhjie talked about his stance towards Joseph Beuys and Marcel Duchamp. The following quote is evidence that Qiu Zhijie identifies “art as shaping practice” to be the common denominator between his own understanding of art and that of Beuys: Art is a shaping practice, it forms my self but does not express it because my self is not yet generated completed − like liquid honey or f luid fat [...]. The self isn’t a finished object, but an imagination, a speculation and an assumption. It is against this background that the self cannot be expressed, but is only the direction one works towards.  (Qiu 2009) Moreover, Qiu Zhijie then seems to contextualize Beuys’s concepts of art and the artist by placing them within a specific European history of art rooted in Christian religion: We can say that the human being is God, or at least the extension of God’s hand. Human beings have created truth and histories out of nothing and consider themselves as God. […] If the human being is not God, who else could it be? [...] This is why God for you is human and your religion is humanism. Against this background I am not surprised that you consider 7 About the unifying function of calligraphy as self-cultivation see: Billeter (1990).

8 I have written about Qiu Zhijie’s concept of selfcultivation as an emancipatory practice within the Chinese socio-political context here: Hopfener 2017).

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Birgit Hopfener / the Red Cross by Henry Dunant a Social Sculpture. One could say that your statement that ‘Everybody is an artist’ means ‘Everybody is God’. Maybe what you mean to say is that everybody is God but like fat not yet solid that means completed, but in the process of shaping. In that logic when you say everybody is an artist you mean at the same time that everybody not yet is a real artist.  (Qiu 2009) These quotes by Qiu Zhijie reveal how, on the one hand, he seeks to identify the specific production context of Beuys’s concept of “Social Sculpture”, and, on the other, he constructs relations between this and his own concept of Total Art by emphasizing how both, in their respective socio-political and historical contexts, conceive of art as an instrument for shaping and sculpting processes and as a practice for enacting agency and becoming an emancipated subject.

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Conclusion The case of Qiu Zhijie and his historical and transcultural construction of Total Art is a good example of how contemporary art in the global context constitutes itself through multiple, transculturally entangled interrelations, and must therefore be conceived not as a universal but as a plural phenomenon. The Map of Total Art is evidence that Qiu Zhijie, even though he is no doubt informed by postcolonial theory, goes one step further when constructing contemporary art history by taking into account multiple histories of art. The postcolonial historiographical approach of decentring and expanding the canon sticks to the logic of “othering”, because non-Western artists are included as “others” constituted in a one-way – not reciprocal – relationship to the one and only Eurocentric master narrative. Qiu Zhijie, by contrast, emancipates both himself and the writing of art history from this power structure rooted in modern Western binary thinking, positing himself and contemporary art history as constituted through networks of multiple, reciprocal, transcultural interrelations. The Map of Total Art has the potential not only to encourage viewers to study these multiple and entangled histories and epistemologies from their respective socio-political and historical perspectives and to reflect on their own situatedness within specific social, epistemological and historical structures of reality and related discursive frameworks, but also to accept ethical responsibility for reevaluating and transforming epistemological and social frameworks such as the still dominant binary epistemological structure rooted in Western modernity, thereby resisting both world-wide nationalist tendencies and global capitalism with its universalizing effects. •

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References Bei, Duola and Le, Dadou (2013): “Fu you gan shou li de huozhe, Qiu Zhijie fang tan lu“ [富有感受力的活着, 邱 志杰访谈录] (Living full of sensibility, interview with Qiu Zhijie). Blog of the artist Qiu Zhijie. http://www.qiuzhijie. com/blog/article.asp?id=568, last accessed 6 September 2016. Billeter, Jean François (1990): The Chinese Art of Writing. New York: Rizzoli. Beuys, Joseph and Harlan, Volker (2004): What is Art? – Conversation with Joseph Beuys. Russet: Clairview. Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2007): Provincializing Europe, Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 3–46. Cosgrove, Denis (1999): “Introduction.” In: Denis Cosgrove (ed.), Mappings. London: Reaktion Books, p. 2. Cua, Antonio S. (2003): “Reason and Principle.” In: Antonio S. Cua (eds.), Encyclopedia of Chinese Philosophy. New York: Routledge, p. 632. Cua, Antonio S. (2005): Human Nature, Ritual, and History. Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, p. 307. Gardner, Anthony and Green, Charles (2013): “Biennials of the South on the edges of the global.” Third Text 27(4), pp. 442–455. Hopfener, Birgit (2014): “Qiu Zhijie’s Self-conception as an Artist: Doing Art in a Critical Historical and Transcultural Perspective.” Journal of Historiography, Modern and Contemporary Chinese Art: Historio-

graphic Reflections 10, http://art historiography.wordpress.com/, last accessed 6 September 2016. Hopfener, Birgit (2017): “Tomorrow, things will be different Qiu Zhijie’s concept of keeping alive through art.” Journal for Cultural Research 21 (1), pp. 4–15. Hopfener, Birgit (forthcoming): “Intervention is the answer but what are the questions? Developing criteria for a critical examination of Qiu Zhijie’s interventionist project “A Suicidology of the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge.” In: Pauline Bachmann, Melanie Klein, Tomoko Mamine and Georg Vasold (eds.), Art/Histories in transcultural dynamics. Perspectives on narratives and frameworks in the 20th and 21st century. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink. Keenan, Barry C. (2011): Neo-Confucian Self-Cultivation. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, p. 7. Li, Christina (undated): “Qiu Zhijie: Many Worlds redrawn.” Blog of the artist Qiu Zhijie. http://www.qiuzhijie. com/e-critiquelunwen/019.htm, last accessed 6 September 2016. Li, Zoe (2013): “Qiu Zhijie, Making Maps Against the Madness of the World.” (Interview with Qiu Zhijie) http://hk. blouinartinfo.com/news/story/903 290/qiu-zhijie-making-maps-againstthe-madness-of-the-world, last accessed 6 August 2017. Ogbechi, Sylvester (2005): “Ordering the universe: Documenta 11 and the apotheosis of the occidental gaze.” Art Journal 64(1), pp. 80–89.

288 Petrešin-Bachelez, Nataša (2010): “Innovative Forms of Archives, Part One: Exhibitions, Events, Books, Museums and Lia Perjovski’s Contemporary Art Archive.” Journal #13. http://www.e-flux. com/journal/13/61328/innovativeforms-of-archives-part-one-exhibitionsevents-books-museums-and-lia-perjovschi-s-contemporary-art-archive/, last accessed 6 August 2017. Qiu, Zhijie (2006): “Total Art Based on Social Investigation.” Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 5(3). Qiu, Zhijie (2006–present): “The Phase of Total Art (Zongti yishu jieduan 总体艺术阶段).” Pdf file, edited and personally provided by the artist.

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Qiu, Zhijie and Fan, Wenxin, eds. (2009): “Cong Dushang dao Boyinsi: Zhanbu zhe zhi wu de yishushi” (从杜尚到波伊：占卜者之屋的艺术 史) (From Duchamp to Beuys: The Art History of the House of Oracles).   Beijing literature and art network, http://www.artsbj.com/Html/interview/ wyft/msj/7762534484559_10.html, last accessed 6 September 2016. Qiu, Zhijie (undated): “On Total Art.” translated into English by Jennifer D. Lee and Rebecca E. Karl. Blog of the artist Qiu Zhijie. http://www.qiuzhijie. com/e-critiquelunwen/016.htm, last accessed 6 September 2016. Schmücker, Marcus and Heubel, Fabian, eds. (2013): Dimensionen der Selbstkultivierung. Beiträge des Forums für Asiatische Philosophie. Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber. Schell, Orville (2016): “To forget or remember. China’s struggle with its past.” The Washington Quarterly 39(3), p. 143.

Birgit Hopfener / Simbao, Ruth (2015): “What ‘global art’ and current (re)turns fail to see: A modest counter-narrative of ‘notanother-biennial’.” Image and Text 25, pp. 216–286. Shankman, Steven (2002): “These Three Come Forth Together, But Are Differently Named: Laozi, Zhuangzi, Plato”. In: Steven Shankman and Stephen W. Durrant (eds.), Early China /  Ancient Greece: Thinking Through Comparisons. Albany: State University of New York Press. Witte de With (2012): “Blueprints Qiu Zhijie.” Witte de With Contemporary art. http://www.wdw.nl/event/promptstriggers-qiu-zhijie-2/, last assed at 6 September 2016. Watson, Ruth (2009): “Mapping and Contemporary Art.” Cartographic Journal, Art and Cartography Special Issue 46(4), pp. 293–307. Zhuangzi (2009): Zhuangzi: The Essential Writings with Selections from Traditional Commentaries, translated into English by Ziporyn, Brook Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company.

Copyrights Fig. 1         

Qiu Zhijie, Map of Total Art, 2012, ink on paper, c. 5 m length, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam

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Globalization as an Artistic Strategy: The Case of Takashi Murakami In 2010, the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami held a solo exhibition in the Palace of Versailles.1 It was a curious sight: at any given moment dozens of tourists, many of whom were Japanese, could be seen circling his works, while incessantly photographing them. Interestingly, while the organizers of the show and its Western viewers thought of the celebrity-artist Murakami as the symbol of contemporary East-Asian art in the West, for many of the visiting Japanese tourists, this encounter with Murakami’s works at Versailles was their first ever. For Versailles, Murakami both provided the opportunity for a blockbuster exhibition, and contributed to the branding of the palace as a global site for the exhibition of art. In this sense, Murakami’s case reveals how the concept of globalism can be exploited in the field of contemporary art: Western curators, art dealers, collectors, and viewers embraced and nurtured Murakami and his art in the name of ‘a global era’, thus positioning themselves as active participants in current globalist discourse; Murakami, in turn, recognized this ‘global era’ and turned to the Western art arena, rather than to the Japanese one, to define his art. It was in the West that he strove to be known as an artist and it was through a Western lens that he wished his art to be constructed and read. Developing this self-orientalizing practice, Murakami, as I will suggest here, used the West’s growing interest in the East in order to enter the ‘global’ (in reality, Western) art canon.2 It is this reciprocal interest in the name of globalism, which established Murakami’s position as one of the most prominent Japanese artists in the West during the first decade of the millennium, and the subsequent adoption of his art by political institutions representing Japan in the international arena, which stand at the centre of this paper.

1  See Le Bon et al. (2010) for the exhibition catalogue Murakami: Versailles. 2  For some more thoughts on the contemporary art canon, and its function as a commodity, in relation to Murakami, see Milano (2017).

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Ronit Milano / The underlying strategies employed in this case by both Murakami and the curators of the exhibition at Versailles are rooted in the emergence of a globalized artistic discourse around the turn of the twenty-first century. Yet at the same time, these strategies break with the epistemic constructions which were originally articulated by exhibitions such as Les Magiciens de la terre (1989) and Documenta11 (2002). Murakami’s shows in the West have built on a similar curatorial rationale, which addresses the concept of ‘the other’, or of ‘otherness’, as an index of Western artistic hegemony (in fact, global artistic hegemony) and related forms of ethnographic and political antagonism. It is an index through which the concept of identity is constructed: Les Magiciens de la terre and Documenta11 entrenched the idea of a global art world through the inclusion of artists from third-world countries.3 Yet what began, at the turn of the current century, as a critical statement, soon evolved into cultural positivism: rather than operating critically, these exhibitions came to centre on inclusion in the interest of the global art market. And what could have been read as a response to post-colonialist discourse might seem today like a new type of Orientalist fashion nurtured by the ‘Orient’ itself as a political body. Ever since globalization was first theorized in the 1990s, it has proved extremely difficult to fully grasp its comprehensive essence: the term is malleable, and it touches upon, and is constantly redefined by, a wide array of economic, social, and intellectual concerns. Pamela Lee (2012) offers one conceptualization of the art world under the sign of globalization, which rethinks Arthur Danto’s formulation of the art world as an exclusive sphere. 4 Lee defines the new art world as an arena inextricably tied to ‘the real world’, where the work of art is both an object of, and an agent for, globalization. Here I shall use the term ‘globalism’ to describe the tendency towards globalization, the conceptual framework that is inhabited by the practical process of globalization. In the globalized arena where art and ‘the real world’ converge, politics, diplomacy, money, social activism, intellectual thought, and other elements in what Foucault would have called the episteme come together and reshape one another. For Lee, the field of contemporary art thus cannot be approached outside the concept of globalism, which is embedded in our understanding of the world and its dynamics. Murakami’s art is one radical example of this dynamic. 3  For an analysis of the emergence of a globalized curatorial discourse, see O’Neill (2012: 51-85). On the Biennial as globalist praxis, see Seijdel (2009). For an opposing view, see Wu (2009: 10715). For the perception of Documenta11 as a space of synergy, see Meta Bauer (2002: 103-107). A critical view of this approach was expressed by Kravagna (2003: 93) who rated the “one-way

import” as a colonial curatorial practice. For a discussion of these opposing views, see Elkins/ Valiavicharska/Kim (2010: 52–62). 4  An early formulation of this idea was published by Lee in 2003 as a short essay relating to an identity crisis that occurs around the turn of the millennium (Lee 2003: 164–167).

Globalization as an Artistic Strategy Art that is integral to a globalized world might be pictured as a stage that both displays and produces concrete constructions which are directly related to reality: the communicational essence of such art makes it a site for the articulation and reshaping of different contemporary identities – an arena of encounter between economic, intellectual, and political capital and various agendas, as well as between cultural identities that can be dialectically defined as ‘self’ and ‘other’. Within the sphere of contemporary art, these identities are presented, processed, and communicated. It is precisely this communication of allegedly differentiated identities within an allegedly pluralist site that Fredric Jameson recognized in 1998 as the defining aspect of globalization (Jameson 1998: 54-77). Building on Hegel’s dialectics, Jameson theorized globalization as a philosophical site for the construction and deconstruction of identity and non-identity. Thinking of globalization as an ideology or, as Jameson suggests, as a philosophical issue, immediately brings to mind the question of political motivations, economic interests, and social gains from the opportunity to dissolve the boundaries between self and other. In this respect we must consider the contemporary motivations for exhibiting ‘an other’; more specifically, in Murakami’s case, we must consider the othering of Japanese art, as well as the intersecting paths that define the local and the global. After all, as Okwui Enwezor suggested, the structure of Western modernity, which is essentially dualist and relative, continues – through the practice of othering – well into the age of global capitalism (Enwezor 2009: 25-40). At the turn of the millennium – as Murakami was gaining visibility in the art world parallel to a growing interest in art produced in third-world countries – a new type of ‘otherness’ was introduced: an ‘other’ that was neither postcolonial nor post-communist, that was perceived as economically powerful, and that was from a place faraway enough to appear almost fantastic for many Westerners, while connoting something ‘sexy’, ‘crazy’, and ‘cool’. Japan thus came to be a curious ‘other’ desired by the West (Napier 2007). Indeed, its very distinction from the West is what made it into an integral part of the latter’s self-definition. It is this dialectic space, I will argue, that Murakami recognized and operated within, manifesting himself as an other in order to become a part of the Western canon. ‘Cool Japan’ was a concept, a cultural ideology, and a political strategy developed by the Japanese government.5 Embraced in the West under the sign of globalization, it seemingly celebrated inclusion and pluralism, while in reality responding to different motivations and aims. Whereas the display of art from third-world countries in the West can be construed as a colonial practice intended to validate Western hegemony through an 5  The term was coined by Douglas McGray (2002: 44-54).

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Ronit Milano / inclusive act, the interest in Far Eastern culture, as much as it was driven by economic and political concerns, was not shaped by a patronizing gaze, as Japan was perceived as ‘equal’ in terms of progression and economic strength (Napier 2007). The idea of ‘Cool Japan’ provided the West with this exact epistemological experience. And as Western pop culture bathed in images of Hello Kitty and Pokémon, the art world enthusiastically clung to what came to be known as ‘Superflat’.6 The word ‘Superflat’ represents a discursive site for the visual reverberations of issues pertaining to contemporary Japanese society and culture. Aesthetically, the term relates to a tendency towards extreme flatness, a lack of perspective, and a sense of graphic movement. This word was invented and first theorized by the artist Takashi Murakami. Born in Tokyo in 1962, Murakami grew up to be an enthusiastic fan of manga and anime. He attended the elite Tokyo University of Arts, known as Geidai, where he received a PhD in Nihonga – traditional Japanese painting – and where he became a key member of a group of art students who would come to hold central positions in the Japanese art scene. It was among this group of young intellectuals that the seeds of Superflat were sown. These artists were all frustrated with the state of contemporary art in Japan – the lack of economic opportunities for contemporary artists, the scarcity of Japanese collectors of contemporary art, the preferences of artistic institutions, and an overly Westernized style (what Ekwezor would have called “petit modernity”, relating to Japanese artists mimicking the Western style).7 This last claim is especially telling, since what can be considered as Western canonic art at that time was essentially pluralist in its aesthetic criteria. What Murakami understood was that this “petit” approach could never make Japan a part of the Western (or so-called globalized) canon, and that in order to become part of it one needed to develop a distinguished language – in other words, to go through a process of self-othering. Artists of Murakami’s generation in Japan all dreamed of making something new, and this dream, with its resistance to Japanese ‘institutionalized’ art, was to be articulated as Superflat during the 1990s. Murakami, who was a shrewd strategist, and his firm – an art management company called Kaikai Kiki (previously the Hiropon Factory) – became central to both its formulation and its dissemination in the West. 8 6 On the social and economic aspects of the popularity of cute Japanese products, see: Yano (2013). 7  Murakami considered much contemporary Asian art to be ‘reappropriated’ Western art, as expressed in the message he posted on the website of his company KaiKai Kiki. Takashi Murakami, “Laying the Foundation for a Japanese Art Market,” Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd, http://english.kaikaikiki.co.jp/whatskaikaiki ki/message/, last accessed 3 January 2012.

8  The Hiropon Factory was founded by Murakami in 1996 in Saitama, Japan, with a branch in New York. Initially a workshop-like space, it evolved into a company that sells Murakami’s art and his massproduced artefacts, and promotes and represents other Japanese artists. Many of the artists chosen by Murakami to exhibit their work in the Superflat shows were part of Kaikai Kiki.

Globalization as an Artistic Strategy In 2001 Murakami was invited to curate the Superflat exhibition at MOCA – the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. 9 The ‘importation’ of the Superflat show to MOCA was anything but a spontaneous idea on the part of Paul Schimmel, the museum’s chief curator at the time. This exhibition, which travelled to Minneapolis and Seattle and drew an audience of close to 100,000 viewers, was the result of a meticulous, continuous and calculated effort made by Murakami and his friends during the preceding decade. This effort harnessed the celebration of globalization for the sake of creating artistic success – of art that would be popular in both aesthetic and economic terms. For Murakami and his Superflat partners, globalization became an instrument for self-definition, enabling them to articulate their identity through the Western perception of Japanese culture – through other’s perception of their otherness. This strategy, however, required an agent – in the domains of both theory and practice. In the early 1990s, Tim Blum was helping to run a small art gallery in Tokyo, befriending some of the artists and intellectuals in the group led by Murakami (Favell 2011: 87). In 1994, when Blum left Tokyo, returning permanently to Los Angeles, he convinced his friend Jeff Poe to open an art gallery, despite the weak market. Today, Blum & Poe is one of the most successful commercial galleries in the world, largely thanks to their decision, in the late 1990s, to ‘import’ Japanese art to America. Murakami and Blum & Poe shared the same strategic idea: introducing to Western consumers – both viewers and collectors – a contemporary style that seemed essentially Japanese (a style that could be characterized, roughly, as evocative of Japanese flat and decorous visual tradition, of manga and anime, of the concepts of kawaii and otaku culture and of an inner fantasy world). At the time, Superflat was not part of the contemporary Japanese canon. It took Western recognition for it to be embraced by Japanese art institutions as it became politically instrumental.10 In 1999, when ‘otherness’ was the name of the game in the art world, Blum and Poe recognized the momentum: they applied for a solo booth at the prestigious Art Basel fair in Switzerland, planning to dedicate the entire booth to Takashi Murakami – then a young Japanese artist who was gradually gaining visibility in the West through his agents in Paris, New York, and Los Angeles. As Blum and Poe recall, many thought that “[we were] out of our 9 On this exhibition and on the idea of Superflat, see Michael Darling (2001: 76-89). Darling was an assistant curator at the MOCA LA at the time of the Superflat show. The MOCA Superflat show was accompanied by a bilingual book (English and Japanese), which Murakami published a year earlier to mark the two original Superflat shows, curated by him, that went on display at the Parco department stores in Nagoya and Tokyo’s Shibuya district in 2000.

10 It was only in August 2001, following Murakami’s success in the West, that he held his first solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo. On the political deployment of this success, see McGray (2002).

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Ronit Milano / minds […] deluded idiots”; the works were all sold (Martin 2013). It was in part as a result of this art fair that Paul Schimmel, who was a close friend and colleague of Blum and Poe, decided to invite Murakami to present Superflat to a wider range of Western viewers, ‘selling’ it as a representation of the canon of contemporary Japanese art. It was on this occasion, I argue, that otherness was invented as a self-applied concept – that is, that Japanese contemporary art was qualified as a form of ‘otherness’ by its very creators. Globalization and the idea of a hegemonic West were instrumental in this self-construction. Throughout the first years of the twenty-first century, while Japan was going through a severe economic crisis, the obsession of the West with Cool Japan continued to grow, encompassing not only the fine art market but also the fields of film and literature 11. Endless programmes focusing on Asian studies, or more specifically on Japanese studies, opened at numerous academic institutions. Murakami, responding to the trend, strove to substantiate Superflat intellectually. When a large exhibition titled “Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture” opened in New York in 2005, Kaikai Kiki joined the Japan Society and Murakami’s dealers in sponsoring the publication of a scholarly exhibition catalogue together with Yale University Press (Murakami 2005). At the height of its artistic and commercial success, Superflat was epitomized and celebrated in the West through this book as “a distinctly Japanese visual language” (Munroe in ibid.: viii). In one of his essays in the book, Murakami defined the current show as a final part in “the Superflat trilogy”, bringing the “Superflat project” to a close (Murakami in ibid.: 151). Arguably, what Murakami really meant to say was that the mission of communicating this particular aesthetic idea to the West had succeeded. Riding the waves of globalism and ‘Japanism’, and following a surge of related popular exhibitions and publications, Superflat was now an artistically, economically and intellectually grounded phenomenon in the West. With Superflat at its zenith, Paul Schimmel seized a lucrative opportunity and invited Murakami to the MOCA once again, this time for a solo exhibition (Schimmel 2007). It is beyond the scope of this paper to analyse all the political and economic aspects of the relationship between museums and the market, or between museums and the shaping of artistic canons . 12 Yet this 2007 exhibition, titled ©MURAKAMI, serves as a case in point for understanding the twofold mechanism underlying the globalist 11  One cinematic case in point was the release of Sofia Coppola’s film Lost in Translation in 2003 and its ensuing international success. On film, see Tomasulo (2007); Ko (2010). On pop culture more generally, and the West’s fascination with Japan, see: Napier (2007); Tsutsui (2010); Yano (2013).

12 On the relations between art, museum and the market, see Stallabrass (2004) and Buskirk (2012).

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art world strategy.13 Schimmel included as part of the show a Kaikai Kiki store displaying items for sale designed by Murakami and its other affiliated artists, as well as an active Louis Vuitton booth featuring Murakami’s designs. In doing so, Schimmel acknowledged these commercial aspects of Murakami’s work as inherent to his artistic strategy. Yet in selling ‘goods’ imported from Japan, Schimmel also reaffirmed the ‘new Orientalism’: hosting Murakami was both part of an ethos of inclusion and a response to Western society’s epistemic and commercial interest in the concept of Cool Japan. This show, however, did more than delineate the intersection of globalization with cultural and economic concerns within the art world: chiefly financed by Murakami’s art dealers, Schimmel’s exhibition anchored Murakami’s place within the Western narrative of the history of art 14; the Western canonization of his art, in turn, positioned Murakami as a leading contemporary artist in his own country. Orientalism, in its new globalized guise, thus became not only a cultural phenomenon, but also a dialectic ideology. To return once again to Fredric Jameson’s interpretation of the Hegelian system: “You begin with Identity only to find that it is always defined in terms of its Difference with something else; you turn to Difference and find out that any thoughts about that involve thoughts about the ‘identity’ of this particular category. As you begin to watch identity turn into Difference and Difference back into identity, you grasp both as an inseparable opposition; you learn that they must always be thought together” (Jameson 1998: 75-76). It is precisely this dialectics which I find fundamental to identity-related formulations in a global art system. Western identity, which can be viewed from a Western perspective as a hegemonic self, is definable only through a form of otherness. And the other, in the same way, is in itself definable only through its own other – in our case, the hegemonic West. The other, therefore, is integral to the self, just as the self is integral to the formulation of the other. Aiming to establish a new Japanese artistic language in his homeland – a local self that would be perceived as such by Japanese institutions and audience, Murakami chose to use the West (Japan’s own other) as a concept facilitating his own process of self-definition. In turn, the Western art scene operated around a similar epistemological model: Murakami’s art was highlighted as a sort of self-validating other – a strategy reflective of the wider relationship between the Western art world and Asian art today. Yet in becoming part of the Western canon, Murakami’s art was itself reconstituted as an other from a Japanese point of view. The conceptualization 13  Describing a visit to Murakami’s studio in Japan, Sarah Thornton unveils some of the preparations and thoughts behind the ©MURAKAMI exhibition at the MOCA LA in Seven Days in the Art World (2009: 181–217).

14 On the ethical aspects of such support, see Finkel (2007). For more on the connection between art and economic interests, see Crow (2008).

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Ronit Milano / of Murakami’s art thus points to the complexity of the globalized world Jameson probes, since the constructs of self-identity and otherness are two sides to a single coin. For Murakami, it seems, the dialectics of globalization offered an opportunity for canonization; for Western institutions, meanwhile, it was an occasion for redefinition through cultural assimilation. And for both parties, it was also obviously a chance for economic gain.15 What is unique in Murakami’s case, though, is his insistence on a locally and culturally specific aesthetic context. In designing the Superflat style and content, and through an intense effort to introduce them to the West, Murakami in fact designed a self as a particular kind of other – creating a sense of ‘Japaneseness’ that was intended for Western eyes. Conceiving of Superflat for a Western audience, he harnessed the dialectic essence of the globalized art world, while relying on the endorsement of Western art institutions. The solo exhibition at MOCA, much like the exhibition in the Palace of Versailles in 2010, thus provided Murakami with an opportunity to sustain a specific artistic form of identity/otherness within the larger historical narrative of Western art. This form of otherness is driven neither by a colonialist impulse, in the Saidian sense, nor by the mission of inclusion; rather, it is a constitutive form of otherness. Yet while other scholars have acknowledged ‘inclusive’ artistic practices to be constitutive of Western identity, I suggest that they are also constitutive of otherness itself. In other words, Murakami’s exhibitions in the West were performative acts designed to formulate an idea of Japanese identity as a pseudo-fantastic form of otherness. The choice to display Murakami’s art in one of the annual contemporary art shows featured at the Palace of Versailles attests to Murakami’s secure place within a supposedly globalized artistic canon. Yet when set against the interior of Versailles, which has served as a site of ‘old Orientalism’ ever since the reign of Louis XIV, Murakami’s show also resonated with the way a self-designed image of ‘the other’ was intersecting with a Western perspective on otherness as a politically and economically driven tactic. While Versailles’s director Jean-Jacques Aillagon invites along established contemporary artists associated with the idea of a globalized art world in order to brand Versailles as a contemporary artistic institution, Murakami, I would argue, has come to view globalization as a strategy. During his exhibition in the palace, the encounter of Japanese tourists with his works resembled an encounter with one’s own reflection in a distorted mirror. Japanese art, as it was displayed in Versailles in 2010, was the outcome of a Western discourse and of this art’s own self-formulation in a Western context. Neither pure ‘import’ nor pure product of ‘inclusion’, Murakami’s 15  On Murakami’s attitude to the underlying systems of capitalist consumption, see: Kwon (2009); Lee (2012).

Globalization as an Artistic Strategy art blurred the boundaries between a pure self and a pure other by means of a globalized dialectics. Murakami’s process of canonization thus reflected the dialectic dynamics of self and other: it was a process in which the self (contemporary Western artistic canon) embraced the other (contemporary Japanese art), so that the two became fused through a self-validating operation. This process can thus be described as the result of opportunist tactics on behalf of both Murakami and Western art institutions – tactics that re-defined globalization as a strategic artistic praxis by harnessing the identity-related dialectics of contemporary culture. •

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References Bauer, Ute Meta (2002): “The Space of Documenta 11: Documenta 11 as a Zone of Activity.” In: Documenta 11: Platform 5. Exhibition Catalogue. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, pp. 103–107. Le Bon, Laurent et al., eds. (2010): Murakami. Versailles. Exhibition catalogue. Paris: Éditions Xavier Barral. Buskirk, Martha (2012): Creative Enterprise: Contemporary Art between Museum and Marketplace. New York, NY: Continuum. Crow, Thomas (2008): “Historical Returns.” In: Artforum (April, 2008), pp. 286–291. Darling, Michael (2001): “Plumbing the Depths of Superflatness,” Art Journal 60, No.3, pp. 76–89. Elkins, James, Valiavicharska, Zhivka and Kim, Alice, eds. (2010): Art and Globalization. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, pp. 52–62.

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Enwezor, Okwui (2009): “Modernity and Postcolonial Ambivalence.” In: Nicolas Bourriaud, Altermodern (Tate Triennial). London: Tate Publishing, pp. 25–40. Favell, Adrian (2011): Before and After Superflat: A Short History of Japanese Contemporary Art, 1990–2011. Hong Kong: Blue Kingfisher. Finkel, Jori (2007): “Museums Solicit Dealers’ Largess.” In: The New York Times, 18 November, 2007, http:// www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/arts/ design/18fink.html?pagewanted=all&_ r=2&, last accessed 7 December, 2014.

Jameson, Fredric (1998): “Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue.” In: Fredric Jameson and Masao Myoshi (eds.), The Cultures of Globalization. Durham and London: Duke University Press, pp. 54–77. Ko, Mika (2010): Japanese Cinema and Otherness: Nationalism, Multiculturalism and the Problem of Japaneseness. London: Routledge. Kravagna, Christian (2003): “Transcultural Viewpoints: Problems of Representation in Non-European Art.” In: Christoph Tannert and Ute Tischler(eds.), Men in Black: Handbook of Curatorial Practice. Frankfurt am Main: Revolver and Berlin: Künstlerhaus Bethanien, p. 93. Kwon, Marci (2009): “Commodifying Identity: Takashi Murakami 1989–2008.” In: Modern Art Asia 1, pp. 28–46. Lee, Pamela (2012): Forgetting the Art World. Cambridge, MA / London: The MIT Press. Lee, Pamela (2003): “Boundary Issues: The Art World under the Sign of Globalism.” Artforum International 42, no. 3, pp. 64–167. Martin, Claire (2013): “Takashi Murakami’s Gallery Ventures Out.” The Wall Street Journal, 12 September, 2013. http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB100014241278873245912045 79038822080870370, last acessed 1 December, 2014. McGray, Douglas (2002): “Japan’s Gross National Cool.” In: Foreign Policy 130, pp. 44–54.

Globalization as an Artistic Strategy Milano, Ronit (2017): “The Commodification of the Contemporary Artist and High-profile Solo Exhibition: The Case of Takashi Murakami.” In: Ruth E. Iskin (ed.), Re-envisioning the Contemporary Art Canon, London / New York: Routledge, pp. 239–351. Murakami, Takashi, ed. (2000):  Superflat. Tokyo: Madra. Murakami, Takashi, ed. (2005): Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture. New York: Japan Society / New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Napier, Susan J. (2007): From Impressionism to Anime: Japan as Fantasy and Fan Cult in the Mind of the West. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. O’Neill, Paul (2012): The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s). Cambridge, MA / London: The MIT Press, Chapter 2, pp. 51–85. Schimmel, Paul, ed. (2007): © Murakami. Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art and New York: Rizzoli. Seijdel, Jorinde, ed. (2009): The Art Biennial as a Global Phenomenon: Strategies in Neo-Political Times. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers. Stallabrass, Julian (2004): Art Incorporated: The Story of Contemporary Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Republished in 2006 as Contemporary Art: A Very Short Introduction. Thornton, Sarah (2009, [first ed. 2008]): Seven Days in the Art World. New York / London: W. W. Norton.

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Tomasulo, Frank P. (2007): “Japan through Others’ Lenses: Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) and Lost in Translation (2003).” In: Japan Studies Review 11, pp. 143–156. Tsutsui, William M. (2010): Japanese Popular Culture and Globalization. Ann Arbor, MI: Association for Asian Studies. Wu, Chin-tao (2009): “Biennials without Borders?” In: New Left Review 57, pp. 107–15. Yano, Christine R. (2013): Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty’s Trek across the Pacific. Durham: Duke University Press.

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The Blind Spot of Global Art?

Nanne Buurman

The Blind Spot of Global Art? Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Ways of Curating Recent years have seen a rise in monographs by curators that may be characterized as autobiographic in some way or other. Given the proliferation of contemporary art as ‘global art’ that is circulated in biennials and artfairs worldwide, it comes as no surprise that some of these publications take the shape of travel writing that demonstrates the curators’ global scope. The first section of The Logbook (2012), volume two of dOCUMENTA (13)’s catalogue, for instance, appears as the artistic director’s travel diary. Graphically inspired by real logbooks, it documents Carolyn ChristovBakargiev’s world-spanning travels in preparation for the show in chronological entries that link dates with the places she has visited, resulting in trajectories like Sharjah / Dubai-Doha-Dubai-Dublin-Turin-New-York (15) or Rome-Paris-New-York-Rome-London-Kassel (27).1 Likewise, curator Nicolas Bourriaud’s treatise on uprooted aesthetics in the global age titled The Radicant (2009) opens with the confession that “this theoretical reflection is born of my nomadic life”, informing readers that the “book was written between 2005 and 2007 in the places to which circumstances brought me: Paris, Venice, Kiev, Madrid, Havana, New York, Moscow, Turin, and finally London” (7). But it is Hans Ulrich Obrist’s autobiographical publication Ways of Curating (2014) that provides the most telling tale of the deterritorialization of curating. 2 While the shift from permanent employment in local institutions towards nomadic freelance work around the world is well rehearsed in curatorial and exhibition studies, Obrist’s (literary) self-fashioning as a global player not only dramatizes the geo- and biopolitical implications of curating in times of neoliberal globalization but also reveals the ethical effects of its epistemologies and discourses. The curator’s anecdotal presentation of his transnational life and work alternates with chapters on the history of curating and exhibition making and a number of references to theorists that have inspired his practice. Deliberately echoing Nelson Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking (1978),3 the title suggests curating as a semiotic worldmaking activity but also hints at the conventional metaphorical habit of conceptualizing life as a journey. 1  For a detailed analysis of The Logbook see Buurman (2017), for more ‘curatorial autobiographies’ see idem (2016). 2  Unless indicated otherwise, page numbers refer to this book.

3  Obrist explicitly pays tribute to Goodman (181), whose theory also must have informed his conception of art commissioning as a “form of producing reality” (136, cf. 168).

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Nanne Buurman / Ways of Curating may in fact be read as a sort of Bildungsroman, since the curator’s way of life is presented in a chronological order as a quest without a clear destination – interspersed with chapters on “interests, themes and obsessions that have shaped my entire trajectory” (2). Charting encounters with places and people (artists, curators, theorists, cultural practitioners) who had an impact on Obrist’s personal development, it starts with the curator’s childhood and youth in Switzerland, progressing to his increasingly transnational nomadic life on the global art circuits, which the narratorauthor even links to the religious notion of a “pilgrimage to art” (114). Thus, the curator’s narrative is both a sort of coming-of-age story and a travel account in which the topoi of map-making, travel and journey feature as prominently as those of communication, innovation and exchange, presenting “HUO” as a prototype of nomadic curation,4 whose tireless hyper-mobile globally networking way of life epitomizes neoliberal norms of subjectivity. Against this backdrop, this essay reads Hans Ulrich Obrist’s autobiography as symptomatic of the dominant modes of production and – more precisely – the ambivalent geo- and biopolitical implications of deterritorialization in the age of neoliberal globalization. Following Gilles Deleuze’s and Felix Guattari’s early reflections on deterritorialization and reterritorialization in Nomadology (1980 / 2015), the complex dynamics of deterritorialization have been discussed by a number of theorists and critics of (capitalist) globalization since the 1990s. In Empire (2000), for instance, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri elaborate on the nexus of globalization, subjectivation and power in what they call biopolitical production. They observe an intensified governmental deterritorialization of power in times of a proliferating transnational capitalist globalization. The perceived “spatial totality” of a “smooth world”, where national and temporal boundaries become almost irrelevant to capital, leading to the idea of an “end of history” that “fixes the existing state of affairs for eternity”, according to them, dovetails with a totalizing real subsumption of “the entirety of social relations” into capitalist accumulation, with priority attached to “communicative, cooperative, and affective labor” (xiiixv). Inspired by Michel Foucault’s lectures on the history of governmentality (orig. 1977–79), Karl Marx’ concept of living labour and materialist feminist theories of social reproduction, they write: In the postmodernization of the global economy, the creation of wealth tends ever more toward what we will call biopolitical production, the production of social life itself, in which the economic, the political, and the cultural increasingly overlap and invest one another.  (xiii) 4  For “nomadic curation” see for example Ralph Rugoff (1999) and for “Mobility as a Prerequisite of Curatorship in the Twenty-first Century” see Paul O’Neill (2012: 73–78).

The Blind Spot of Global Art? Focusing on tropes of globality in contemporary art circuits, the dematerialization of curating as a mode of biopolitical production and the governmentality of care as the central themes in Ways of Curating, this essay traces how the ambivalences of geo- and biopolitical deterritorialization are exemplified by HUO as a paradigmatic figure, whose practice seeks to transcend not only territorial borders but also the limitations of the human body.5 More precisely, the goal is to scrutinize how Obrist’s self-staging as an uprooted, global networker and communicator relates to the neoliberal imperative to free oneself of all social and material ties that might hold one back in the name of total availability, mobility and flexibility. Finally, I will consider the ways in which the curator’s ostentatious rhetoric of restraint and innocence corresponds to a post-critical erasure of standpoint that turns HUO into a dis-situated ‘blind spot of global art’, whose transcendental, idealistic and universalizing worldview leaves his position of privilege (as a wealthy, white, European male) unmarked while turning a blind eye to (neo-)colonial hierarchies, economic inequalities and political power structures. Life as a Journey, or: Normalizing the Nomadic Way of Life The fashionable and often celebratory (self-) characterization of cultural producers as nomads or even migrants, for which Obrist is but one example, has been criticized for its lack of attention to the difference between voluntary and forced migration, the smooth travel of the frequent flyer and the many constraints that refugees, for instance, encounter (e.g. Gielen 2013). Nevertheless, Obrist’s narrative stays on the bright side of globalization and the opportunities of a relatively carefree cosmopolitan life, with mobility only carrying positive connotations. Ways of Curating consequently starts with Obrist’s characterization of Switzerland, his country of origin, as an “insular”, “landlocked country” (1) where – despite the “polyglot culture” – a “lack of metropolitan bricolage, or mixing” (1) prevails, so that he is happy to eventually escape its “narrowness” (1 / 2). In this prologue, titled after Fischli & Weiss’s film The Way Things Go, Obrist introduces the journey as the defining motive in the story of his restless, nomadic life, where travel and mobility play a significant role, both literally and as recurring metaphors. Not only does he characterize the film as “a journey without beginning or end, without a clearly defined goal” (3), he also cites Paul Virilio: “[t]he journey becomes [...], a waiting for arrival that does not occur” (ibid.). The endless travelling for which HUO is famous becomes one of the most prominent threads in his narrative. In reviews of the book 5  Focusing on the construction of HUO as a public persona in the book and elsewhere, this essay significantly does not attempt to speculate about the curator’s intentions or make a statement on Hans Ulrich Obrist as a person.

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Nanne Buurman / that portray the curator as a voyager and central figure of the global art world, critics, too, focus on Obrist’s “reputation for hyper-travel” (Balzer 2015: 12): “His roller-suitcase approach to life seemed to reflect signal changes in the art world, which was becoming faster, bigger, and vastly more international.” (Max 2014: n.p.) The adolescent Obrist’s use of school trips and night trains to meet artists across Europe particularly intrigues critics, who emphasize the fact that Obrist is a born curator and networker. This (auto)biographical cliché of the curatorial Wunderkind destined to become one of the most influential people in global art (the current number one of Art Review’s Power 100 list) is reinforced in Ways of Curating by Obrist’s anecdote about how he visited Harald Szeemann’s exhibition Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk (1983) forty-one times when he was only fourteen (30). Moreover, the reader learns that at age seventeen, Obrist used a school trip to Rome to meet the artist Alighiero Boetti (9) and a school trip to Paris to meet other artists: “I had seen the artist Christian Boltanski’s work in Switzerland, and was aware that he lived and worked in Malakoff, 5 kilometres southwest of Paris. I arranged to visit him and the artist Annette Messager, while my schoolmates were trudging around the city.” (78) Boltanski told him that Szeemann “worked all over the world” and was known for his “constant travelling” (79), a path Obrist would soon follow. Indeed, HUO describes how, during his university years, night trains around Europe became an economical and efficient mode of travel: “Night trains […] saved time. One could leave a city late at night, and arrive in the next one early in the morning. Trains were my hotels. One city, one day.” (76 / 77) In his early twenties, a collaboration with the curator Kaspar König required Obrist “to travel every week to work with him [...] in Frankfurt [...]” (99). Moreover, he writes, “I was also travelling regularly to Paris to work with […] another of my most important curating mentors, Suzanne Pagé” (100). He soon worked for her in the Museé d’Art Moderne on the project Migrateurs (starting in 1993), “an attempt to create a mobile platform within a large institution” (102). But although the project’s title alludes to migration, Migrateurs in fact consisted of temporary interventions in the museum and had little to do with migration in the narrow sense. A similar metaphorical use of tropes related to movement and travel also characterizes some of his other projects that evoke mobility in one way or another. As his life grew increasingly mobile, Obrist also became interested in mobile exhibition formats. Boetti once told him that he wished to do an exhibition “in all the planes of an airline, so that they would be flying the exhibition around the world every day” (11). Inspired by this idea and by curator and critic Lucy Lippard’s notion of the suitcase exhibition (51), Obrist created a “portable museum” in a picture frame called the “Nano Museum” (125). The format was also influenced by the nineteenth-century

The Blind Spot of Global Art? cultural critic Felix Fénéon, whom Obrist characterizes as “the son of a travelling salesman, [whose] journey through life was peripatetic” (107). There are anecdotes about how Fénéon always carried with him a little box containing two paintings by Seurat that he used to decorate his hotel rooms (108), which is why Obrist, fascinated by transitory spaces like trains, hotels and airports, similarly devised an exhibition in a hotel room that he discusses in the chapter “Felix Fénéon and the Hotel Carlton Palace”. Eventually, Obrist also curated proper travelling exhibitions, like do it (1994) or Cities on the Move (1995), whose descriptions read like the exhausting itineraries logged by a travelling salesman: do it began in 1993 as twelve short texts, which later that year we translated into eight languages and printed in an orange notebook-like catalogue. In 1994 the first do it exhibition took place [...] in Klagenfurt, Austria. Soon after, it began travelling to other cities: Glasgow, Nantes, Brisbane, Reykjavik, Sienna, Bogotá, Helsinki, Geneva, Bangkok, Uppsala, Talinn, Copenhagen, Edmonton, Perth, Ljubljana, Paris, Mexico City and twenty-five cities in North America.  (18 / 19) This long list of localities is typical of HUO’s obsessive fascination with the concepts of mobility, migration and nomadism, ideas raised again and again, often without further critical reflection about the ambivalent realities they also refer to. As the narrative of Ways of Curating continues and Obrist’s career progresses, the curator’s orbit widens even more. Among the travel destinations he details, rather than merely lists, are London (114/146), New York (50) and Hong Kong (122). For Obrist, who is now a frequent flyer, the globe has shrunk into the proverbial ‘global village’. Neither transport nor money appears to be an obstacle anymore: In the early summer of 1995, while researching Cities on the Move, Hou Hanru and I attempted to pay a visit to Rem Koolhaas in Rotterdam. He was too busy to see us there, and was bound for Hong Kong the next day to continue his research on the People River Delta. ‘Guys, we should talk about Asia in Asia, not in Rotterdam. See you tomorrow in Hong Kong!’ was his parting message for us. Hou and I took this message quite literally, and bought plane tickets to Hong Kong immediately.  (122) In contrast to his earlier descriptions of the adventurous night trips through Europe, the journey itself and the inconveniences of travel are no

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Nanne Buurman / longer mentioned. What matters are the place names dropped in passing as if it were the most natural thing to hop daily from one city, country, or continent to the next. Yet, the curator rarely reflects on his privilege of holding sufficient economic resources and his good fortune in carrying a Swiss passport that grants access to most countries of the world and allows the easy passing of borders. Thus Obrist’s narrative increasingly normalizes the relatively carefree life-style of a global art jet-set as if this were a general condition of contemporary life rather than the privileged way of life of a lucky few.

Practices of Self-Cultivation

A Celebration of Globalization, or: Trivializing Postcolonialism The optimistic globalism Obrist embodies with his itinerant life-style is also reflected on the stylistic level of the text. Metaphors and concepts such as ‘journey’, ‘map-making’, ‘creolité’, ‘difference’ and ‘diversity’ fuse into a celebratory jargon of globality, which pays little attention to economic inequalities, hierarchical power structures and other social or material obstacles that many people still face despite living under conditions of ever increasing globalization. Obrist understands his curatorial practice as a “pollination of cultures, or a form of map-making that opens new routes through a city, a people or a world” (1). However, instead of engaging with the challenges of capitalist globalization, the curator’s narrative is flavoured with a touch of worldliness that has little to do with geopolitical realities. Obrist, for instance, seems to be very fond of the metaphorical application of the word journey to all kinds of things, particularly the passing of time and history. For example, he repeatedly likens museum visits to a “[...] journey through the stages of a nation’s history” (27): “By the late nineteenth century, walking through a series of interconnected rooms in a museum was understood as a journey throughout time, throughout states of development that tell the story of history.” (43) Another concept he is fond of – that of the map and map-making – is introduced with direct reference to one of his earliest artist friends, Alighiero Boetti, who started “making embroidered maps (Mappa) of the world” (9) in the 1970s. Obrist honours Boetti’s maps as a “negotiation of linguistic and physical borders” (9), which “prefigured the cross-cultural exchange and dialogue [...] that would soon become the stock-in-trade of the rapidly globalizing art world” (10 / 11). He also credits Boetti with acquainting him with the work of Éduard Glissant, to whom he dedicates the chapter “Mondalité”. The curator claims that he reads Glissant’s books every morning for fifteen minutes (14) and is intrigued by his concept of “creolization”. To Obrist, the term implies a “worldwide process of continual fusion. ‘Creolization,’ [...] is a process that never stops” (15). What matters to him about Glissant’s work

The Blind Spot of Global Art? is “global exchange” or “worldwide exchange” that “produces difference” (14 / 15). Similarly, HUO repeatedly criticizes “homogenization” (14, 15, 24, 52, 127, 128) and stresses the importance of “locality” (15, 19, 52, 128), declaring that these ideas have influenced his practice deeply. The travelling exhibition do it, for instance, “changed with each destination [and] became a complex and dynamic learning system, with many local differences” (19). This calls to mind Miwon Kwon’s problematization of “the (artificial) production and (mass) consumption of difference (for difference’s sake)” as the downside of site-specific art in One Place After the Other (1997: 105). According to Obrist, “[b]iennials today need to provide new spaces and new temporalities in order to achieve Glissant’s mondalité: a difference that enhances the global dialogue” (128). But in the book the curator shows little concern for the quality of or reason for difference, new formats or dialogue. With the production of difference as his ultima ratio, all that seems to matter to Obrist is to enhance diversity and innovation for their own sake: “One often finds oneself in exhibition formats that are a bit too fixed, lacking innovation in either a spatial or temporal dimension. As such, one must ceaselessly question these conventions and change the rules of the game.” (168) Indeed, “changing the rules of the game” (168, 78 / 79, 153, 155, 148), “inventing new formats” (168, 153, 13, 128, 13), and doing or creating “something new” (13, 14, 81) are the “guiding principles” (78) that the curator excessively repeats throughout the book. This insatiable desire for newness uncannily recalls the colonialist appetite for exploring new territories to discover more exploitable resources, while disregarding the social inequalities that often come with difference. The do it exhibition, Obrist points out, was also inspired by James Clifford’s concept of “contact zones”. After explaining that the anthropologist developed the notion to reflect on the reconfiguration of ethnographic museums from places where cultures were displayed to sites of encounter and self-representation, Obrist extends this idea to stand for an “anti-authoritarian act of including the audience in the production of what was exhibited” (20). He thereby factors out Clifford’s central insight that colonial encounters in contact zones “are not relations of equality, even though a process of mutual exploitation and appropriation may be at work” (1997: 194).6 Emptying the term of its relationship to colonial hierarchies, Obrist elsewhere declares in a rather unspecific way that “recollection is a contact zone between past, present and future” (57). With regard to yet another project he curated, HUO later also vaguely explains: “The idea was 6  He also does not mention that Clifford borrowed this concept from Mary Louise Pratt and payed tribute to her in his chapter “Museums as Contact Zones” (1997: 192). Pratt first developed the concept in her article “Arts of the Contact Zone” (1991): “I use this term to refer to social spaces where cultures

meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in context of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermath as they are lived but in many parts of the world today.” (34)

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Nanne Buurman / to create a contact zone where something could happen but nothing had to happen.” (153) His over-generalized employment of this complex concept robs it of its specific postcolonial emancipatory agenda, stretching it to the point that almost everything becomes a contact zone. This is but one example of Obrist’s rather superficial appropriation of theoretical buzzwords that spice up his text with a taste of postcolonial criticality. He also cites other postcolonial discourses and theorists of globalization, like Benedict Anderson, Étienne Balibar and Homi Bhabha, stressing the importance of border-crossing and cross-cultural exchange without further attention to the implications these theories entail.7 Despite the heavy citation of postcolonial discourse, Ways of Curating thus provides little evidence that HUO’s own practice is seriously engaged with postcolonial problems or the project of decolonization. With a few exceptions, the majority of the artists and collaborators he cites belong to a roster of primarily ‘Western, white men’. Nevertheless, he famously collaborated with Hou Hanru for the project Cities on the Move dedicated to Asian mega-cities: “Hou and I had spoken very early on about Magiciens de la Terre, the groundbreaking 1989 exhibition curated by Jean-Hubert Martin – we had discussed what it meant that Western curators curate such shows and how interesting it would be if there was a meaningful back-and-forth between a Western and an Eastern curator. That’s how Hou Hanru and I decided to do an Asian show together.” (121–122) If one takes a closer look at Obrist’s celebration of difference and globality and his interest in map-making and border-crossing, it is possible to detect not only a sort of orientalizing neglect of the socio-economic implications and global power structures, but also the implicit Euro- and androcentric overtones hidden behind a thin veneer of critical jargon, borrowed from distinguished theoreticians.

Practices of Self-Cultivation

Pioneers of Curating, or: Expansionist Tendencies Obrist’s interest in “pioneers of curating”, to whom he dedicated an entire chapter, is a case in point. “Pioneer” connotes the first explorers or settlers in a new country or area. In US history, pioneers were frontiersmen and -women who fulfilled their destinies by venturing westward into a “wilderness” to “civilize” a “virgin territory” despite its being populated by 7 Referring to Anderson’s concept of nations as “imagined communities”, he stresses the importance of “[acknowledging] that we’re living in a transnational moment” (122). Diverging from the theorist’s specific use of the term, he applies the terminology to legitimate his practice and celebrate cross-cultural exchange: “It seemed important to go beyond national boundaries and focus instead on cities – because the driving force of the 1990s was really these urban mutations.” (ibid.) Likewise, he cites

Bhabha for “[i]n-betweenness [as] a fundamental condition of our times” (163), which – Obrist claims – “is an especially useful principle of exhibitions involving science, where the idea has always been to produce an in-between space that allows for radical and unexpected combinations” (163). Finally, he quotes Balibar to underscore his view that “we are living through a period in which the centre of gravity is transferring to new worlds” (127).

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Native Americans (cf. Turner 1893). While the term itself already bears colonialist overtones, Obrist enhances these connotations through his story of an avantgarde of curation. In the chapter “Pioneers”, he presents a set of seven white, Euro-American men, who share an ethos of expanding the boundaries of their practice. By meeting and connecting “the world’s leading artists, poets, writers and intellectuals”, Harry Graf Kessler, for instance, “developed a major aspect of the curator’s practice – to bring together different worlds – and applied it to fields beyond”, which is why Obrist dubs him a “global salonière” (62). Hugo von Tschudi’s “pioneering decisions” (65) in the nineteenth century to buy impressionist paintings for Berlin’s National Gallery are credited with “globalizing national collections” (66). Walter Hopps is recognized for “putting Los Angeles on contemporary art’s map” (70) and for “[changing] the contours of the art world [as] he continued expanding boundaries after leaving California” (71). René d’Harnoncourt “added a pioneering understanding of the globality of art” (72) and “pioneered a new style of exhibiting artworks based around their common affinities, rather than their particular place in history” (ibid.). HUO acknowledges that “where previous museum directors had expanded the appreciation of art across Western national boundaries, d’Harnoncourt emphasized its influence across the entire globe and throughout its history” (73). Finally, he notes that “Pontus Hultén’s innovative exhibitions expanded the scope of curatorial practice and redefined the function of the museum” (ibid.). While the seven founding fathers of curation (Kessler, von Tschudi, Hopps, d’Harnoncourt, Hultén, Alexander Dorner and Willem Sandberg) each have their own subheading in the chapter, a few important female curators (Bice Curiger, Anne d’Harnoncourt and Alanna Heiss) are mentioned only in passing and rarely granted the heroizing attributes that the men receive.8 Thus, Obrist constructs a hagiographic genealogy of great white pioneering men: “Szeemann was totally into Sandberg, and Sandberg was completely familiar with Alexander Dorner.” (59) 8  D’Harnoncourt, for instance, is primarily identified as her father’s daughter: “D’Harnoncourt’s daughter Anne […] was a pioneering curator as well. She also told me much of what I know about her father’s career.” (73) While Obrist acknowledges that “she ranks among the more important American curatorial figures” (ibid.), he does not choose the superlative ‘most’ here. Rather than praise her for her own practice, Obrist values her as a provider of information: “She and Walter Hopps both discussed at length early pioneers in American curating.” (58) In general, Obrist appears to praise women less enthusiastically. He later describes his “mentor” Pagé thus: “So Pagé pioneered exhibitions of outsider art [...]” (101). And while Obrist writes two full pages on Lucy Lippard, he does so without using any heroizing adjectives (50 / 51).

He repeatedly attributes to male “pioneers” qualities like “great”, “giant” “towering”, but Gertrude Stein and Peggy Guggenheim – for whom the title “global  salonière” that he grants Kessler would be more fitting – are simply mentioned in passing in the section on Hultén (75). This diminishing of women’s achievements seems to be a thread that runs through all HUO’s publications. In A Short History of Curating (2009), where he presents interviews with a different selection of “pioneers of curating”, only the last two interviews he conducted are with women (Lippard and d’Harnoncourt). See also Holly Crawford’s (2014/15) index to all the names mentioned in Obrist’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Curating (2011), which, according to the Amazon blurb, “also might just shed light on the question of why are there no great women artists”.

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Nanne Buurman / Obrist’s celebratory rhetoric of “pioneering curators” also parallels his uncritical appropriation of postcolonial discourse. Here it is perhaps worth mentioning that the “pioneer” René d’Harnoncourt organized exhibitions of Mexican art and of Indian Art of the United States – both shows dedicated to work made by inhabitants of the American territories that were colonized by Euro-American settlers in their westward expansion. Like his MoMA show on Timeless Aspects of Modern Art (1948–49), these shows were later criticized for their universalist tendencies and their political and economic agendas of capitalist humanism (Staniszewski 1998: 85, 87, 94, 124) – aspects Obrist, however, chooses not to mention in his heroizing and harmonizing account. Another example of Obrist turning a blind eye on colonial heritage is the biography he sketches of Henry Cole, founder of the Victoria & Albert museum in London, whom he also identifies as a “true pioneer of exhibition-makers” (116) and as a “giant amongst nineteenth-century British administrators” (117). Cole was also responsible for organizing the famous Great Exhibition in London (1851), which is not only significant in the history of exhibition making as the first international World Fair but also for its architecture, Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace. As a self-congratulatory display of British economic, technological and cultural superiority at the height of the Victorian empire, the show has to be seen in the context of the history of colonialism and imperialism.9 Nevertheless, Obrist merely stresses that the Great Exhibition was a “great international festival”, which “produced a picture of the world that was also a picture of Britain’s relationships with the world” (119). That this was a very Eurocentric, colonialist and capitalist world picture (see Mitchell 1989) is something Obrist does not consider. Instead, he admiringly and guilelessly states that “Cole’s ambitions were global” (118) – without a word on the imperialist context of the show or its educational fostering of free trade and consumerism (see Bennett 1996). This euphemistic narrative disregards economic aspects, neither mentioning imperialism nor colonialism once, but telling an innocent story of progress: “In nineteenth-century Britain, much of what we recognize as the modern world was coming into being. [...] It was an era of rapid advances in design, technology and copyright practices [...].” (118) Here, Walter D. Mignolo’s observation, that “colonial history is the non-acknowledged center in the making of modern Europe” (2009: 16), applies. Instead of taking into account the centrality of colonialism for the development of the modern capitalist world, Obrist simply celebrates Crystal Palace as a forerunner of today’s temporary exhibition architecture. Surprisingly, 9 It not only displayed products from the colonies but also paved the way to the tremendously successful colonial exhibitions in the second half of the nineteenth century, many of which also included racist human zoos or ethnological expositions where non-

Europeans were put on display. Both the 1878 and the 1889 Parisian World Fairs as well as the 1893 World Columbian Exhibition, for instance, featured so-called ‘negro villages’.

The Blind Spot of Global Art? though, he does not draw an explicit connection from Paxton’s temporary building to the temporary pavilions that he himself co-commissions every year for the Serpentine Gallery, together with Julia Peyton-Jones, who in Obrist’s words “has built the Serpentine into a global institution” (146).10 This is all the more remarkable in that the gallery, where HUO has been serving as a co-director since 2006, is situated very close to where the Great Exhibition of 1851 took place in Hyde Park, so that there is a direct line connecting these “temporary structures” (147) to their historical forerunner. The spectre of colonialism that still haunts the imperialist architectures of South Kensington today thus remains unspoken, while Obrist euphemistically celebrates Cole for his success as a “modern”, “democratic” and “cosmopolitan” urbanist and city planner (118–120). Mapping the 21th Century, or: Decentring Networks Against this backdrop, it comes as no surprise that Obrist is also rather uncritical about contemporary biennials, which, according to Caroline A. Jones, “are structurally indebted to perennial international exhibitions of the past” (2010: 69). She explains: […] many of the features of those earlier world pictures are replicated or implied in the present (among them: presumptive universality, goals of knowledge production, ties to tourism, implications for urban infrastructure, regulation of international art-world trade routes, rehabilitation – through the cosmopolitan city – of previously restrictive or totalitarian regimes, and openings for multinational capital investment and new geopolitical ambition.  (ibid.) Again, Obrist does not pay attention to their colonial and nationalist histories but rather prosaically states: “Biennials have become a global phenomenon.” (127) He continues by explaining that “the second half of the twentieth century witnessed a multiplicity of art centres on all continents. Since the 1990s, biennials have contributed considerably to this new cartography of art” (ibid.). Obrist stresses how biennials “are making an important contribution” to the “emergence of a multiplicity of possible centres” (129) and how “they can also form a bridge between the local and the global” (ibid.). In discussing biennials, Obrist therefore not only disregards their histories, politics and economics, but his observations that “dialogues between artists and places, between publics and exhibitions, can 10 In the summer of 2016, Peyton-Jones was succeeded by Yana Peel, who started her career at Goldman Sachs and is founder of the Outset Con-

temporary Art Fund. With her, the position was renamed from “director” to “CEO” of Serpentine Gallery.

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Nanne Buurman / be thrillingly catalysed by the forces of globalization” and that “there is an amazing potential for new encounters among today’s fast-proliferating array of art centres” (24) also ignore the persisting powers of old centres and the capacity of biennials to “accommodate cultural difference” within hegemonic frameworks of cultural production (Osborne 2010: 9). The year 1989 plays a significant role in Obrist’s celebration of decentring:

Practices of Self-Cultivation

The year 1989 was marked by several paradigm-shifting events: while the collapse of the Berlin Wall heralded the beginning of the post-Cold War period, Tiananmen Square became marred by student protest and mass bloodshed. The Russian army left Afghanistan after a nine-year occupation, and the first Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite started orbiting the earth. Perhaps most significantly, Tim Berners-Lee wrote a proposal in which he outlined his idea for what would soon become the World Wide Web.  (170) While these geopolitical and technological shifts initially gave rise to the hope of a globe-spanning contemporaneity, an optimism about a free world of peace and progress and worldwide interconnectivity, since the 1990s these dreams have been shattered for many by the realities of neoliberal capitalism as an all-encompassing hegemonic force. Nevertheless, Obrist holds on to this optimism with his project 89plus, a “global study” that attempts to “[chart] the work of those born in or after 1989” (170): Since then, continuous research, recommendations from all over the world and an ongoing open call have shed light on the growth of a young, globally connected network of peers, which can be followed on an 89plus website through an evolving set of network visualization. 89plus is an attempt to discover, assist and, ideally, empower a generation as they cross borders and foster a worldwide community of ideas. The aim is to provide an opportunity for young people from virtually all parts of the globe to have their ideas heard, showcased and implemented on the world stage.  (170–171) Besides falling into neoliberal advertisement rhetoric, Obrist’s presentation of this project also serves as an example of what Peter Osborne calls a “global or a planetary fiction” (2013: 26). A “projection of unity onto the differential totality of times” (ibid. 22), a “disavowal of politics” that “performatively projects non-existent unity onto the disjunctive relations between coeval times” (ibid. 23).

The Blind Spot of Global Art? Observing that “many artists are obsessed with maps”, Obrist “suddenly realized that maps, and the whole idea of navigation systems, have become along with social networks, one of the biggest topics on the Internet. So we brought together artists, web designers and architects to think about mapping the twenty-first century” (150). Remarkably, Obrist’s shift from a mapping of geographies and territories to the mapping of temporalities or temporal units like generations or a century, seems to suggest that once there are no more blank spots on the earth to be discovered, it is time that has to be explored in the quest for novelty and difference. Obrist’s awkward exoticization of the “89plus” generation “born in the age of digitization” (169) and his decision to call this final chapter “Curating the Future”, brings to mind the idea that the future is colonized by an extended all-encompassing capitalist present (e.g. Fisher 2009). The megalomaniacal project of mapping a whole generation or century, along with a totalizing perception of a “Whole Earth” enabled by the technologies Obrist mentions, such as GPS, the World Wide Web and Google (Maps), relates in very specific ways to biopolitical governmentality. While maps have always been instrumental in the mastery of unknown territories – and “circumnavigation and mapmaking”, as Mary Louise Pratt points out in Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation, “[gave] rise to what one might call a European global or planetary subject” (1992: 30) – digital technology reaches even further. It not only provides seamless coverage of the most remote parts of the world, with viewers adopting an extra-terrestrial view from outer space, but computer programs and cookies also allow the tracking of all activities pursued by the humans who use them, mapping populations in a way that was perhaps not foreseeable when Foucault first analysed the biopolitical shifts from the rule of territory to the control of populations through security regimes in Security Territory Population (orig. 1977–78). Whereas maps with their visual representations of territory still imply a point of view, the interpretation of information from the internet implies a superhuman “vision from everywhere and nowhere” (Haraway 1992: 584) – if vision is still the right term for the algorithmic processing of big data, which in fact not only registers people’s (web) behaviour but also predetermines their future possibilities based on statistical calculations and predictive policing (O’Neill 2016).11 Therefore, it is noteworthy that Obrist does not mention the fact that the Google Cultural Institute, a PR branch of the data mining search engine, is a major sponsor of the “89plus” project (see 89plus.com). This digital deterritorialization of power and the idea of the internet as an omniscient machinic vision (whose material roots, the glass fibre cables, 11 In his theorizing on earlier preemptive security regimes, Foucault remarkably describes their ability to allow “circulation” as “centrifugal” (2009: 67), since the panoptic gaze of former disciplinary

regimes of enclosure is internalized by their subjects who consequently monitor themselves or allow being monitored voluntarily.

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Nanne Buurman / are often forgotten) may be linked to another characteristic of Ways of Curating: its portrayal of HUO as an extreme example of what I call “biopoliticization of curating”, that is, “a shift of attention from the exhibition as an end-product of curating to the persona of the curator and her life” (Buurman 2017: 62). Reviewers have not only pointed out Obrist’s astonishing “ubiquity”, his ability to be “everywhere at once” (Blazer 2015:11, Bärnthaler 2015: 48 speaks of “omnipresence”, transl. by NB), but also have remarked that he seems to be “a human aggregator, almost a socialmedia-in-person”, as Hal Foster (2015: n.p.) puts it. Before I conclude by discussing how HUO’s disembodied performance of machinic subjectivity corresponds to a post-critical erasure of a standpoint and an invisibilization of his power, I will now analyse the ways in which Obrist’s account of the dematerialization of curating, his preference for not only immaterial art but also conversational curatorial formats, his constant talking and his ubiquitous networking, make him an exemplary subject of neoliberal globalization with its immaterialization of production and biopolitical colonization of life itself.

Practices of Self-Cultivation

Dematerializing Curating, or: The Curator as a Social Medium Critics have noted that Obrist is “devoted to ‘time-based’ art, especially performances and installations” (Foster 2015: n.p.), to “ephemeral aesthetics” (Max 2014: n.p.) and to “dematerialized” art (Cooke 2015: n.p.). Although his childhood memories also reveal a nostalgia for material culture and its handling, and the way he speaks about handwriting and books indicate a somewhat fetishist attachment to these objects (e.g. 44), Obrist believes that “the twenty-first century [...] will increasingly question this fetishization of the object. The architectural and artistic contributions that are going to endure are not only the ones with built physical form. It is not only a question of objects but a question of ideas, a repository of ideas and scores” (47). While it comes as no surprise that he values libraries, archives and the internet as stores of knowledge, Obrist is also interested in the idea of “books as exhibitions”, which he introduces in the chapter “Printed Exhibitions” that pays homage to Lippard’s and Seth Sieglaub’s 1960s work with “dematerialized art practices” (51). “Through them, I first came across the idea that exhibitions can be immaterial, and be held outside museums and exhibition spaces.” (50) Moreover, HUO dedicates a whole chapter to philosopher Jean Francois Lyotard’s exhibition Les Immatériaux (1985) because it “exemplified the [...] conditions of immateriality”, “anticipate[d] our digital future avant la lettre” and “investigate[d] the consequences of the shift from material objects to immaterial information technologies” (157–158). Obrist, moreover, highlights the relatively dematerialized character of all curating, which he links to an overproduction that results in the necessity

The Blind Spot of Global Art? to select rather than produce objects and to the temporariness of most exhibitions (cf. 24, 83). While he stresses that, “[c]urating, after all, produces ephemeral constellations with their own limited career span” (58), his own practice is presented in the chronology of the book as gradually becoming more immaterial. He moves from the mobile and temporary exhibition formats and travelling exhibitions already mentioned to projects like Utopia Station (2003), which “didn’t require architecture, only a meeting, a gathering” (132), Il Tempo del Postino (2007), a visual opera for which artists were not allotted exhibition spaces but time slots (139), and 11 Rooms (2011), an exhibition of life art inspired by Gilbert & George’s notion of “living sculptures” (144). More important still, his practice of conversation – initially an informal working method in which “the process always starts with a conversation” (10) – soon became a ritualized complement to Obrist’s exhibition making, eventually defining the centre of his overall practice (57): “Almost everything I had done was born out of conversations. I started thinking it would be a good idea to create a trace of my core activities. And that’s when I started to make systematic recordings.” (55) This ritualized recording of conversations resulted in a tremendous output of books of transcribed interviews for which HUO is now perhaps more famous than for his exhibition projects. Over time, Obrist increasingly curated conversational formats. Because for him “bringing interesting people together” (153), “making junctions” (155) and “connecting people” (ibid.) are the most important tasks of the curator, he not only engaged with organizing conferences but also thought about how they could be reformatted (153). He took the idea of curating conferences to extremes and invented the “Serpentine Marathon” as a discursive complement to the temporary pavilions that are commissioned every year by the London gallery (148). Obrist is convinced that “simply introducing two people who one thinks should know each other can have a major effect on future artistic practice, whether through the impact they can have on each other’s work or through entirely new collaborations. It’s another form of curatorial practice, and I have continued it ever since” (123 / 124). Known as a master of networking himself, he also praises many of the “pioneers of curating” for being efficient networkers (e.g. 135–137). The fact that he repeatedly highlights the well-connectedness of his forerunners by listing their contacts is mirrored in the lists of his own contacts that increasingly pop up in the narrative (109, 127, 140, 152, 155), exemplifying Obrist’s obsessive habit of namedropping. Like his curatorial practice in general, Ways of Curating thus follows a social media logic and may be said to function like a written Facebook in the way that it puts on display Obrist’s connectedness. It could also be described as a meta-biography of HUO’s ‘Elective Affinities’, since he is very fond not only of reading the biographies of ‘great men’ (62, 106, 114,

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Nanne Buurman / 119) but also of giving short bios of the people, both living and deceased, who inspired him. He usually individualizes achievement, without saying much about the specific aesthetic qualities of the artworks he writes about, let alone about the materiality of their stagings. Nevertheless, one edition of Ways of Curating is adorned with the image of a nail seemingly hammered through the white cover of the book as if it were the wall of a gallery. But the design of the book is somewhat misleading: the material craft of curating, the literal making of exhibitions and installing of artworks is not mentioned in the book, which focuses on the more prestigious immaterial and affective labours of travelling, networking and communicating. The invisibilization of material work and the economics of curating goes hand in hand with a commodification of subjectivity, where social contacts and relationships function as cultural capital for the HUO brand, which in turn bestows value on everything stamped with his name. Because the curator’s life and the biographies of his collaborators become the main exhibits of the book-as-exhibition, Ways of Curating may be understood as a narrative of what Hardt and Negri have called biopolitical production. In this regime of accumulation, it is not work that is the main basis of value production. Instead, the entire subjectivity is capitalized by its real subsumption under neoliberalism’s networked relations of production, so that it is also no longer possible to distinguish between labour and leisure.

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Technologies of the Self, or: Curatorial Asceticism Obrist’s narrative pays little attention to the infrastructural or material conditions that enable his floating life- and work style. Whereas his constant use of mobile phones, computers, airplanes and other technologies of travel and communication are frequently noted by reviewers, they are rarely mentioned in HUO’s text itself. Instead, he smoothly moves from one place to the next almost as if by teleportation. Likewise, the economic and political power structures behind his projects (some of which must be quite capital intensive) go unremarked, creating the impression of a mysterious ease in which everything is possible with few material or social constraints. Global divisions of labour, or other hierarchies that oblige some to do the dirty work of others, receive little attention.12 Obrist, for instance does not seem to be concerned with mundane matters such as the reproductive labour often performed by women: “I never cooked. I never even made tea or coffee because I always ate out. The kitchen was just another space where I kept stacks of books and papers.” (84) Ironically, it is in the chapter “The Kitchen” where Obrist provides a two-page excursus on the relationship of “economy and 12  There is one notable exception to the rule of HUO’s neglect of infrastructure and materiality

when he talks about his exhibition Cloaca Maxima in a sewage museum (111 / 112).

The Blind Spot of Global Art? art”. He not only informs readers that he “studied political economy with a professor named H.C. Binswanger, who directed the University of St. Gallen’s Institute for Economics and Ecology”, but also paraphrases his professor’s publication Money and Magic (1994) at length, affirmatively appropriating the link between the invention of paper money and imagination. He thereby promotes an economic theory that is unanchored from any grounding in actual materiality or bodily needs, echoing the generalization of immaterial tendencies in financialized economies. Obrist claims that “[t]he non-utility of my kitchen could be transformed into its utility of art. To do a show there would mix art and life, naturally” (ibid.). Turning his kitchen into an exhibition, however, also displaces its nourishing function for the sake of displaying art and – in tune with the economic shift of priority from use to pure exchange value – denies the necessities of bodily maintenance. From the review portraits of Obrist readers learn that “the closest thing to food in the kitchen was Diet Coke” (Max 2014: n.p.) and that he compensates for this by keeping a drawer in his office topped up with cereal bars that provide energy throughout workdays that begin at five and rarely end before midnight (Bärnthaler 2015: 42). Against this background, the détournement of the kitchen seems less a blurring of art and life, as Obrist claims, than a symptom of negating life’s need for recreation for the sake of work, or a colonization of life by labour. Besides HUO’s sparse diet and self-sterilizing habits (ibid.) that could be interpreted as “rituals of self-purification” (Foucault 1988: n.p.), almost all the journalistic portraits mention “his life’s struggle with the body’s need for rest” and the technologies of self that “Obrist uses to defeat the clock” (Balzer 2015:17). In the chapter “Night Trains and Other Rituals” Obrist himself writes: Night trains taught me to sleep when I could. On a long train or bus journey you learn to rest when you can, despite the lack of comfort. I also began to experiment with different ways of sleeping. For instance, I had read about Leonardo da Vinci’s method, which involved sleeping fifteen minutes every two hours. I tried it. Honoré de Balzac would drink large amounts of coffee (to fuel his ceaseless creativity he would reportedly drink up to fifty cups per day), including just before falling asleep to limit the length of time spent unconscious. However, he died aged fifty-one, possibly from caffeine poisoning, and so I eventually curbed this tendency. The idea behind these unconventional procedures was not just to reduce the amount of sleep to the minimum required for an active and creative existence. They were also attempts to try out alternative ways of organizing daily life, alternative daily rituals. The attraction of these methods to me has always been to erase the

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structural separation between work and recreation that organized conventional living. The night train was a way to get from city to city, but also a travelling laboratory for testing such practices.  (77/78) The technologies of the self that Obrist applies to himself, systematically testing the limits of his body, consume him so much that he seems to risk his health. Nevertheless, he rarely mentions the negative effects of this lifestyle. Only once he admits “fatigue” and the danger of “burning out” (56), and he completely blanks out his collapse in 2006 after one of the twentyfour-hour interview marathons mentioned by Bärnthaler (2015: 42 / 45). In this sense, HUO’s ascetic dedication to tireless work and his practices of self-mortification call to mind not only the stoic and monastic “technologies of the self” described by Foucault (1988) but also the attitude that Max Weber (2005) elaborated in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. The sociologist observes that the Protestant work ethic grew out of an “innerworldly” – that is, secular – ascetism, where all good puritans were expected to serve God by living like monks in their everyday life, adopting the principle of hard work without wasting time on sleep or inactive contemplation (Weber 2005:123). Obrist’s excessive industry, his presentation of work and innovation as ends in themselves, as well as the remarkable lack of sensuality in his narrative, correspond to this ethic. His sleep-minimizing techniques, which he describes as a quite methodological endeavour, likewise match the rational, systematic character of puritan selfregulation described by Weber. Moreover, Obrist, who once said that he “would never do anything that does not have to do with work” (Bärnthaler 2015: 41, transl. by NB), would perhaps agree with the puritans that there is no greater sin than wasting time. Work, Weber declares, is an old ascetic means and an end in itself, particularly for the unpretentious self-made man. It is therefore no coincidence that David Balzer has linked Obrist’s “self-effacement”, his industry and “fraught relationship with sleep” to “American puritanism and their proverbial work ethic” (2015:16). Obrist’s demure style is variously described by critics as “self-effacing sensitivity and curiosity” (ibid. 15), “self-negation” (ibid.), “down-play [of] his role” (Cooke 2015: n.p.) and “semi-anonymous prose” (Foster 2015: n.p.). In fact, the observation that “he doesn’t display much of his personality” (ibid.) also resonates very well with Weber’s characterization of the “ideal type of the capitalistic entrepreneur” as someone who “avoids ostentation […] as well as conscious enjoyment of his power”, leading a life that is “distinguished by a certain ascetic tendency” and “modesty” (Weber 2005: 59).

The Blind Spot of Global Art? Pastoral Self Denial, or: The Governmentality of Care With the puritans, Obrist also shares a moralizing insistence on the virtues of humility. As Foucault (1988: n.p.) points out, in “Christianity there is a correlation between disclosure of the self [...] and the renunciation of self”. Throughout the narrative Obrist not only praises others for “never seeking the limelight” (4), a “lack of regard for” their fame (45), ascetic lifestyles (69) and an “unheralded role [as] a civil servant administrator” (120), but also keeps insisting on the need for curatorial modesty (10, 11, 13, 25, 32 / 33, 87, 154) in normative statements about what a curator should or should not do. About Kaspar König he remarks, “a vital lesson he taught me was that it is not the job of a curator to impose their own signature but to be a mediator between artists and public” (98). This norm is generalized in statements such as the following, brought forward in a somewhat antiquated style using the ‘royal we’, as if to avoid the ‘I’ and give more authority to the statement: Yet here we must sound a note of caution. The danger with large group exhibitions is that it can be seen as the exhibitionmaker’s own Gesamtkunstwerk. By the 1980s many thematic exhibitions risked being seen this way, the curator as an overriding figure or auteur who uses artwork to illustrate his or her own theory. Artists and their works must not be used to illustrate a curatorial proposal or premise to which they are subordinated. Instead, exhibitions are best generated through conversations and collaborations with artists, whose input should steer the process from the beginning. […] Recounting the actual history of curating and exhibitions can help us steer clear of a related confusion: that the curator herself or himself is an artist. [...] These developments have given rise to an impression that curators are competing with artists for primacy in the production of meaning or aesthetic value. Some theorists argue that curators are now secularized artists in all but name, but I think this goes too far. My belief is that curators follow artists, not the other way around.  (32 / 33) Moreover, Obrist emphasizes that he implements the principles of modest curation in his own practice by claiming that he was working “very discreetly” (95), “without dictating a structure or thesis” (100). Rather than staging “an essay-like argument” (ibid.) or “dictat[ing] the production of new works in a rather authorial way” (152/53), he prefers to “produce a context for chance encounters” (ibid.) and a “discontinuous assemblage of

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Nanne Buurman / possibilities” (100). This laissez-faire approach to curating as “making impossible things possible” (10), “making artists’ dreams come true” (11), “cultivating, growing, pruning and trying to help people and their shared context to thrive” (25), or “creating the conditions for triggering sparks between [different people]” (154) without imposing his own will, has been appreciated by artists like Liam Gillick, a frequent collaborator, who said: When you work with him, he absolutely protects you and creates enormous space for what you need to do – and yet no one knows he’s done it. [...] He stands against a certain sort of very assertive, very authored curating that was prominent when we were young. He has a real anti-authoritarian streak.

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(cited in Max 2014: n.p.)

Likewise, John Baldessari acknowledged that “[h]e’s like a good mom [...] everything my son has done is good” (cited ibid.). The curatorial ethics of care, restraint and self-denial that HUO seeks to exemplify in his working life has a quasi-religious character. In interviews, Obrist explicitly calls himself an “itinerant friar” (Bärnthaler 2015: 46, transl. by NB), and in Ways of Curating he cites John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, a puritan bestseller and Entwicklungsroman (also extensively cited by Weber), when he likens his life to a pilgrimage to art (114). Rather than serving a god, however, Obrist was looking for ways to serve art. He writes, “[a]t this stage, my desire to be a curator had solidified, but I was still generally unsure of how I could be useful to art” (79) and “I was searching for a way to make a contribution. What, in this art system, could be a first step, and above all, how could I be useful to artists?” (81) These accounts of the curator’s quest for his calling as a servant of art call to mind Foucault’s observations about pastoral power as a benevolent form of government and predecessor of neoliberal governmentality. In pre-sixteenth century French “gouverner” denoted among other things “movement in space”, “diet”, “care given to an individual” and “a constant, zealous, active, and always benevolent prescriptive activity” (2009: 167). Good monks, according to Saint Benedict cited by Foucault, “no longer live by their free will [...] in marching under the judgment and the imperium of another, they always desire that someone command them” (ibid. 234). This also seems to apply to HUO. In his narrative, it appears as if he never had to apply for a job because he was always asked (98, 102, 146, 155). About Fischli & Weiss, his first mentors, he says: “Their friendship and the interest they took in me began a kind of chain reaction that never stopped. [...] They also began to tell me about other artists whose work I should see, and whom I should meet.” (5) The frequent use of expressions like “he instilled me with” (11 / 13), “he advised me to” (9 / 10), “he told me to” (5, 10, 57, 69,

The Blind Spot of Global Art? 110), “he taught me” (97 / 100), “from […] I learned” (100 / 121), “[…] explained to me” (127/128), “[…] encouraged me to” (10), “his ideas helped me realise” (97), “a vital lesson he taught me was” (98) serve Obrist to present himself as a student, an empty vessel, a tabula rasa or a disciple of art, who is instructed and literally inspired by others. This impression is reinforced by HUO’s habit of citing isolated aphorisms by theorists, artists and other inspirational figures (90, 150, 169), adopting the wisdoms of others, without contributing much himself. This mode of “assimilative writing” could be interpreted along the lines of the “hyponmematic practices” analysed by Foucault in “Self Writing” as the quotation of “heterogeneous” and “disparate” readings instrumental in the “formation of the self out of collected discourses of others” (1983: n.p.), but it also corresponds to Foucault’s observation that pastoral power implies an “individualization by subjection” (2009: 239), resulting in a “mode of individualization that not only does not take place by way of affirmation of the self, but one that entails destruction of the self” (ibid. 235 / 236). Conclusion Remarkably, a comparable dynamic of invisibilized power that ambivalently links biopolitical and geopolitical deterritorialization is observed by Pratt in Imperial Eyes. She calls attention to the common use of “strategies of innocence” in colonialist travel writing, “whereby European bourgeois subjects seek to secure their innocence in the same moment as they assert European hegemony” (1992: 7). The “self-effacing protagonist” of such colonial stories of anti-conquest, Pratt further notes, “often has a certain impotence or androgyny about him; often he portraits himself in infantile or adolescent terms” (ibid. 56). Obrist’s self-effacing presentation as a curious student, an ascetic monk or a self-neutralizing machine man who tirelessly serves the cause of art but remains rather asexual and asensual throughout the book has led many critics to comment on his “deference”, “innocent air” and boyishness, which is commonly associated with a naïvity, lack of criticality and superficiality.13 One critic, for instance, remarked that HUO “seems as egoless as he is guileless and stateless” (Max 2014: n.p.). 13  They note “an extreme form of deference [...]” (Cooke 2015: n.p.) and a “deep deference” (Max 2014: n.p.). Max calls him “astonishingly innocent”, which is confirmed by Cooke’s information that “[p]eople remember him during this period as innocent […]”. She calls him a “combination of canny and native”, an impression which is shared by Lorch (2015: n.p.), who notes that his voice is “almost naïve”. Hal Foster calls him “panglossian about our neoliberal age” and “powered by positive thinking”       (2015: n.p.). Claire Bishop comments: “The world of contemporary art is fast-moving and superficial

and demands constant feeding, and he’s a prime example” (cit. in Max 2014: n.p.). Bärnthaler observes “that he is often just giving cues rather than digging deeper is often interpreted as superficiality but it is a consequence of his discreet and polite character. Multitasking as a life-style necessarily also implies short attention spans” (2015: 48, transl. by NB). He also notes that HUO finds everything “superinteresting” and “OMG” (oh my god!)”, asking: “Is there anything that he does not find engaging? Superinteresting but perhaps it also doesn’t really matter” (ibid.).

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Similarly, I have argued that Ways of Curating indeed largely centres around visions of a seamless world in which the curator’s ceaseless travels around the globe invoke a notion of ubiquity that comes at the cost of a more profound characterization of the author. As a consequence of this onesidedly optimistic stance, HUO comes across as a rather ‘flat character’ or ‘one-dimensional man’ (to borrow a term from Herbert Marcuse), who fails to take critical account of the problematic downsides of globalization. Obrist’s description of his ascetic rituals of self-mortification is stylistically reflected in a fleshless prose, turning the curator into a disembodied voice that hovers above the realities of the world with no eye for problems of global capitalism, neo-colonialism, or other injustices or inequalities on the ground. The monocular treatment of deterritorialization in Ways of Curating discussed in this essay thus also runs counter to what Haraway has termed “situated knowledges” (1988) and calls to mind the “hubris of the zero point”, which according to Mignolo ignores the fact that “the knower is always implicated, geo- and body-politically, in the known” (2009: 4). In his narrative, Obrist seems to assume the “unmarked position of Man and White” (Haraway 1988: 581). It remains unclear, however, whether the curator’s self-effacing rhetoric, his practices of self-objectivation and his post-critical superficiality are simply expressions of a curatorial ethics of care, a streamlining of subjectivity in tune with the neoliberal ‘age of like’, or a more deliberate disavowal of power and responsibility. What is for certain is that the idealization of a free-floating, globe-trotting life-style perpetuated in Ways of Curating in many cases tends to gloss over different geographical, historical and social conditions for participating in the art world, thus projecting a neo-universalist contemporaneity which normalizes frequent-flying and hyper-mobility while turning a blind eye to the existing, albeit shifting, borders and constraints. •

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References Balzer, David (2015): Curatorialism. How Curating Took Over the Art World and Everything Else. London: Pluto Press. Bärnthaler, Thomas (2015): “Dauerbrenner.” In: Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin, No. 15, April 10, pp. 40–49. Bennett, Tony (1996): “The Exhibitionary Complex.” In: Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson, Sandy Nairne (eds.), Thinking about Exhibitions. London / New York: Routledge, pp. 81–112. Bourriaud, Nicolas (2009): The Radicant. New York: Lukas & Sternberg. Buurman, Nanne (2016): “Hosting Significant Others. Autobiographies as Exhibitions of Co-Authority.” In: Beatrice von Bismarck,  Benjamin Meyer-Krahmer (eds.), Hospitality. Hosting Relations in Exhibitions. Berlin: Sternberg, pp. 123– 149. Buurman, Nanne [2016] (2017): “CCB With… Displaying Curatorial Relationality in dOCUMENTA (13)’s The Logbook.” In: idem / Dorothee Richter (eds.), documenta. Curating the History of the Present, OnCurating, 33, June, pp. 61–75. Cooke, Rachel (2015): “Hans Ulrich Obrist: ‘Everything I do is somehow connected to velocity’.” In: The Guardian, 8. March, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/ mar/08/hans-ulrich-obrist-everythingi-do-connected-velocity-interview, last accessed 20 August 2017. Crawford, Holly (2014 / 15): Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Hans Ulrich Obrist*indexed, CCO.

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix (2010): Nomadology: The War Machine (orig. in: idem, A Thousand Plateaus, transl. by Brian Massumi). Seattle: Wormwood Distribution. documenta und Museum Fridericianum GmbH (2012): The Logbook, Vol. 2 / 3, dOCUMENTA (13) catalogue. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz. Fisher, Mark (2009): Capitalist Realism: Is there No Alternative? Winchester: Zero Books. Foster, Hal (2015): “Exhibitionists.” In: London Review of Books, Vol. 37, No. 11, 4 June, pp. 13–14. www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n11/hal-foster/exhibitionists, last accessed 20 August 2017. Foucault, Michel (1983): “Self Writing”, In: Dits et écrits, Vol. IV., pp. 415–430. https://foucault.info/doc/documents/ foucault-hypomnemata-en-html, last accessed 20 August 2017. Foucault, Michel (1988): “Technologies of the Self”, ed. by Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman and Patrick H. Hutton, Univ. of Massachusetts Press, pp. 16-49, https://foucault.info/doc/documents/ foucault-technologiesofself-en-html, last accessed 20 August 2017. Foucault, Michel (2008): The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978–1979, Michel Senellart, translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, Michel (2009): Security, Territory, Population. Lectures at the College de France 1977–1978, ed. by Michel Senellart, translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave / Macmillan.

324 Gielen, Pascal (2013): “Nomadeology: The Aetheticization of Nomadic Existence.” In: Steven Rand, Heather Felty (eds.), Life Between Borders. The Nomadic Life of Curators and Artists. New York: apexart, pp. 17–30. Haraway, Donna (1988): “Situated Knowledges. The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” In: Feminist Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3, Autumn, pp. 575–599. Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio (2000): Empire, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Jones, Caroline A. (2010): “Biennial Culture: A Longer History.” In: Elena Filipovic, Marieke van Hal, Solveig Øvstebø (eds.), The Biennial Reader. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, pp. 66–86. Kwon, Miwon (1997): “One Place after Another: Notes on Site Specificity.” In: October, Vol. 80, pp. 85–110.

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Lorch, Catrin (2015): “Die Fruchtfolge des Kurators.” In: Süddeutsche Zeitung, 10. March. Max, D.T. (2014): “The Art of Conversation. The curator who talked his way to the top.” In: The New Yorker, 8. December, http://www.newyorker.com/ magazine/2014/12/08/art-conversation, last accessed 20 August 2017. Mignolo, Walter D. (2009): “Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and De-Colonial Freedom.” In: Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 26 (7–8), pp. 1–23. Mitchell, Timothy (1989): “The World as Exhibition.” In: Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 31, No. 2, April, pp. 217–236.

Nanne Buurman / O’Neill, Cathy (2016): Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. New York City: Crown. O’Neill, Paul (2012): The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s). Cambridge, Mass / London: MIT Press. Obrist, Hans Ulrich (2009): A Short History of Curating. Zurich / Dijon: JRP Ringier & Les Presses Du Réel. Obrist, Hans Ulrich (2011): Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Curating. Berlin / New York: Sternberg. Obrist, Hans Ulrich (2014): Ways of Curating. London: Allen Lane / Penguin. Osborne, Peter (2010): “Contemporary Art is Postconceptual Art”, Script of Public Lecture, Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Villa Sucota, Como, 9 July. Osborne, Peter (2014): “Every other Year is Always This Year. Contemporaneity and the Biennial Form.” In: Galit Eilat et al. (eds.), Making Biennials in Contemporary Times. Essays from the World Biennial Forum No 2, São Paulo: Biennial Foundation, Fundação Bienal de São Paulo and ICCo – Instituto de Cultura Contemporânea, pp. 23–35. Pratt, Mary Louise (1991): “Arts of the Contract Zone.” In: Profession, pp. 33–40. Pratt, Mary Louise (1992): Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation. London / New York: Routledge. Rugoff, Ralph (1999): “Rules of the Game.” In: Frieze, No. 44, Jan / Feb., pp. 47–49.

The Blind Spot of Global Art? Staniszweski, Mary Anne (1998): The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Turner, Frederick Jackson (1893): “The Significance of the American Frontier.” In: idem. (1921): The Frontier in American History. New York: Henry Hold and Company, pp. 1–38. Weber, Max [1933] (2005): The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Trans. by Talcott Parsons). London / New York: Routledge.

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326 Nanne Buurman /

Biographies 

Biographies

327

BIOGRAPHIES

328

Biographies  Biographies Annette Bhagwati

is Project Director of 100 Jahre Gegenwart (2015– 2018) and The Housing Question at the HKW – Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, where she has been Programme Coordinator and Curator from 1999 to 2006. She is Affiliate Professor of Art History at Concordia University, Montreal. Bhagwati studied art history, social anthropology and geography in Freiburg, Berlin and London. She received her PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. (Pages 191–212) • Jacob Birken

is a writer and researcher currently based in Kassel, Germany. He has worked as a freelance curator and for institutions like the ZKM – Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie in Karlsruhe and the HKW – Haus

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der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. His research focuses on images of history and historicity in art and popular media, and their sociopolitical and ecological implications. (Pages 35–52) • Jelle Bouwhuis

is an Art Historian. He was a curator at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and headed its project space Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam from 2006– 2016. He directed the longterm programs ‘Project 1975’ (SMBA, 2010–2012) and ‘Global Collaborations’ (Stedelijk Museum / SMBA, 2013–2016), and curated and / or supervised over 70 exhibitions in the Netherlands and elsewhere. He currently pursues the PhD research ‘Modern Art Museums in the Perspective of Globalization’ at Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam.

330 See academia.edu for a profile and more publications.  (Pages 167–190) • Nanne Buurman

is an art educator, curator and scholar currently working on her PhD in art history at the Freie Universität Berlin, where she was a member of the International Research Training Group InterArt Studies from 2012– 2015. Her main research areas are curatorial and exhibition studies with a focus on documenta, authorship and gender, socio-economic contexts and globalization as well as politics and epistemologies of the curatorial. As a guest editor she was responsible for the documenta issue of OnCurating Journal that came out in June 2017 titled Curating the History of the Present. (Pages 301–326) •

Sarah Dornhof

is a postdoctoral researcher in cultural studies, anthropology and art history at Freie Universität Berlin. Her research focusses on transcultural, transnational and postcolonial dynamics in contemporary art, memory studies and cultural politics in Morocco. (Pages 231–252) • Leah Gordon

is a London based visual artist and curator and the co-director of the Ghetto Biennale in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Her work focusses on Modernism and religion, informal economies, as well as class and folk histories. (Pages 129–154) • Birgit Hopfener

is Associate Professor in the art history department at Carleton University, Ottawa and an associated member of the excellence cluster

Biographies 

“Asia and Europe in a Global Context: The Dynamics of Transculturality”, Heidelberg University. Her area of specialization is global contemporary art, with a special emphasis on China. Her current research clusters around contemporary historiographic art in the global context, transcultural subjectivities and concepts and practices of transcultural collaborations. She authored the book Transkulturelle Reflexionsräume einer Genealogie des Performativen: Bedingungen und Artikulationen kultureller Differenz in der chinesischen Installationskunst (2013) and is the co-editor of Negotiating Difference: Chinese Contemporary Art in the Global Context (2012). (Pages 275–288) • Abdellah Karroum

is the Director of Mathaf, the Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, Qatar. He is the

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founder and artistic director of several projects, including L’appartement 22, an experimental art space in Rabat, Morocco and an educational laboratory at the Film School ESAV in Marrakech. Amongst others, Karroum has curated for the 2006 DAK’ART Biennale for African Contemporary Art, the 2008 Gwangju Biennale and the Marrakech Biennale in 2009. (Pages 155–164) • Barbara Lutz

is an art mediator and scholar based in Berlin. She studied Cultural Sciences and Aesthetic Practice at the University of Hildesheim and holds a certificate in Curatorial Practice and Exhibition Management of the University’s Centre for Lifelong Learning. She has worked for several international projects and festivals and has lectured at the University of Hildesheim. In her work she focuses

332 on a current understanding of transculturality in the field of curatorial practice and art mediation with special regard to documenta. (Pages 213–230) • Antigoni Memou

is Senior Lecturer in Art History at the School of Arts and Digital Industries at the University of East London. Her book Photography and Social Movements: From the Globalisation of the Movement (1968) to the Movement Against Globalisation (2001) was published by Manchester University Press in 2013. (Pages 75–88) • Birgit Mersmann

is associated Research Professor at the NCCR “Iconic Criticism” at the University of Basel, Switzerland. From 2015–2017 she was Visiting Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art / Aesthetic

Theories at the University of Cologne. Research foci include image and media theory, visual cultures, contemporary East Asian and Western art, global art history, the history of Asian biennials, visual translation, interrelations between script and image. (Pages 91–110) • Ronit Milano

is a senior lecturer at the Department of the Arts in Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. She has published articles concerning the political, economic and intercultural context of contemporary art and the new role of museums in a changing arena. Milano is currently completing her second book, on the convergence of intellectual and financial value in the contemporary art market. (Pages 289–300) •

Biographies 

333

Her dissertation examines is the Project Manager of the the emergence of instituTate Research Centre: Asia in tional and curatorial concepts of globalization within the London. She is an internationally educated artist, cura- framework of Arab Artists’ work exhibited at the cinquentor, lecturer and writer. Her research focuses on complex nial exhibition documenta. causal frameworks, which (Pages 111–128) influence discourses on fine • art globally. Amongst others, Isabel Seliger she studied at the School studied East Asian languages of Oriental and African Stud- and literature (Japanese) with ies, at Chelsea College of Art an interdisciplinary focus on and Central Saint Martins in East Asian art history and London. In London Voon aesthetics, early Buddhist Bartlett has taught Cultural sculpture, classical Chinese Studies and Fine Art Practice language, and studio art at at various universities and Freie Universität, Berlin, Keio levels. University, Tokyo, and UniverVoon Pow Bartlett

(Pages 63–74)

• Janna-Mirl Redmann

is a PhD candidate at Geneva University, from 2013–2017 she was a researcher for the Swiss National Fund SINERGIA project OTHER MODERNITIES Patrimony and Practices of Visual Expression Outside the West.

sity of Hawai’i at Mānoa, Honolulu. From 2002–2004 she was Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Brandeis University in Waltham, MA, and Associate in Research at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. Research interests include transculturality in the history

334 of science, comparative intellectual history, comparative aesthetics, post-colonial theory, and Asian discourses on globalization and world order. Her work is also informed by diverse experiences in the creative arts, specifically collaborative initiatives that focus on artistic research. (Pages 255–274) • Andrew Stefan Weiner

is Assistant Professor of Art Theory and Criticism in the Department of Art and Art Professions at New York University. He also taught in the MA Curatorial Practice Program at California College of the Arts. Weiner received his PhD in Rhetoric from the University of California, Berkeley. He has contributed to publications like ARTMargins, Grey Room, Afterall, Journal of Visual Culture, and Texte zur Kunst. (Pages 53–62) •

Biographies 

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