What is Global Curating?
In early 1916, while the First World War was still raging, Paul Wittgenstein, the elder brother of the famous philosopher, was about to give his first public concert as a one-armed pianist. He was to play a specially composed piece (the famous concerto by Ravel was to come some years later) and various well-known pieces that had been arranged for one hand.
As well as having made more than passable debut as a conventional pianist before the War, Paul Wittgenstein was a scion of one of the wealthiest families in Europe. His family knew most of Vienna's glittering personalities and beyond, many of whom had been regular guests to their musical salons.
Instead of cutting short Paul's career, his traumatic accident only strengthened his resolve to become a pianist of international renown. On the other hand, Ludwig, who had always been critical of his brother's playing, felt especially unnerved on the eve of the performance.
Although the advertisements for the concert made no mention of his brother's injury, everyone in Vienna knew of it. Ludwig had the nagging suspicion that its audience would be made of sympathisers and those curious, like visitors to a side-show to see an odd-ball repeat his extraordinary feat over and over again.
Years later, after Paul played the famed Ravel concerto at the Proms, Ernest Newman, writing in the Sunday Times, courageously asserted that the performer was maybe trying to do what was impossible.[i]
This historical anecdote illustrates a handful of conditions that curating exhibitions in a global context faces: the first is the role of curiosity in attracting audiences to cultural events, the second is whether such curiosity is enough to sustain itself, whether a disabled “Othe”’ can ever compete with the normative standards of production.
To this, we may ask other questions. One may be the present-day role and relevance of criticality in its Kantian moral sense, its evolution from the twentieth-century avant-garde, and its commodified hardening within institutions.
Another is the “critical” direction of art within the ambit of class and racial relations. If art is sublimation, is art in the age of globalisation a cultural sublimation on a grand scale? a way of watching the world's woes that insulates from any need of action? And to what is the extent to which the central and ‘”underprivileged” socio-economic bodies—the “West”—celebrates its other all the better to absorb, or consume it.
The “West” is given scare quotes here not only because it is now a somewhat nebulous and overblown generalisation, but also because its dominance is all the more called into question in recent years, the economic dominance of Europe and the USA stemmed by its profligate arrogance.
Nonetheless, “Western” working models for curating still pertain. They harken back to organisational principles of genre, prestige-building, spectatorship, and capital that were already well in place by one of the first art critics, Denis Diderot, in the mid-eighteenth century.
In his day, French painting had experienced over a century of refining its institutionalisation of art through the taxonomic grouping of what had begun over a century before. Painting was divided according to the levels of moral edification it could enshrine, from still life at lowermost rung, to history painting at the uppermost.
Today, while the organisation of genres is implicit in the language and reference internal to art's history, it is but one component in the diffuse “post-medium condition”, to use Rosalind Krauss’ famous phrase.
Whitney Museum of American Art curator at the museum's Wade Guyton exhibit. Photo by Claudio Paparietro. Via The Wall Street Journal
I want to posit that a similar organisational spectrum is also present today, except that it has shifted globally into the realm of the organisation of culture. Instead of categories internal to art related to its subject matter and its formal capabilities, the categories are external and based on the various imaginaries of national identity.
Just as we have global marketing and global fashion, we have global art.
This is articulated as something far more than art that has a broader reach than its own country or local vicinity. Instead, global art is a concept that extends far beyond the reach and agency of the artist.
Global art is art subject to what can be understood according to a discernible grab-bag of national attributes. Alternatively, national attributes are generated a posteriori, that is, if an artist of culture X, then the work is reflective of X-ness. We look at things backward. One reason for this is that when we see something from someone from a culture different from ours, it is natural to look for that aspect that makes it different. And that aspect, that quality, we deduce as an element of its authenticity.
Despite our age of indeterminate and frenetic flux, we are witness to a kind of cultural warfare in which countries vie for credibility and interest. Despite boundaries being more porous than they have ever been, physically and through the cybersphere's immaterial channels, there is widespread enthusiasm for national branding.
Thus, we have Chinese art “now”, Korean art “now”, contemporary art from Lebanon, Turkey, and wherever else. Disregarding the historical fluidity of borders not only now but since the dawn of civilisation (nations are mobile ideas not essentially determined), conveniently ignorant that states such as Slovenia or Latvia are, in terms of independent sovereignty, only decades old, each country is expected to account for itself in a way that reflects itself.
Hence the morality that was once internal to the artwork’s content has shifted to a cultural morality in which the imperative is on the curator to choose art and artists that most appositely reflect a series of cultural conditions within a particular space at a certain time.
It is expected that a country's art represents the meaning of that country in a desublimated form; it diagnoses and discloses a cultural essence to which the outside viewer is then privy.
The packaged and survey exhibitions where this occurs are a kind of tourism, but of the most mendacious kind. For whereas with traditional tourism, the threat of descent into exploitation and kitsch is self-consciously present or at least imperfectly concealed; exhibitions packaging countries ride on the rhetoric of high culture, a rhetoric that is as silencing as it is baffling. Such exhibitions suggest that there are circumstantial qualities that can be raised to ideology and that culture lies innocently reified in the art object.
A 2011 exhibition of Korean and Australian art (at the National Art School, Sydney, under the auspices of the MCA), Tell me, tell me was one such case, and made to be more palatable because laced with ‘cross-cultural exchange’. (So who really curated it, the two curators or the Department of Foreign Affairs?)
Among the revisionist and post-colonialist debates about Orientalism and the colonial Other since the 1990s, there appear to be two salient points of emphasis. The first is to explore the nature of cultural exchange over that of cultural hegemony. The second states that the first position is only revisionist softening.
The first re-reading emphasises that imperial dominance is not overriding but riven with cracks of resistance (not only on the part of the colonised but amongst the colonised) and complicity (among the colonised). They emphasise the fluid nature of economic and aesthetic exchange, from textiles and jewellery to visual motifs and artistic styles.
Dressing gowns, for instance, have a mixed provenance, haling first from Japan the yukata) but subsequently manufactured since the seventeenth century in India. The word used at this time, 'banyan', has a suitably exotic ring—as in the banyan tree, an Indian fig—but it comes to us via the Portuguese, which modified it after the Sanskrit.
Or take the famous Tree of Life design from China. This was transported by the British in the seventeenth century to India. There, the textile designers and embroiderers promptly took their own liberties, which were then greeted by delight when transported back to China and responded by superadding to the design originating with themselves and modified outside. Such 'exchanges' are typical but easier to locate in design than in art where, for the last five hundred or so years, we are encouraged to stop quiet at the by-station of the artist's own individual choice and agency.
But these cases from four centuries' past are occurring at a much higher rate and with incomparable speed in the cybersphere, the largest, fastest, and most active site of exchanges—aesthetic, economic, personal, ideological—ever conceived.
Notwithstanding, the other postcolonial perspective, advanced by the likes of Spivak, insists that the equalisations of global economies are either superficial or non-existent and all the more nefarious because they are silenced and concealed.
The aesthetic, cultural equalisation—we all know about and maybe eat McDonald's, we all know about and maybe have an iPhone, is incommensurate with the social inequities between the euphemistically named “developing” countries.
Nike profits from sweatshops, and Apple from labour conditions so dire that they result in incidences of suicide. The connotations of the term ‘Globalisation' are highly misleading since many third-world economies have not witnessed any substantial changes and have been hotbeds of warfare for several decades.
Africa continues to be the place where medicines are either scarce, exploited, or tested. It is also home to numerous gang states which live in a seemingly perpetual state of conflict and chaos. This is to the benefit of the capitalist markets, which can play off the individual groups rather than negotiate with a unified state who would then be able to concentrate on infrastructural development for higher production and stronger international negotiability.
Sierra Leone, Namibia, Rwanda, or the former Belgian Congo are all examples that the New World Order is a farce. Another central thinker to this predicament is Slavoj Zizek, who has contributed significantly to illuminating Euro-American policy's deception, which is the patina of political benevolence (financial and military aid etc.) made possible from the exploitation of mass-corporatisation. The Congo is no an anomaly,
On the contrary, this ‘regression’ to a de facto pre- or sub-state results from their integration into the global market and concomitant political struggles—suffice to recalls cases like Congo or Afghanistan. In other words, pre-modern sub-states are not atavistic remainders but rather integral parts of the 'postmodern' global constellation.[ii]
Complaints such as these openly demonstrate that globalisation is less than a fixed concept. The strong implications of cohesion built into the word Globalisation may speak to the markets for mass branding and the Internet, but it belies a problem since, as a term, devalues to the point of suppression, circumstances that have not changed at all.
When featured, expressed, or critiqued on the international art scene, it is a situation that both recognises this but in a context in which its truth, its urgency, and its physicality is disavowed.
Contemporary art is a contradictory site since its agency, and political entitlements remain more diffuse than ever (than say, when history painting was the best thing for academicians to test their mettle), and where ambiguity and metaphor, intrinsic to good art's power, are convenient mechanisms for deflecting sticky questions.
So, the problem may seem to lie as much, if not more, in the places where art is shown, how it is chosen, how it is delivered and organised.
The romantic notion of the individual artist, which in today's term is the artist as brand, habitually obfuscates the fact that the production of art and its modes of organisation for display are, in fact, seamless.[iii]
The Biennale phenomenon that began in the 1990s was followed in the new millennium by the art fair. Venice held its first Biennale in 1895, Sao Paolo in 1951. The Sydney Biennale began as a small festival in the Opera House in 1973 with Anthony Winterbotham as the curator but was not rigorously biennial until 1984. The Whitney Biennial also opened in 1973, but after annual exhibitions that had been mounted since 1932. The Biennial in Istanbul opened in 1987, the Gwangju Biennale in 1995, the Biennale in Shanghai in 1996, in Liverpool in 1998, and in Singapore in 2006. As for the Fairs, the first Art Basel was held in 1970; the Frieze Art Fair opened its doors in 2003.
The fairs comprise a carefully timed circuit that includes the European Fine Art Fair that opens in Maastricht in March, Art Basel in June, the Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporaine in Paris in October, and Art Basel in Miami Beach in December.
The latter is a graphic case of global branding in action. A city is literally transplanted as brand, idea, and essence all in one, to another city across an ocean, and a city to which it bears no resemblance or affinity except for the transplantation itself.
Finally, there is the birth of the hypermuseum with Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim in New York in 1959 and culminating Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao in 1997. Contemporary wisdom appears to suggest that the puff has begun to go out of the Biennales, although the Art Fairs continue to boom because they are commercially driven. Perhaps the waning of the Biennales’ “critical” power is revealed in the Gehry phenomenon, Bilbao and its successors: it is not the ship’s contents that count, it is the ship itself.
Gehry’s building, which caused a rash of others like it, with all their stray, angular space-age amphibiousness, is, as a museum per se, a bit of failure.
But then again, is it? For it caused a complete rethinking of art museums on more than one level. Through the “Bilbao effect”, Gehry's building showed that a single building with the high-flown rhetoric of cultural cachet could revitalise a city into a place of interest and make it be taken seriously.
While Duchamp had revealed the tacit systems that surround or acceptance and appreciation of an object as art, Gehry building and others like it seemingly reaffirmed this revolutionary principle in a counter-revolutionary way since it returns the art object to the bosom of the institution, where the institution's importance is no longer built on the quality on its content, but on its own superficial aesthetics: the label (the Guggenheim) and its look (the blue-chip architectural design).
Gehry's Guggenheim ultimately inaugurates the museum as a phenomenon unto itself and as a marketing exercise that exploits the objects within it. It is not a collection—like the Wallace, Sackler, or Frick—which is a sum of its parts; it is a museum whose parts are supplementary.
Like the Libeskind Jewish History Museum unveiled just after it is 1999, the contents are incidental. When people visit Bilbao, they go to visit the museum, not the collection. Daniel Libeskind's museum, another clattering, asymmetrical metal-clad wonder, was in many ways a coming-to-truth or resolution, an entelechy, of the hypermuseum. For two years, it remained open to paying visitors who marvelled over an empty building. Many Berliners subsequently lamented that it was ultimately filled—filled with the things its initial purpose was to house. To a greater or lesser extent depending on your point of view, the artefacts had become redundant.
As we well know, such institutions share the majority of responsibility for how we consume and understand contemporary art or rather Contemporary Art in which what is good is of a piece with what is said to be good, a chain of immaterial approbations that become more forceful the more they become built on one another, no different from the stock market.
They are phenomena that encompass roughly three tiers of artistic activity. Because the work is not ostensibly for sale, it welcomes more experimental and ephemeral practices. The Fairs are vast department stores for the world’s most voracious art plutocracy. The museums ratify into permanency the transient permanency and set them against recent historical relief of artists of the twentieth century who are now the “modern masters”.
These activities were all efforts of cultural ascendency. They were, and continue to be, public rituals of financial excess and phantasmagoria. In the 1990s, Biennales vaunted themselves as events that were a snapshot of a particular cultural Zeitgeist, but this has now largely been discredited.
Why? The first reason is that it was until recently only Europe and America could afford to house their collections in edifices of hyperbolic grandeur.
The second is the ideological contradictions within the curated art festival themselves, particularly the Biennales, which sought to address the proverbial Other while affirming the institutional frameworks of dominance, both intellectual and fiscal exchange.
The arbiters for the Fairs are the galleries, or Biennales, the curators. The major galleries are like fashion houses within which other prominent designers work (as John Galliano once did for Dior), and Biennale curators are like film directors. One talks of a Robert Storr Biennale as one would a Spielberg film.
The incorporation of the Other in contemporary art into discourse is socio-economic (politically correct) and curatorial.
Curating art of the Other usually begins with the expatriate Other (e.g., Jacir, Neshat, Hatoum, Ai Wei Wei) internal to whose practice is already a constructive, speculative nexus between two cultures.
The word “constructed” is used intentionally here because the nexus is not reasonable or “researched”; it is imagined, fabricated. (I will return to these notions again shortly.) Only once the instinctual demands of climatisation have been met, more adventurous steps can be made.
The entry of contemporary Chinese art only the international circuit, beginning in New York, is the best example. Its platform and its means of circulation are still, however, the 'global' paradigms of Western historical art-making.
The artwork is created and understood under terms inherited from the avant-garde such as critical and political, and postmodernity, such as irony, banality, and kitsch.
These cultural productions are supposed to be advanced enough to comply with the Western system—as opposed to the traditions of calligraphy which are exhibited but more as commodified cultural artefacts rather than as an international 'engagement'—while at the same time reaching deep into the heart of the country's own difference.
Chinese art is meant to smell and feel Chinese. Meanwhile, works of art from the centres of New York and London need not bespeak a culture since their responsibility is to benchmark The Contemporary for that year or that fashion season. From Koons to Barney to Hirst—these provide the standards by which difference is gauged.
They are also the talismanic centrepieces in the fairs, like the American dollar on the global financial market—with all the same spuriousness that lurks behind the power that resides purely in perception and coercion—by which the Others can be measured.
The Other or the half-Other, the artist with a hyphenated identity, must remain thus if he or she is to remain marketable. Once they are purchased and displayed by grand institutions, they are situated as points of contrast and vouch for the institution's truly liberal, multi-cultural ambit.
What is most cynical about this exercise is not the exercise itself, but the apparent lack of self-awareness of the curators who engage in it.
In his review of Spivak’s major work, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999), Terry Eagleton, with typical wry candour, comments that
Gayatri Spivak remarks with some justification … that a good deal of US postcolonial theory is 'bogus', but this gesture is de rigueur when it comes to one postcolonial critic writing about the rest. Besides, for a 'Third World' theorist to break this news to her American colleagues is in one sense deeply unwelcome, and in another sense exactly what they want to hear. Nothing is more voguish in guilt-ridden US academia than to point to the inevitable bad faith of one's position. It is the nearest a postmodernist can come to authenticity.[iv]
Eagleton later affirms that her outsideness, as it were, is in fact nurtured and conceived on the inside, in the US where she receives numerous accolades and honours.
Beneath Eagleton's grudging respect for Spivak lies a straightforward point, that holds for artist or theorist or filmmaker, namely that the West—here the places that command and commission discourse—not only thrives but must enlist the voices that appear to rupture the structure.
It is a categoric and commonly made error to think that places of power are coherent. Yet what is demanded of foreign artists, writers, and so on is that they be highly literate in a packaged performance of attributes that appear under a particular cultural banner.
Thus, the coherence of the so-called West is its very incoherence, and its systematic aesthetic absorption of cultures it exploits denigrates and denies economically and politically. Art on a global scale is the most manifest bungling of the old Left and on the largest scale.
The politics of curatorial inclusion much resembles a supermarket filled with exotic, rare ingredients.
What Eagleton ultimately locates is that discourse in its approval if not its circulation stays in the West. But, as I suggested above, this ‘West’ is now more of a regulating idea; the West as brand.
While the manufacture of Ralph Lauren, the highest-grossing fashion and lifestyle company worth over four billion dollars, is carried out in China, Macau, Tunisia, and Turkey, the brand remains in New York. The same can be said of myriad other brands which were once made in Italy—Diesel and Armani Jeans—and have moved their production offshore to China.
The late Okwui Enwezor was an Igbo Nigerian can talk of his humble origins, but this is only heard through a Euro-American filter. His label, we assume, is more authentic because it is tempered by hardship.
It is more critical because the charmed life of a Westerner doesn't vitiate it. The outsourcing of culture in terms of the value of the more authentic “primitive” other mirrors the economy of the developed countries themselves, who have moved production away from the country of origin. The short-term gains have been felt, and the long-term effects are now only becoming apparent. Is this a harbinger of things to come in art as well?
Suppose the first years of the life Libeskind's Jewish History Museum marked an architectural coming-to-realisation of the museum as a museum without contents. In that case, the Louvre Abu Dhabi is a climax of the museum as a brand.[v]
Designed by Jean Nouvel, the project has run against a chorus of protest, not just for conflating an historic site once the residence of kings with a bequest—the Guggenheimisation of the Louvre if you will—but for the connection of high art to human rights abuses.
For the labourers in Abu Dhabi, from Bangladesh, India and surrounding countries work in dire conditions for wages the barely meet their living costs. This is well known (and not acted upon), but the Louvre case is a remarkable collision of human rights abuse with high culture.
Headed by the French art historian Didier Rykner, over 4650 petitioners signed against the France-Emirati enterprise. But the French Culture industry has been steadfast, the Minister for Culture Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres proclaiming, ‘We’re not selling the French legacy and heritage. We want this culture to radiate to parts of the world that value it. We’re proud that Abu Dhabi wants to bring the Louvre here.
We’re not here to transform culture into a consumer product’.[vi] In the denial is the confession. But that is not all that is remarkable about this statement.
It also perpetuates the imperial civilising mission that began at around the same time beginnings of the French Salon at the beginning of the seventeenth century.
References to the sun king are there, whether conscious or not: France is 'radiating' is cultural might to willing consumers. This is the truer, more accurate, definition of globalisation: preserving cultural capital through its immaterial dissemination.
The modern, proto-globalised cultural institution protects its contents on-site, occasionally packaging a portion of its riches for tour. Like a sinister alien that can grow an extra appendage at will, the Louvre gives its essence, which is an idea.
It transports its prestige, a prestige constructed out of a venerable and intricate history. Yet what makes the situation so fraught, and yet so lucidly revealing is that now we see the use of history to make an alias, but this history is now a hollowed-out shell. Abu Dhabi, the city itself designed by Rem Koolhaas is the ultimate post-postmodern city.
With the prospect of an institution such as this, if it gets off the ground, it outranks the Singapore or Shanghai Biennales. Unlike these, it has taken more than the framework and the concept (The structure has a vast space intended to house a Biennale), it has been able to buy its kudos rather than build it.
Unlike Disneyland that traffics in representations, Abui Dhabi seeks to reestablish these representations within an active socio-political context.
And as to the gesture of protest: this rehearsing of French Left outrage ought not to cloud the fact that the curators and other 'art workers' who signed the petition were already engaging in a proportional form of exploitation, albeit in a more immaterial and less bloody form.
This is to say that from the point of view of cultural marketing, some cultures are more interesting than others. For instance, an Iranian-Australian will attract more curators than a German-Australian.
To curate an artist with Iranian blood is to afford crucial cultural insights into a time of brutal slippage between the Christian and Muslim worlds. It is also to show that as a curator you are unsympathetic of a politics of militant opposition, but can play a game of solution-solving discursive behaviour.
As a German-Australian, you are just a migrant. The distinct advantage of curating minorities is that one can undertake a humanitarian project without getting your hands dirty. It potentially makes money or at least carries cultural credit.
In the 1980s, curating had one imperative, which was to include women, today it has three: women, minorities, and indigenous people (Aborigines, First Nation etc.).
The minorities are best from two groups: the Middle East, to show a general global sympathy, and Asia, to acknowledge the rising superpowers of India and China. Even though the Chinese outnumber numerous other European, white, and Christian minorities (Croats, Serbs, Czech) they are more migrant and minority.
Art thrives on, feasts on, processes that appear to be outside of the mainstream system, similar to how multinational corporations pour large sums into diagnosing the latest subcultural movement, language or fashion only reabsorb it into its marketing image. But it does have enormous relevance to Australia.
Australian art, not including Aboriginal art, is perhaps already there, but for the reason that the international scene has proportionately little impulse to translate it or to absorb it. Aboriginal art is currently undergoing its own ad hoc review, especially since it has become increasingly self-aware of itself as a look and a brand that is divorced from the real lived circumstances of its making.
Before it is traduced and simplified, Aboriginal art often produced by collaborative groups or is circulated amongst a small fraternity. But I will reserve the topic for curating Aboriginal art for a later discussion.
It would seem that one solution to the predicament of art both in the grips and globalisation and engendering our idea of globalisation sketched out here is to foster in artists a self-reflexive attitude to their identity, and to educate them and curators alike the great extent to which identity is manipulated, rewritten, fabricated and imagined.
This is not a taste of Lebanon, or of Cameroon, Namibia, Haiti, Cuba, or Korea, but this is what he or she imagines it to be. This would mean that the kinds of collaborations and exchanges, those buzzwords again, can occur outside of the culture. The age of criticality is now passing, as the editor of Artforum, Tim Griffin has also begun to suggest.[vii]
This does not mean that we are dealing with the complicity of kitsch; it means that strategies of resistance and complicity need to be reformulated yet again. Why can't an Australian do Korean art or Egyptian art? After all, Koreans and Egyptians in Australia can do Australian art, why not stretch the membrane of immanence?
It would test the grounds of political correctness. It would also make the consumption of false, falsified, or forced authenticity a lot harder.
References:
[i] Alexander Waugh, The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War, New York: Anchor Books, 2008, 106, 185
[ii] Slavoj Zizek, Living in the End Times, London and New York: Verso, 2010, 172.
[iii] Although about literature, the most important contribution to this idea is by Pierre Bourdieu, Les règles de l’art. Genèse et structure du champ littéraire, Paris: Seuil, 1992.
[iv] Terry Eagleton, ‘Gayatri Spivak’, Figures of Dissent, London and New York: Verso, 2003, 158.
[v] See also Terry Smith, What is Contemporary Art?, Chicago and London: Chicago U.P., 2009, 88-90
[vi] ‘Louvre to Build Branch in Abu Dhabi’, Associated Press 3/6/2007, msnbc.com. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17482641/#.TwzQMM2BL9o
[vii] Tim Griffin, ‘Compression’, October 135
