Spaces of institutions and relations
Sebastián López

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Between the local situation and a globalization that squeezes us, between my history or our history—depending on the space where one places oneself—and the contexts which we generate from them, between the identities which we build—or negotiate—art institutions mix and generate discourses, alter principles and, as they usually do, categorize at their fancy. This is not new, but in the 90’s institutions have grown in power and importance, and today it seems impossible to escape them. In spite of this situation, some artists are elaborating projects which include a reflection on institutions. As I expect to demonstrate further along, this is not a new edition of the so-called "institutional critique" which engrossed significant artists of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Taking these problems to a new point, without resigning and anchoring their discourse in the personal and the local within the international framework in which the artistic discourse is today played out, they are exposing the institutions new mechanisms, and the histories which make them possible letting them manifest, at the same time, their own history as artists. Two artists will serve to clarify, partially, this situation: Meshac Gaba, born in Cotonou, Benin, today living in Amsterdam, and Hong Hao, born and still living in Beijing, China.

1. Meshac Gaba
When Meshac Gaba started his project, the Museum of Contemporary African Art, the very name determined one of the strategies upon which this project developed over these last few years, and will continue in the future. We know that the words of the name he selected, can be arranged in other ways: Contemporary Museum of African Art, African Museum of Contemporary Art. This is not the acronyms game with which museums have amused themselves following the corporate bent , some, recently, from their very birth. Rather, the surprising explosive character the combination of some of them may have: on the one hand, the promise (Museum of Contemporary Art) and on the other an unexpected surprise (African). In fact, to many, Africa as culture is not associated with the contemporary, much less with an artistic production that can be defined as such. Although in most African countries there is a full development of modernity, this has been continually repressed in favor of an archaic idea, even though the masks shown in museums, with which this archaism is usually associated, are barely from the late XIX Century, and those sold in antique shops, were produced yesterday.
The project of the Gaba Museum, pure fiction to let loose themes and commentary about Africa and the contemporary, has its ‘pendant’ in the Marcel Broodthaers Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles. Without the Belgian’s archeological spirit, Gaba launches his project to decipher the labyrinths on which Africa, the continent’s perception, and its cultural production are now.
The Museum’s Architecture and its Space
The "Museum’s Architecture" is the project’s second installation. It is an open proposal that must be finished by the public. Its mechanics is based on the game principle: wooden blocks are scattered over a blue carpet. Visitors to the exhibit are invited to construct their architectonic proposals for the Museum of Contemporary African Art. During the exhibit and the shows where this work was exhibited, visitors have proposed a long series of imaginary constructions. The numerous proposals reveal the manner in which the visitors imagine this architecture, and the series of relations which, consciously or unconsciously, they elaborate for a space which would contain contemporary African works unknown to the spectator. There is nothing that indicates which nor how these architectonic proposals will be inhabited. With the "Lego-museum" as we called it familiarly, Gaba organizes a series of relations in which "Museum", "art" and "contemporary" reveal our own ideas about the museum’s space if it is devoted to African art. Africa determines and governs the discourse. The fact that Gaba has placed architecture at the very beginning of his project is significant. The museum’s architecture not only has been transformed into the container of works of art par excellence, but has also been the space in which different negotiations about African art has taken place. Ethnology museums were the heirs of the "curio collections" in which the most varied kinds of African objects were collected at first, as well as those from other continents. Then, with the advent and triumph of avant-garde movements, modern arts museums started to introduce and show African artistic objects, essentially masks, which had formed the base of the language with which XX Century artists put together their works.
The typologies, both of the Ethnology Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, are, at the same time, the typologies of classification and continuous passing of objects from one space to another. The staging of these negotiations is made evident by the way in which these spaces and the objects contained in them have been positioned by European museums. A moment which Gaba reveals in the manner of a game.
In the "Museum’s Architecture" there is no retrospective look. The discussions about museum architecture were launched in the ‘80s, and have gone through the ‘90s sheltered by the numerous museums built in Europe, and the many remodelings and extensions which even today are being carried out. But before the massive presence of the new museums and the updating of others, Gaba’s is governed by an open game based on the imaginary, the body, and continuous change. Nothing is stable, and the continuous succession of "models" proposed by anonymous visitors dilutes the materiality so that only the idea remains. The "architecture" will thus be the mirror of desire, the screen of the imaginary, the blank sheet ready to receive both design and scribbling.
When considering the first six installations Gaba has carried out so far, there is an important contrast that should be pointed out. In none of his latter projects—The Museum Shop, The Museum Restaurant, The Game Room, among others—does he emphasize what in general terms we consider to be the center of the museum, that is, the rooms where works of art are shown. What centers the discourse of his first six projects are secondary products. The shop, the restaurant, the game room, etc., are subordinate products which have been transformed into essential ones. This is one more mirror which Gaba places to reflect a contemporaneity in which the museum as an entity enters and leaves, hides in or has to be sought, in a constant game.
In the "Museum’s Architecture" and what followed, there is a conscience that the museum has changed to the point of transforming itself into something unrecognizable. Beyond institutional critique, including and outdoing the proposals of Broodthaers and even those of Buren, Gaba decentralizes the analysis while continuing to hit a raw nerve.

2. Hong Hao
Borgian is the most apt adjective to apply to the Hong Hao Selected Writings. A profound expert of Borges’s works such as he, as are many Chinese artists of his generation, he seems to have kept in mind for his Selected Writings a story from "El libro de arena" ("The Book on Sand ") in which a man finds a book with neither beginning nor end. This was pointed out by the Chinese critic Yuting Chou, remembering at the same time that it is "impossible to set a human order" to Borges’ book "and the pages are numbered with no apparent reason". Hong Hao calls his book an "encyclopedia", which brings his project even closer to Borges’ favorite readings. The Selected Writings took Hao over ten years and led him to make a series of 31 engravings. Each engraving has as its base an open book, and each page/engraving reveals, step by step, different stories related to China and the situation of change it lived from the mid-‘80s to the mid-‘90s. Interactions between old and new traditions lead to the switching back and forth between subjects such as acupuncture and instructions on "The Road to Success" or "Seeking the Truth", which in Hong Hao’s words are shared by "people from the East and the West who put their heads together to find a solution, but who look towards the void (maybe the problem will never find a solution)", or in "The Mystery of a Spring Night", in which, on one side of the page an old man is watching a television body building program and on the other one, there are upside down Chinese characters. On the first page of the book, the Prologue consists of only one Chinese character, and the rest of the page is occupied by the "sponsors" (Netscape, Sony, Philips, Kodak, Ford, among others) and a fictitious list of prizes. On the opposite page a text indicates that "this book is recommended by UNESCO".
The project’s framework is composed of a series of maps which, by the eloquence of its subjects, make the total reading different. In "The Sharing Out of Nuclear Weapons", intentionally drawn as an old map, but centered on the Pacific Ocean, real and imaginary places are marked by their military potential. In "The New World Order", Hong Tao has altered the countries’ frontiers and names. The United Sates is named the Popular Republic of China, Europe is Mozambique, and Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador are marked as Lebanon. In "The World’s New Topographic Map" countries and continents have a size according to their prestige and power. The imaginary reeled off by Hong Hao’s work is elaborated locally. Thus its references to situations from the Chinese society’s recent decades and its anchoring on (art) history. In "Histories of the World" (Shishuo Xinyu), while the name is taken from a Chinese classic, the image is derived from Gericault’s Medusa’s Raft. On the opposite page a traditional Chinese painting pictures the fisherman-god Jiang Taigong, all preceded by the Chinese characters meaning East (dong), West (xi) and thing (dongxi). Its description in map code is loaded with the meaning of the word "Chinese" (Zhongguo) which means "country in the middle", as old Chinese maps drew it. The strength of explaining the contemporaneity they contain springs from that locality which sustains it.

Deleuze and Guattari pointed out that maps are one of the clearest examples of the rhizomatic, or better still, are part of it. "If the map is opposed to the tracing, it is because it turns completely towards experimentation to grasp reality. The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed on itself, but builds it", they assert. If maps "are open, connectable in all dimensions, detachable, reversible, susceptible of being constantly modified", it is because they "favor the connection between areas by releasing the bodies without organs, by opening them to a maximum on a consistent plane".
Cartography presents itself as the ideal way of destroying analyses which are tree-formed, vertical, hierarchical. And it is not by chance that Hong Hao makes use of them in a moment when Chinese visual arts had started to struggle for visibility both inside and outside of China; opposite the country’s internal orthodoxy, which rejected any form of contemporaneity in the arts, and opposite a "West" which ignored the serious attempts of a modern discourse in visual arts, and had constructed a Chine made up of calligraphy, vertical landscapes and blue ceramics. Between the internal ideological control and the institutions which marked the hierarchies of the canon so as to be able to describe the "other one", as derivative or inauthentic due to its application.
The space in which visual arts relations are established internationally, is the space of the so called "curatorships". And in these last years there has been no cultural space more "curated" than that of China. The avalanche of exhibitions of contemporary Chinese art have culminated undoubtedly in the massive presence at the central exhibition of the 1999 Venice Biennial, curated by Harald Zeeman. The "dAPERtutto", as it was called, included the presentation of a private collection of contemporary Chinese art owned by a Swiss collector. This event, silenced by the European press but amply discussed in that of Asia, exposed the negotiations regional art is subjected to outside the centers of cultural power.
This fact has been openly discussed and denounced in Asian magazines. In this sense it is interesting to point out a work by Hong Hao in 1997-98, in which this contemporary cultural space has been exposed. Due to its rhizomatous character, I believe it can be seen as a prolongation of his maps in previous years, although here, it must be explained, the drawing of the map was not made with pen and paintbrush, rather it acquired a performative character making the protagonists themselves act in such a way that their actions "make the map".

In 1997 Hong Hao had a friend mail a letter, written in German, from "Europe" to China, headed by a fictitious logo of Documenta X. The letter was sent to different art galleries, visual arts centers and museums in which plastic arts activities had been more constant. These letters asked the addressees to collaborate by showing works of contemporary Chinese artists since the curator who signed the letter would visit China between June 30th and July 15th, hoping to see, evaluate and select Chinese artists for the exhibition "Aus der andere Welt: Chinesische Avant-garde" (From Another World: Chinese Avant-Garde). Although the letter’s date, May 21st was enough to raise suspicions (Documenta X opened to the public on June 21st of that year), the Chinese visual arts milieu went into turmoil. In a few days dozens of exhibitions were prepared waiting for the curator, in the hope that some Chinese artists would be selected for an event in the framework of what was, and continues to be, one that attracts massive attendance of public, press, art merchants and institutions, and can even bring about fame and financial success.
A few days before the "arrival" in China of the illustrious curatorship, a Chinese artist living in Europe deciphered the letter’s signature, and so informed China. The letter was signed by Lelnay Gnohoah, mirror representation of Hong Hao Yanlel. In spite of this, many of the exhibitions were carried out, constituting one of the more important artistic events of the China of the ‘90s, at the same time closing the thematic change movement and new experiments which even in China was called the Chinese avant-garde.
A year later Hong Hao made a map to mark this event. He printed the letter on a map of Kassel, city where Documenta takes place, marking the "defense" spaces in the area where this exhibition usually takes place.
The space which Hong Hao uncovered is complex and actual. On the one side it points out the estrangement of the local in the international, and its negotiations. Without forgetting the contemporary curatorship "techniques" which determine which cultures or countries or continents, such as China itself, appear or disappear with the fluctuation of cultural fashions. On the other side, it exposed the mechanisms of the West to curate, and the willingness of "letting itself be curated" to which not only China, but also other countries submitted gladly. The new world order of plastic arts. Without forgetting the index-like forms in which "other cultures" have entered international exhibitions and their taxonomies.
I cannot avoid thinking of the fact that this has been revealed by Hong Hao, Chinese artist, lover of Borges. Because in what today seems more like the property of Foucault than of the Argentine writer, Borges has told of a Chinese Encyclopedia where animals were divided into: a) belonging to the Emperor; b) embalmed; c) tamed; d) suckling pigs; e) sirens; f) fabulous; g) loose dogs; h) included in this classification; i) are excited as if mad; j) innumerable; k) drawn with a very fine camel’s hair brush; l) etcetera; m) those which have just broken the vase; n) those which from afar look like flies.