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Text published
in Zones of silence, edited by the
Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam, 2001 . There is a general concern that globalisation will impose homogenised cosmopolitan cultural patterns built on Eurocentric foundations, which inevitably flatten, reify, and manipulate cultural differences. This fear has serious grounds. There is no doubt that the transnational expansion of our age requires languages, institutions, and international functions in order to make communication possible on a global scale. Globalisation is only possible in a world that has bee previously reorganised by colonialism, with Western culture acting as a macrosystem that articulates the contemporary world. The original European culture turned into a metaculture in permanent construction and deconstruction according to the struggles an negotiations of the various hegemonic and subordinate strata of both what we still call the Western and non-Western world although these polarities have become blurred. Beyond all of this, what is feared is a planetary radicalisation toward a homogenised international culture, launched from the United States. This tendency would end up by eliminating local traditions as reservoirs of identity. Standing out is the powerful diffusion of North American pop culture whose inventiveness dynamism, and powerful networks of circulation and marketing have spread its influence throughout the world. Already at the en of the thirties, Clement Greenberg was saying that Kitsch was th first universal culture(1).The consolidation of English as the language of international communication on a global scale causes great concern, even expressed recently by a winner of the Nobel Prize in literature. It speaks volumes that Esperanto, that Utopian invention has been relegated to a sort of hobby, its universalistic project realised in the language of power, business, and publicity. Today even dogs are trained in English, and it is said that they understand this language better than any other. It is not simply a matter of language, communication, and mass culture. These processes are aiso woven into 'high' culture. When the fine arts are discussed in very general terms, people tend to use the terms 'international artistic language' or 'contemporary artistic language' as abstract constructions that refer to a type of art English in which today's 'international' discourses are spoken(2). Both terms are highly problematic. In fact, the term 'international language' can only be coined in the fine arts with respect to the mainstream and the kind of cultural product it distributes, erasing from them all pretense of universality and of exclusive representation of the contemporary. Frequently, being 'international' or 'contemporary' in art is nothing but the echo of being exhibited in elite spaces on the small island of Manhattan. In that limited context, certain mainstream canons could be denominated as 'international'. Given their legitimising aura, they are imitated or appropriated by the peripheries. By the thirties, a sort of language of modernism had been forged, the result of a paradoxical assemblage of the various ruptures produced by the historical vanguards. A stock of resources had been established, drawing from various tendencies that artists were using, combining or transforming at will. The explosion of pop, new performance, minimalism, conceptualism, and other orientations that were later called postmodern produced another rupture. But by the nineties, a sort of 'postmodern international language' had been instituted, prevailing over the so-called international scene even while its coinage as a dominant code denies de facto the pluralist perspective of postmodernity. The extreme case is the figure of the international installation artist, a global nomad who roams from one international exhibit to another, his/her suitcase packed with the elements for a future work of art or the tools to produce it in situ. This figure, an allegory of the processes of globalisation, represents a key rupture with the figure of the artist-craftsman linked to a studio in which the work of art is produced. Now the artists export themselves. Their work is closer to that of the manager or engineer who is travelling constantly to attend to specific projects and businesses. The studio, that ancestral, vulcanian site linked with the artist, becomes more a laboratory for projects and design than for production. Thus the physical link of demiurge-studio-work of art that associated each of the three elements within a specific space and, furthermore, with a locus and its geniuses, is broken. This type of artwork and methodology has a genetic relationship to the international postminimalist-postconceptualist language. With it, a kind of circulation based on biennials, thematic shows, and other forms of collective global exhibits is facilitated and markedly cheapened. The exclusivist and teleological legitimisation of the 'international language'of art acts as a mechanism of exclusion towards other languages and discourses. In many art institutions - as among many art specialists and collectors - prejudices based on a sort of axiological monism prevail. In a sort of catch-22, this circle tends to regard - with suspicions of illegitimacy - art from the peripheries that endeavors to speak the 'international language'. When it speaks properly it is usually accused of being derivative, when it spesks with an accent it is disqualified for its lack of propriety toward the canon. Frequently works of art are not looked at: they are asked topresent their passports, which tend not to be in order, for those works are responding to processes of hybridisation, appropriation, resignification, neologism, and invention as a response to today's world. This art is asked to present an originality related to traditional cultures, which is to say, oriented toward the past, or to show an abstract, pure originality toward the present. In both cases, such art is required to state its context rather than to participate in a general artistic practice which on occasion couid only refer to art itself. The appropriation of modernism by the peripheries turns out to be interesting within this order of things. This appropriation signified an active construction of modernism itself, diversifying its language, meaning and aims. But we do not usually tend to consider a global modernism that reacts to different contextual situations. Thus, José Clemente Orozco is always discussed within Mexican muralism, never as one of the great artists of expressionism. In this substraction of interpretation the positions of the central powers, which confine difference into the ghetto, coincide strangely with nationalism, which encloses difference behind a wall. In this sense, the term authenticity has been employed, through a narrative of purity of origins, to dispualify postcolonial culture, accusing it of westernisation. This usage becomes even more problematic in an age in which complex re-adaptations of identities are taking place. Globalisation, the postmodern opening, and the pressure of multiculturalism have moved us toward a greater plurality. But in general, and above all in elite circles, globalisation has responded less to a new consciousness than to a tolerance based on paternalism, quotas, and political correctness. On the other hand, the new attraction toward otherness has allowed for a greater circulation and legitimation of art from theperipheries, above all as channeled through specific circuits. But too frequently, value has been placed on art that explicitly manifest difference or that better satisfies the expectations of otherness held by postmodern neoexoticism. This attitude has stimulated the self-olherising of the peripheries in which some artists - consciously or unconsciously - have tended toward a paradoxical self-exoticism. The case of 'international language' in art reveals a hegemonic construct of globalism more than a true globalisation, understood as a generalised participation. Today we have both mainstream circuits and hegemonic alternative ones, with their mainstream and anti-mainstream establishments, the latter being also exclusivc although broader than their counterparts. Both legitimate in each own field, and actively interacting. Dominant major and minor circuits of museums, galleries and publications (what we might call the 'universalisers') construct the 'worid art scene', even unintentionally. This system claims to legitimise specific practices without conceiving of the international or contemporary culture as a plural game board of multiple and relative interactions. The rhetoric regarding globalisation has abounded in the illusory triumph of a transterritorial worid, decentralised, omniparticipatory, engaged in multicultural dialogues, with currents flowing in all directions. In reality, globalisation is not as global as it appears. Or, to paraphrase Orwell, it is far more global for same than for others. Even the Internet, paradigm of a new era in free universal and individual communication, connects a small percentage of the world's population. The mythification of the processes of globalisation and the spread out of communications lead us to imagine a planet interconnected by a network that extends in all directions. The speed of the avenues of optic fibers and satellitesmakes us forget the congested avenues of the megalopolis and the flight corridors, or the critical lack of avenues and highways in a large part of the world. Cyberspace may be a virtual paradise, a designer drug for escaping the global cybermess. It should be obvious that globalisation does not consist of an effective interconnection of the whole planet by means of a woven grid of communication and exchange. Rather, it is a radial system extending from diverse centres of power of varying sizes into multiple and highly diversified economic zones. Such a structure implies the existence of large zones of silence, barely connected to one another or only indirectly, via the neometropolises. In the years I was travelling through Africa I found in practice that frequently the best way to get from one country to another bordering country was via Europe. This axial structure of globalisation and regions of silence constitute the economic, political, and cultural networks of the planet, motivating intense migratory movements in search of connection. There has been little progress in South-South linking, other than economic recessions. Globalisation has certainly improved communications to an extraordinary extent, it has dynamised and pluralised cultural circulation, and it has provided a more pluralist consciousness. Yet it has done so by following the very channels delineated by the economy, thus reproducing in good measure the structures of power. When I hear a certain postmodern optimism regarding decentralisation and the rupture of hegemonies, I always recall a story by Augusto Monterroso, the author of the shortes stories ever written. Its title is The Dinosaur and it consists of a single line: 'When I awoke the dinosaur wes still there'. The lack of horizontal interaction is a colonial legacy barely modified. This situation urges the peripheries to undertake stronger efforts to establish and develop horizontal circuits that act as cultural life spaces. Such circuits will contribute to pluralising culture, internationalising it in the real sense, legitimising it in their own terms, constructing new epistemes, unfolding alternative actions. On the other hand, pluralism can be a prison without walls. Borges once told the story about the best labyrinth: the desert's incommensurable openness, from where it is difficult to escape. Abstract or controlled pluralism, as we see in some 'global' shows, can weave a labyrinth of indetermination confining the possibilities toward real, active diversification. We are living in a post-utopian epoch of reformism that seeks change within what exists, instead of changer la vie. But many transformations are taking place in silence. Part of them came out of a Lampedusan strategy from power establishments, aimed to change so that everything remains the same. Power today does not strive to confront diversity, but to control it. However, mutations also correspond to the international activity of new social and cultural subjects, postcolonial processes, massive urbanisation in Africa, Asia and Latin American, with its cultural and social implications, extensive migrations all over the world, with their cultural displacements and heterogenisation, and other processes from 'the bottom up'. Many are the conflicting ways of difference and decentering in this presumably global world, which is ruled by the fundamentalism of the market and competition. Today, culture constitutes a camp of post-Cold War tensions, in which the conflicts and negatiations of power are interlaced. They engage over assimilation, tokenism, the rearticulation of hegemonies, the affirmation of difference, the critique of power, and appropriation and resemanticising from all sides among other tensions. In a polemical book, Samuel Hunting ton has stated that the orientations defined by ideology are making way for those defined by culture(3). Even if this statement is very problematic because, among many other things, the 'dinosaur' o ideology is still there, it highlights how culture has become a crucial element in the international interplay. This general situation is producing a rearticulation in the realm of culture and identities that cannot be discussed efficiently based on the paradigms that had once prevailed. When at the end of the seventies the Japanese scholar Suichi Kato lamented that he could not find 'the Japanese soul' in a powerfully westernised Japan(4), he was unable to understand that this 'Japanese soul' was running things in its own fashion. It was manifested in a different form of constructing westernisation, according to the structure and institutions of the country's society and culture. If those components were transformed in the process, they also determined it, producing a Japanese-style westernisation, inconceivable in the West. Today, the 'Japanese soul' lies not only in the kimono and tea, but also in Sony, Toshiba, and Mitsubishi. To affirm cultural identity in tradition, understood in a sense of 'purity', is a colonial heritage. It led to disastrous cults to 'authenticity', 'roots', and 'origins', above all in the postcolonial era when the new countries attempted to affirm their identities and interests against the metropolises and their imposed westernisations. Now there is an ever-growing tendency to see identity in action, in terms of the present and the future, according to how each subject makes contemporaneity. Wole Soyinka once said that a tiger does not proclaims its tigertude: it springs. Paradoxically, the global world is becoming the world of difference. Globalisation aims for conversion and domination also implies more generalised access. If its imposition seeks to convert the 'Other', its availability facilitates its use for the 'Other's' own, different, ends, transforming the metaculture from within. If the latter retains its hegemonic character, the subordinate sectors are taking advantage of the metaculture's international broadcasting capability to transcend local frameworks. Used from the other side, it has allowed the dissemination of varying perspectives and has undergone adjustments in line with these perspectives. Furthermore, every process of homogenisation on a large-scale - even when it succeeds in smoothing out differences - generates other, new ones within itself, like Latin shattering into romance languages. This stands out in the heterogeneity that immigrants are producing in the megalopolises. Like it or not, today we all participate in extremely intense mediations of cultural differences overlapping the construction of new urban culture, neologisms, and 'border culture' as much in places where physical borders exist as where they do not, or where the border is nothing but a street. To the imbalance of certain African 'traditions' though inevitably new and dynamic forms will emerge in their place. Nevertheless, that does not mean that these traditions must or ought to develop along the same lines by which the West has defined its own progress'(5). These developments correspond to other facets of the postcolonial affirmation of the differences and consequent cultural pluralisation to which I have referred. It is necessary to emphasise, however that this is not a matter of the actualisation and dynamisation of remnants of the precolonial past. The 'new and dynamic forms' of these traditions are postcolonial traditions, they are born and exist in milieus that have aiready been westernised, for which reason they will be by necessity hybrid, syncretic, or neologic even when they aspire to a reconstitution of a traditional past or seek in doing so to reaffirm difference. Such forms will have to articulate themselves, though it is by negation in the extreme case, in the tense globalisation-difference framework that embraces us all. A truly global diffusion and evaluation of culture is only possible through a multidirectional web of interactions. We are urged to embrace more initiative to organise South-South and South-North circuits able to pluralise what we understand by 'international art', 'international art language' and 'international art scene', or even what is called 'contemporary'. Equally important is the construction of international and contemporary art and culture in a true international way: in differences and from differences. That is, enacting difference rather than representing it, thus actively fashioning the 'international language' in multiple ways. It is necessary to cut the global pie not only with a variety of knives, but also with a variety of hands, and then share it accordingly. This is neither revolution nor political correctness: it is a need for all if we do not want an endogamous culture. The key point is who exerts the cultural decision(6), and on whose benefit is it taken. |
Gerardo Mosquera is a freelance curator and
art critic based in Havana; Adjunct Curator at the New Museum of
Contemporary Art, New York City, advisor at the Rijksakademie van
Beeldenden Kunsten, Amsterdam, and a member of the advisory board
of several art journals and institutions. He was a founder of the
Havana Biennials, and has curated many exhibitions, including It's
Not What You See. Perverting Minimalism (Madrid, 2000); Important
& Exportant (2nd. Johannesburg Biennale,1997), and Ante America
(Bogota, Caracas, New York, San Francisco, San Diego...,1992-1994).
Author of numerous texts on contemporary art and art theory, Mosquera
recently participated in fresh cream (London, 2000), edited Beyond
the Fantastic: Contemporary Art Criticism from Latin America (London,
1995), and is currently co-editing Over Here. International Perspectives
on Art and Culture (working title) for the New Museum/MIT Press
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