Contemporary Art

1989 to the Present

Alexander Dumbadze, Suzanne Hudson, Alexander Dumbadze, Suzanne Hudson

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781444338669, 9781444338607
• eBook ISBN: 9781118298886
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

An engaging account of today's contemporary art world that features original articles by leading international art historians, critics, curators, and artists, introducing varied perspectives on the most important debates and discussions happening around the world.

• Features a collection of all-new essays, organized around fourteen specific themes, chosen to reflect the latest debates in contemporary art since 1989
• Each topic is prefaced by an introduction on current discussions in the field and investigated by three essays, each shedding light on the subject in new and contrasting ways
• Topics include: globalization, formalism, technology, participation, agency, biennials, activism, fundamentalism, judgment, markets, art schools, and scholarship
• International in scope, bringing together over forty of the most important voices in the field, including Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy, David Joselit, Michelle Kuo, Raqs Media Collective, and Jan Verwoert
• A stimulating guide that will encourage polemical interventions and foster critical dialogue among both students and art aficionados

1

THE CONTEMPORARY AND GLOBALIZATION

In the middle of the twentieth century there was much art-world excitement regarding “internationalism”—the notion that art might reflect or impact the complex relations between distinct, politically sovereign nations. Greatly accelerated by the geopolitical events of 1989, critical attention has shifted to globalization, a difficult, even slippery term that downplays political powers, emphasizing how the deregulation of trade has largely eroded traditional nation-state boundaries. The forces of globalization—often abstracted away from the specific people, corporations, or governments that occasion its usage—its proponents believe, have promoted an effortless, even ­naturalized, flow of materials, goods, and services. For globalization’s detractors that “unification” levels local distinctions through processes of acculturation.

Tim Griffin argues in his essay “Worlds Apart: Contemporary Art, Globalization, and the Rise of Biennials” that globalization is fundamental for understanding how institutional frameworks now shape contemporary art. Certainly, globalization was celebrated in the early to mid-1990s in conjunction with the rise of international biennials. Many curators, critics, and artists believed in the potential of working in interstitial spaces and traveling to and among them. These optimistic attitudes changed with the turn of the millennium, when globalization became something actively to counter both in art and in writing, for reasons ranging from its flattening of difference to multinational corporations’ disregard for human sovereignty and environmental responsibility.

Of late, commentators have focused on the rise of the contemporary, a concept that sits alongside globalization. Like modernism, the contemporary suggests an aesthetic phenomenon that is necessarily global in scope, and for Terry Smith, as he outlines in his “‘Our’ Contemporaneity?”, this also represents a historical shift toward a cultural condition that continually reveals new worlds, new senses of being, and ultimately new ways to exist in our collective, yet particularized, time. Modernism arose in fits and starts around the world, and meant different things in different places. The ­contemporary assumes globalization as its foundational criteria and in a narrow sense describes what it literally means to be with the times. The contemporary speaks less about stylistic concerns (although they are implied) or ideological beliefs (they are still coming to the fore). In the conjunction of globalization and the contemporary we find two central concepts for comprehending on a macro level art production and distribution of the last twenty or so years. The question becomes just how this will be historicized. As Jean-Philippe Antoine suggests in his “The Historicity of the Contemporary is Now!” a new type of art historical practice is already under way, one which need be reciprocally informed by the work done by artists who assume the role of historian.

Worlds Apart: Contemporary Art, Globalization, and the Rise of Biennials

Tim Griffin

If art is necessarily bound up with its institutions—in other words, made legible as “art” only through and within its various apparatuses of production, display, and circulation, in addition to its discourses—then nothing is so crucial to our conception of contemporary art as globalization. Yet this is only to suggest that nothing else is so implicated in art’s dense weaving (or even dissolution) into the broader cultural field today.

To explain, globalization, utilized as a term in recent economic and political theory, often pertains to, in the words of Fredric Jameson, “the sense of an immense enlargement of world communication, as well as of a horizon of a world market.”¹ Within artistic circles, the word has been used more specifically to describe an exponentially increased audience for (and financing of) contemporary art, attended by a radical proliferation of public and private museums and exhibitions throughout the world and, further, an expanded and ever-more rapid travel network and exchange of information among constituents of art on all points of the compass. (To illustrate this point simply with a hypothetical example: A work produced and debuted in São Paolo, Brazil, can be purchased in the artist’s studio by a committee of visiting trustees from a major institution in New York, where the piece is placed on view within the next month for tens of thousands of both local audiences and tourists from dozens of countries.) Precisely such circumstances, however, demand that art be seen in correspondence with the larger context of a world shaped principally by the forces and flows of global capital.² For amid a postindustrial landscape it becomes clear, as put succinctly by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their benchmark volume on globalism, Empire (2000), that “the economic, the political, and the cultural increasingly overlap and invest one another.”³ Rather than imagining that art can be placed at an idealistic remove from these societal shifts, we arrive at a better grasp of art’s real contours—or better, of art’s institutions—by examining just to what degree it is steeped in those shifts. And nowhere in art is such an examination so possible or sustained—or so telling of both contemporary art’s predicament and potential, or of its waning and waxing singularity within the greater field of culture—as among biennials of the past twenty years. In fact, in order to grasp the conditions for art-making today fully, one begins most productively with a consideration of their historical development and implications.

Arguing as much is partly to posit a crossing of two postwar trajectories: First, of art and its various models of critique; and, second, of socio­economic currents destabilizing nation-states and their ideological bases world-round. If in the 1960s, minimalist sculptors implicated the viewer’s body in their work, capitalizing on a phenomenological experience of the object in space, the following decade—in the wake of such artists as Daniel Buren calling for a sustained exploration of art’s “formal and cultural limits”—would see the rise of institutional critique and its efforts to disavow any sense of art’s autonomy: The notion of any display space or viewer that was objective or, more precisely, independent of social matrices of class, race, gender, and sexuality (Dan Asher, Sherrie Levine, Martha Rosler, Mierle Laderman Ukeles).⁴ By the 1980s, such engagements were extended by artists (Group Material, Hans Haacke, Christian Philipp Müller) to those social and economic terms and conditions that made any institution itself possible, with these artists’ critical intention still being, to cite art historian Miwon Kwon’s signal text “One Place After Another” regarding early ­iterations of specificity in art, to “decode and/or recode the institutional conventions so as to expose their hidden yet motivated operations—to reveal the ways in which institutions mold art’s meaning to modulate its cultural and economic value, and to … [make] apparent [art’s] imbricated relationship to the broader socioeconomic and political processes of the day.”⁵

Such a longstanding mission, often undertaken in the immediate ­context of the museum, would only have been amplified in the face of such political developments in 1989 as the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of apartheid in South Africa, and the execution of pro-democracy demonstrators in China’s Tiananmen Square. While artists in previous decades might have wanted audiences to interrogate conditions of viewership and of art’s relationship with culture more generally, here were world-historical events forcing a mass reconsideration of ideology, of subjectivity and subject-hood, and of national and postcolonial identity (and even of the terms East and West, North and South)—all of which were already being eroded or challenged by widening forces of commerce and technology. In fact, if artists were, as Kwon has also noted in her essay, already being prompted by the trajectory of institutional critique to move outside the conventional realm of art—relocating their practices in the discursive framework of any site they chose, and steeping their art-making in research and, moreover, in other disciplines, from anthropology to archaeology and so on—such endeavors would naturally gravitate toward the suddenly recalibrated coordinates of contemporary society. As curator Okwui Enwezor aptly put it in a brief text written in 2007, the world-historical events of 1989 “spurred a critical appraisal of the conditions of artistic production and of the systems by which such production was legitimated and admitted into the broader field of cultural production,” resulting in a “shift in curatorial language from one whose reference systems belonged to an early twentieth-century modernity to one more attuned to the tendencies of the twenty-first century.”⁶ The very ground under the institution of art had shifted; and if the museum was, as an initial object of postwar artistic critique, nevertheless linked to the idea of the modern nation-state, artists and curators alike would now seek alternative discourses and frameworks for their projects.

Numerous biennials provide ample, concrete evidence of such efforts being prompted by such a changing postwar landscape. For instance, the inaugural Johannesburg Biennial, curated by Lorna Ferguson, opened in 1995, just a year after South Africa’s first multiracial elections, in an effort to establish the country as part of a larger global community (a second iteration, curated by Enwezor, was titled “Trade Routes” and explicitly revolved around the theme of globalization). The Gwangju Biennale was created the same year, against the backdrop of South Korea’s first freely-elected government after a decades-long military dictatorship; titled “Beyond the Borders,” its first exhibition aimed to present work reflecting the dissolution of longstanding arbiters of identity, from political ideology to nationality. Further to the West, Manifesta—a self-described roving “European Biennial of Contemporary Art”—began in 1996, taking the fall of the Berlin Wall as a cue for reconsidering a new Europe (in terms of political ideology, economic structures, and novel communication technology) both in its own right and in relationship to the world at large. And, looking back to more than a decade before Manifesta’s creation, we find a precedent for such a multinational scope in the Havana Biennial: Created specifically to highlight artists of the Third World on the global stage (though later iterations of this exhibition would include Asian artists, effectively expanding its purview more generally to non-Western artists) this large-scale exhibition took region, as opposed to country, as its organizing principle.

If all these exhibitions were intended at their respective inceptions to ­create a stage for art within which audiences could discern a kind of destabilizing of cultural perspective—a redrawing of the societal map, as it were, that was Copernican in its altering of the terms for center and periphery, and subsequently for object and context—it is still more provocative that most historians and curators contemplating the biennial phenomenon of the past twenty years cite the 1989 Centre Georges Pompidou exhibition Magiciens de la Terre as a singular precedent for such investigations. Curated by Jean-Hubert Martin, this exhibition included work from the global “margins” not only to counter museums’—and, more specifically, the Paris Biennial’s—privileging of work produced in Europe and the United States, but also to put into question the very Western ideation of art. (Notably, the Paris Biennial was created in 1959 by André Malraux.) As Martin would say at the time in an interview with art historian Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “[T]he questions of center and periphery are also related to issues of authorship and oeuvre…, especially since the artist’s role and the object’s function are defined [elsewhere] in an entirely different manner from our European way of thinking.”⁷ In turn, the exhibition would feature not only Western artworks by such artists as Nancy Spero and Cildo Meireles but also objects playing unique traditional roles within their specific societies, including a Tibetan Mandela and a Navajo sand painting, among other pieces. While such displays would necessarily ask audiences to view art in the West through the prism of ethnography—effectively denaturalizing art’s place in Western society, prompting an awareness of its stakes in specific societal structures and belief systems, as well as of what Martin would call “the ­relativity of culture”—they also courted a very great risk.⁸ For in presenting installations specially made on the occasion by these various artists—one should note that to say “artists” is not quite accurate here, given the curator’s desire to problematize conventional ideas of art by deploying the anthropological terms of cult and ritual, as evidenced even by the use of “magicians” in his title—the exhibition re-inscribed Western tropes of authorship despite itself and, as a result, of authenticity and originality. The latter aspect, with its troubling historical associations with primitivism and, more specifically, constructions of an “other,” would undermine the exhibition’s supposed mission to subvert any privileged Eurocentric vantage on cultural production throughout the world.

Far from being a closed chapter of curatorial history, Magiciens de la Terre therefore has a continuing legacy in exhibition practices today, partly since so many curators have in its wake sought corrective approaches to the problematic of center and periphery, and partly since the core dilemma of that exhibition—of bringing together different cultures only at the peril of re-inscribing neocolonial perspectives—persist even now. Regarding the former, it is worthwhile to consider the increasing prominence of Martinique-born, postcolonial poet and theoretician Édouard Glissant, particularly in terms of his emphases placed on the recognition of sustaining difference among cultures that are nevertheless being drawn into ever-closer relations. As he would write in 1990:

What we call globalization, which is uniformity from below, the reign of the multinationals, standardization, the unchecked ultr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• CONTRIBUTORS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 THE CONTEMPORARY AND GLOBALIZATION
• 2 ART AFTER MODERNISM AND POSTMODERNISM
• 3 FORMALISM
• 4 MEDIUM SPECIFICITY
• 5 ART AND TECHNOLOGY
• 6 BIENNIALS
• 7 PARTICIPATION
• 8 ACTIVISM
• 9 AGENCY
• 10 THE RISE OF FUNDAMENTALISM
• 11 JUDGMENT
• 12 MARKETS
• 13 ART SCHOOLS AND THE ACADEMY
• 14 SCHOLARSHIP
• INDEX