Globalization and Contemporary Art

Jonathan Harris, Jonathan Harris

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781444396997
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Historia del arte contemporáneo

In a series of newly commissioned essays by both established and emerging scholars, Globalization and Contemporary Art probes the effects of internationalist culture and politics on art across a variety of media. Globalization and Contemporary Art is the first anthology to consider the role and impact of art and artist in an increasingly borderless world.

• First major anthology of essays concerned with the impact ofglobalization on contemporary art
• Extensive bibliography and a full index designed to enable the reader to broaden knowledge of art and its relationship to globalization
• Unique analysis of the contemporary art market and its operation in a globalized economy

Part 1

Institutions

Introduction

Very early on in most discussions of the contemporary art world, the significance of institutions is granted. “Professionally” successful artists – those, that is, able to live financially through the sale of their artworks and related income – spend their working lives, it is acknowledged, negotiating art world institutions of various kinds: for example, art schools, galleries, collectors, dealers, exhibitions, museums, and publishers. This category of “professionally successful artists,” however, already excludes most producers of artworks over the last fifty years – those, that is, who made a living primarily by teaching rather than sale of works. The category also tends simplistically to reduce acknowledgment of the range of economic activities most if not all artists engage in through a lifetime’s career. This might involve, perhaps, an early phase of extensive teaching, then a career mixing practice with other activities, and later a freedom from other kinds of work altogether, or, conversely, a necessary return to teaching or other livelihood activities as sales of artworks decline. One can see, immediately then, how comprehensive understanding of the contemporary art world – “global” or otherwise – involves confronting a range of intertwined qualitative and quantitative problems. “Success” is a matter of sales as well as critical acclaim, although some artists who persistently sell works may never have them bought by museums at all. Institutions have a critical “gatekeeper” role in the contemporary art world but there are many kinds of institution and some kinds – and some international networks of these – are far more important than others. Artists need institutions and institutions need artists: the relationship is symbiotic and mutually productive, yet often generates tensions.

This opening part offers five chapters that deal with art institutions of varying kinds, assessed within a range of interacting city, national, regional, and global studies. The indicative list of types of institution mentioned above should suggest that the category is capacious, ambiguous in some ways and overlaps at many points with others (six of these constitute the other parts in this book). The term “artist,” for example, refers in these chapters to a wide range of makers and in doing so generates some difficult conceptual and methodological problems of its own. While this term may seem clear and factual, its use historically and in relation to contemporary art is complex, as the brief discussion above regarding “successfulness” indicates. In one direction, the complications are “materials” based – painters or sculptors, on an ostensibly factual level, are readily admitted to the class, while filmmakers or architects may not be. In another direction, the criteria become “quality” based – that is, is the work sufficiently creative or original to warrant raising its producer to the level of excellence the term implies?

Discussion of actual “producers” – to select a term distanced from the emotive senses to “artist,” and in this use intended as neutral – fills this book, in terms of both empirical cases and numerous theoretical analyses of the idea’s significance. The terms “art” and “artist,” originating within European art discourse in the Renaissance, have become common throughout the world and are used in art history to refer to historic products and producers in regions around the world where these words and senses were entirely unknown prior to contact with Europeans. To complicate matters further, in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as modern art movements spread through the world as part of the history of western imperialism and colonization, producers indigenous to other regions sometimes themselves identified with the term (for a variety of reasons) but sometimes refused it, seeing it as a form of colonization in itself. A tension emerges constantly, then, in essays across the book, between, on the one hand, discussion of artists negotiating their place in, for example, museums and biennale exhibitions belonging to what might be called the Euro-North American global art-institutional network – including museums and biennales in British “post-Empire” countries such as South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand – and, on the other, producers attempting to maintain, or regain, “traditional” forms of work and means of manifesting them and their activities to specific local communities. “Traditional,” as my inverted commas here are intended to suggest, is a loaded term too which is subject to much critical attention in this book. To complicate matters further, many non-Europe- or non-North America-based artists have tried to negotiate positions somewhere between the two poles and some examples are considered by authors in this part and in others.

Here Vivianne Barsky and Walid Sadek deal with artists and institutions in two adjacent countries in seemingly perpetual, and closely related, crisis central to global geopolitics since the late 1940s: Israel and Lebanon respectively. Peter Lord considers the fraught history and organization of state visual arts funding and exhibition in Wales, now a “devolved,” semi-autonomous, part of Great Britain. Walter Mignolo examines artist Fred Wilson’s “Mining the Meaning” exhibition and related works of “postcolonial” criticism in the United States of America made in the 1990s. Lastly, Natasha Becker reassesses the politics of early post-apartheid South Africa surrounding the Johannesburg Biennale of 1995. Authors deal with artists’ work in their accounts of institutions, though the place of these in the discussions varies. The “agents” active within art institutions include many more kinds beyond the producers of artworks (and, increasingly, their technical staff) – for example, dealers, curators, professors, administrators, critics, and publishers. The phrase “art world” in one sense refers to all these classes of interrelating people, acting within institutions but also between and across them. In addition, since the 1980s artists have increasingly been invited to act as curators for international exhibitions and in this sense – as Fred Wilson’s work testifies – categorical divisions between these kinds of creative and critical work, as well as between the personnel carrying them out, have sometimes become blurred. Though the significance of this latter development should not be overstated – though, again, it raises important methodological issues to do with quantitative research into the contemporary art world globally – it should be assessed alongside recognition of the increasing professionalization of such jobs as curation and arts administration.

These five essays generate pressing questions and debate around some key developments within the globalized art world. These are inevitably part of broader economic, political, and ideological relations within the global order, although it might be conceded that art and art institutions are largely, if not totally, insignificant within the lives of most ordinary people dealing with the practical realities of life in Lebanon, Israel, or South Africa. Yet, as Sadek shows in his discussion of contemporary art in Beirut before and after the Israeli military invasion in 2006, work keeps getting made and institutional spaces of numerous, often temporary, kinds open to provide venues for its manifestation – though these, along with the whole material infrastructure of the country, offered targets for bombing. It became increasingly hard for Lebanese artists to continue to live in Beirut and maintain “normal” links to the Euro-North American global art-institutional network; emigration, when possible, has meant a radical severing of ties to the country and its culture. Not surprisingly, there is a sizable diaspora of artists from Lebanon, many of whom live and work now in Europe and North America. They tend to find themselves fully accepted neither by the “host” society they have joined nor by the one they left, with which they may have only sporadic contact. (On the related diaspora of Palestinian artists, see the chapter by Hourani, Part Five; and Afro-Asian artists, the chapter by Araeen, Part Six.)

In one sense, this continuing, contemporary experience of geographical movement extends that of the historic “avant-gardes” in visual art since the early twentieth century, when artists moved – for a variety of motives – to the metropolitan capitals of Europe and then to the United States, where New York came to symbolize modernist culture’s exile life during World War Two. Patterns of migration globally, then, have included artists as a small fragment of the millions who moved – usually from the east and south towards the west and northern regions, over the last hundred years – in search of a better livelihood and hope for a fairer society. Significant movement did happen also in the other direction, as the development of the states of Israel and South Africa in the same period testifies. The transformational crises characterizing these societies – inseparable from the regional histories of colonization and settlement closely tied to the British Empire and its continued involvement in these countries after the formal ending of imperial rule – find form in their contemporary art and art institutions, as Barsky’s and Becker’s essays demonstrate. Barsky’s discussion of the building and recent modification of the Israel Museum set on a hill near Jerusalem presents a case-study history of the state of Israel and its ceaselessly violent relationship with the Palestinians whose land was appropriated to achieve it. Though South Africa’s apartheid system survived in law until the early 1990s – the existence of which also generated suffering, violence, and death on a huge scale over many decades, mainly for the black majority – Israel’s geopolitical significance as a “western” state surrounded by Arab and Islamic countries has given it a global centrality disconcertingly at odds with its comparatively very small size and population.

As Barsky’s discussion of the design and location of the Israel Museum and its recent exhibitions on art in that country since its inception in 1949 suggests, globalization in a key sense refers to the spectacular projective power of electronic and digital media. Artworks showing photographs and videos of Palestinians or Israeli soldiers or Jewish “settlers” intertextually reference the TV footage circulating perennially around the world that keeps the region visualized and “newsworthy.” While the Israel Museum and curators at other wealthy institutions in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv are closely integrated within the Euro–North American global art-institutional network – especially dependent upon US organizations and individuals for donations and prestige collaborations – artists in Israel (Jewish or Palestinian) walk a tightrope in negotiating the ways in which representations of the conflict may be found acceptable or inadmissible within its national and public institutional spaces. Notions such as “artistic freedom” and “autonomy,” in this context, take on acutely political and ideological, as well as social and cultural, senses.

Lord’s essay on the development of contemporary art in Wales since the 1970s indicates the action of a similar kind of imperative, if shorn of the violence, as Welsh nationalists sought to create institutions and relations of production and dissemination for art that would enable a locally centered culture and society of interests to emerge and flourish. Lord shows how, in contrast, the residual British national bodies established for visual arts support in Wales – the Arts Council of Great Britain and later the Welsh Arts Council – continued to prefer an “internationalist” and modernist art practice focused on European and US metropolitan centers. This undermined support for local contemporary art not oriented to modernist perspectives and misrepresented the history of art made in Wales by, for example, selecting artists for international exhibitions whose work conformed to the dominant European–American model of development. Lord argues that this powerful selective prejudice can be seen across the full range of institutions created for the training, exhibition, and curation of artists and their work in Wales over the past five decades. In opposition to this, he discusses artists and artists’ groups, such as the “Becas” of the 1970s (named after the “Rebeccaites,” a Welsh opposition group from the 1840s) who promoted “Welsh-aware” arts and crafts forms. (For accounts of other artists’ formations partly established to counter official institutional power, see chapters by Clark, Giunta and Kocur in Part Two, Papastergiadis in Part Four, and Jorgensen in Part Six.)

Mignolo’s essay on Fred Wilson’s “Mining the Meaning” exhibition from 1992 opens into a broad discussion of colonialism and its sociocultural consequences. Wilson, Mignolo notes, has become very successful institutionally as a result of this show – which consisted of choosing and placing museum artefacts in installation pieces that revealed colonial history and its impact on “western” knowledge of the world. The politics and knowledge of the “decolonizing paradigm” – for producing that is Wilson’s objective, through his appropriation of official institutional culture and its property – is a practice substantially without institutions of its own, Mignolo observes. His suggestion is that contemporary society (in the United States of America principally) remains dominated by institutions that reproduce existing colonial, racist values. These continue to be influential beyond that country’s boundaries, within the globalized world of which contemporary art is a part. The Euro-North American global art-institutional network has a complex and sensitive position within this, tied in various ways, as these institutions are, simultaneously both to the “homeland” metropolitan centers in the West yet also located, as essays in this part of the book show, in distanced regional centers where the pull towards local society and the needs of indigenous peoples exerts a constant tension on the relations of global dominance the West continues to enjoy.

1

Real Time and Real Time at The Israel Museum, Jerusalem

VIVIANNE BARSKY

Two kinds of absence structure the field of aesthetic experience at the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first…. One [is] the absence of reality itself as it retreats behind the mirage-like screen of the media…. The other is the invisibility of the presumptions of language and institutions, a seeming absence behind which power is at work, an absence which artists… try to bring to light.¹

What appears as globalization for some means localization for others; signaling a new freedom for some, upon many others it descends as an uninvited and cruel fate.²

“Beyond the Limitations of Borders”

In the spring and summer of 2008, as part of the cultural events planned to mark Israel’s sixtieth anniversary, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, presented an exhibition proposing to map distinctive trends in local visual art during the preceding decade. Titled Real Time: Art in Israel 1998–2008, this was one of six roughly concurrent exhibitions at the country’s major museums, each devoted to a different d...