Art Activism for an Anticolonial Future

Carlos Garrido Castellano

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781438485744
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Arte y política

Analyzing the confluence between coloniality and activist art, Art Activism for an Anticolonial Future argues that there is much to gain from approaching contemporary politically committed art practices from the angle of anticolonial, postcolonial, and decolonial struggles. These struggles inspired a vast yet underexplored set of ideas about art and cultural practices and did so decades before the acceptance of radical artistic practices by mainstream art institutions. Carlos Garrido Castellano argues that art activism has been confined to a limited spatial and temporal framework—that of Western culture and the modernist avant-garde. Assumptions about the individual creator and the belated arrival of derivative avant-garde aesthetics to the periphery have generated a narrow view of "political art" at the expense of our capacity to perceive a truly global alternative praxis. Garrido Castellano then illuminates such a praxis, focusing attention on socially engaged art from the Global South, challenging the supposed universality of Western artistic norms, and demonstrating the role of art in promoting and configuring a collective critical consciousness in postcolonial public spheres.This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to Knowledge Unlatched—an initiative that provides libraries and institutions with a centralized platform to support OA collections and from leading publishing houses and OA initiatives. Learn more at the Knowledge Unlatched website at: https://www.knowledgeunlatched.org/, and access the book online at the SUNY Open Access Repository at http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12648/7166.

Part One

UNDISCIPLINING
SOCIALLY
ENGAGED ART

1

ART BIENNIALS AND POSTCOLONIALISM’S POLITICS OF DISCOURSE

Poesis is replacing politics everywhere as the retreat position in the international art world.

—Terry Smith, Thinking Contemporary Curating

A first step in exploring why “South” histories of socially engaged art are very much still unacknowledged relates to questioning the specific artistic forms through which “South” art histories are constructed. This involves, unavoidably, dealing with mega-exhibitions and biennials. Before undertaking this journey, I want to clarify that my concern is not so much with the functioning of exhibitions but rather with their political economy within global art histories, with their rationale. I am not interested in adding anything to the criticism of biennials as spectacularized platforms of neoliberal exchange, nor in categorizing the possibilities for transnational interaction offered by long-term socially engaged initiatives as better or in any way different from those provided by biennials. This chapter will map how the latter were normalized at the expense of many alternative ways of understanding art making, as well as the consequences of this process of normalization for our understanding of how art works on a global scale.

In his decades-long attempt to define the contemporary (see epigraph above), Terry Smith categorizes artistic contemporaneity as an amalgam of different tendencies of artistic and curatorial creation. For Smith, contemporary art is not art from the present but rather art “capable of calibrating several distinct but related ways of being in or with time, even of being, simultaneously, in and apart from time” (T. Smith 2019: 254. See also T. Smith 2009, 2011, 2016). Smith identifies three main currents among these: continuing modernism, transnational transitionality, and relational aesthetics (which Smith defines in a far more complex way than Nicolas Bourriaud’s classical approach).1 The second current, transnational transitionality, would mainly encompass the art produced in relation to the ongoing legacies of colonialism and imperialism. What is important in this categorization, beyond the identification of several forms of contemporaneity, is that Smith associates each current with a specific form of curating and art making. Under this logic, the second trend would be linked to biennials and temporary exhibitions.2 It follows from here that the history of artistic postcolonialism is linked to the history of those particular curatorial formats.3

It is true that, for Smith, none of those currents is conceived of as an isolated container; on the contrary, contamination and crisscrossing are the norm. Museums, collectors, and the market also play a central role in the definition of artistic postcolonialism,4 their action being indissolubly linked to the history of biennials. I share much of Smith’s analysis of artistic contemporaneity as a multifaceted project, one that becomes materialized differently according to the specific history of each context. Smith provides excellent evidence for discussing the emergence of biennials and the consolidation of mainstream postcolonial debates together. There are particular consequences that result from considering biennials and temporary exhibitions as one of the main (but not the only) driving engines of “postcolonial” contemporaneity. Those consequences raise important questions, among them how exhibition making became the privileged form of postcolonial artistic contemporaneity, and also how this preeminence disavowed alternative forms of artistic agency, both historical and present. Responding to those two questions is the main objective of this chapter.

Undertaking this path entails, first of all, historicizing the rise of biennials around the globe during the 1990s as a process running in parallel with the expansion of neoliberal economies. In the second place, it also pertains to the relativization of the weight of exhibition making as just one form of artistic creativity among many others. The critique of biennials and globalization often implicitly carries a negative appraisal of postcolonialism.5 When biennials are recognized as the main place where artistic transnational expression takes place, postcolonialism is often in the background as the main target in the negative balance of those events. Although some of the criticism directed both at biennials and postcolonial thought is justified, a more careful analysis is needed to avoid confusing both realities or rejecting them out of hand. There is no doubt that biennials and temporary exhibitions have been essential in shaping how contemporary art looks now, and they have done so in many positive ways.6 I contend that the importance of mega-exhibitions has come at the expense of limiting the visibility of creative forms such as socially engaged art, art activism, and alternative institutionalism, where issues of cultural labor and cultural capital are particularly evident. The problem has, then, nothing to do with biennials or postcolonial criticism per se. Rather, the problem appears when biennials are naturalized as the main space where art becomes global, where local and transnational art interactions are negotiated.

This naturalization, the belief in “the centrality of reading as the appropriate form of politics” (Ahmad 1992: 3), is linked to the global success of a mode of artistic practice in which artists undertake research at multiple locations, presenting the results of their local interactions with communities around the world in a rather unified language oriented to its consumption and circulation with little variation in the biennial map. This strategy ties together art’s postcolonial aspirations and the exhibition form, and ultimately comprises a sort of lingua franca. This is based firstly on the ubiquitous placelessness of artistic experience (through artistic investigation in particular contexts that are afterward translated and narrated at the exhibition’s space) and secondly on negativity (through the process by which contemporary artists critically reveal the hidden ideological rules behind reality), replacing modernist forms and tropes.

My first step in dealing with this set of questions involves the recognition that this lingua franca that we find so often in artistic biennials and the transnational art market is just one possibility among others, and that transnational artistic negotiations occur in multiple ways through heterogeneous creative strategies. It also necessitates an exploration of the way that biennials and temporary exhibitions became the privileged forum with which anyone interested in exploring postcolonial issues in relation to art would expect to deal. Whereas both art emerging from the “social turn” and biennials are identified as markers of the main avenues through which art is nowadays evolving, it seems to me that their relationship remains largely unexplored. In line with the presiding interest of this book, this chapter suggests that the dialogue between postcolonialism and contemporary art cannot be reduced merely to the history of transnational biennials. Simply put, our contemporary art worlds are the result of the interaction between different forms of artistic creation. The history of those interactions, then, would also include decisive exercises in alternative institutionalization, art activism, the creation of South-South synergies, and, in more general terms, active processes of artistic collaboration taking place to a large extent outside the space of the art institution and the temporary exhibition.

If postcolonial criticism is to remain a valuable tool for explaining contemporary ways of being in the world (especially at a time when it runs the risk of being dissolved into less political configurations described as “world” and “global”), then reconstructing its complete history, including experiments with artistic collaboration, might provide a positive step toward this end. Accepting that postcolonialism inspires a variety of artistic forms, including critical, socially engaged artistic practices, could help determine what remains of the colonial within the global and in which ways (artistic) globalization is retooling and repurposing colonial power relations.

It should be clear that what is at stake is far more important than a simple criticism of artistic biennials per se (as if a single image of what biennials might be could be extracted). Nor is the point to affirm that any form of artistic creativity linked to biennials is intrinsically ineffective. More useful and more decisive, I think, is to address how both biennials and postcolonial art in its more accepted form gained prominence simultaneously, becoming the “default” vehicle of artistic research and postcolonial-infused art criticism.

If there is no possible history of art exhibitions without addressing the colonial roots of the act of exhibiting itself, then it is also true that postcolonialism compellingly determines the economics of present-day global art networks. It is evident at several levels that a mainstream and simplified understanding of postcolonialism informs our current understanding of contemporary art, from the adoption of a vocabulary that celebrates ideas of hybridity, transnational mobility, and global positionality to the proliferation of art centers in contexts traditionally excluded from art historical narratives. There is no doubt that this process has had a positive impact in decentering the art world and creating a truly global configuration beyond traditional Euro-American art venues. Yet far less attention has been paid to the ways in which postcolonial concerns are articulated within a spectacularized, transnational art world, ultimately determining what is seen as acceptable and what is not. To what extent can we read the critical crisis of our art world (or its apparently successful other side of the coin, which comes in the form of art turned into global neoliberal finance7) in terms of the collapse of a mode of artistic contemporaneity grounded on the same principles (flexibility, transit, hybridity …) that once constituted postcolonialism’s main critical aspiration? Is what we are witnessing through the current crisis of contemporary art the collapse of transnational connectivity? Does a history of artistic contemporaneity qua the history of transnational biennials leave us with no possible response to the appropriation by neoliberal capitalism of the values of mobility and heterogeneity? Finally, what kind of rationale would follow from a direct excavation of those alternative forms of artistic postcoloniality (including alternative institutionalism or art activism) outlined below? What happens, in more simple terms, when we adopt long-term, noncuratorial, socially engaged artistic strategies as a model to understand international and regional articulations and the continuities of colonial power.

In order to broach these questions, I begin by producing an analysis of postcolonial theory in the fields of artistic production and art criticism. The chapter then explores how postcolonial discourse evolved so as to privilege models of negative criticism—something, I argue, that made possible the naturalization of certain kinds of artistic and curatorial strategies. The chapter ends by addressing some potential alternatives to biennial-based mode(l)s of postcolonial creativity.

Postcolonialism Dematerialized (I): Biennialism and the Contemporary

In recent discussions of contemporary art, biennials still emerge as the main cultural and discursive formation of artistic postcoloniality. In this sense, even the idea of an exhausted postcolonialism, of postcolonialism as a critical model in crisis, is mobilized through transnational biennials (see, for example, the “Farewell to Postcolonialism” proposed by the Guangzhou Triennial in 2008, which will be analyzed in further detail below). The problem is that biennial-based histories mainly highlight the South as a set of enclaves where nothing happens from biennial to biennial, replicating old colonial patterns of misrepresentation and emptying of the territories to be colonized. Although in the current panorama “Western reason” can be exchanged for “the global economy of attention,” or more simply “global capital,” the image remains similar when “South” artistic contexts are made to appear as a by-product of globalized curatorial attention in a “post–Magiciens de la terre” moment. This view not only divests those contexts of any previous history of experimentation with modernity and contemporaneity; it also condemns them to express themselves through the spectacular, internationally intelligible framework of the biennial, and normalizes a certain time and space as the most suitable platform for artistic dialogue.

The success of mega-exhibitions and biennials after 1989 operated as a master narrative that presented exhibitionary practices as the locus par excellence of global exchanges, occasionally naturalizing the process by which biennials acquired that predominance, normalizing their modes of operation, and condemning alternative forms to oblivion. Among those forms are socially engaged and activist art. Indeed, this book’s main idea—that socially engaged forms of art linked to anticolonial and decolonial causes present a complex and decades-old genealogy, whose evolution informs an alternative history of global artistic interactions—is directly affected by the consolidation of large-scale exhibitions as the privileged ground for transnational exchanges.

The consolidation of large-scale mega-exhibitions as one of the main markers of artistic contemporaneity came as part of a complex amalgam of social, political, and economic processes, among which the decline of “traditional” art institutions such as the museum, the boom of the art market in the 1980s, the globalization of the art market, the expansion of the curatorial to any facet of creativity (within and outside the field of art), and the cultural geopolitics arising by the end of the Cold War can be described as highly significant though not unique events. Undoubtedly, the success of the biennial form cannot be separated from the creation of a global artistic landscape, in which curators and artists from all continents interacted in shifting, transient scenarios across the globe. Still, these processes are in many cases the result of more durable regional and intercontinental exchanges and collaborations between artists and institutions.

How could the biennial format become so normalized as to hide those alternative forms and appear as the main platform for transnational, difference-based artistic configurations? Answering this question is no easy task. Whereas recent criticism has focused on the logic of the exhibition’s form, the way that form relates to alternative modes of contemporary artistic creativity has been much less discussed. The idea that the “contemporariness” of an artwork and of an artist are defined and arbitrated in international biennials is nowadays a common assumption, but one that simply does not take account of the steps leading to such a conclusion. Biennials are not just privileged contact points of exchange between the national, the transnational, and the regional. They also function simultaneously as spaces of transnational capitalism’s symbolic value, and as leverage tools of a particular kind of artistic discourse. Seen as a zone of translatability, biennials are also accepted as the main arbiters of local contemporaneities. Their role consists not just in displaying artworks or acting as transnational nodes; more importantly, they also refashion local modernities, modulating their access to global artistic configurations. Their capacity for penetrating and regulating local art ecosystems is often overlooked in favor of biennials’ most spectacularized side.

Carlos Basualdo (2010) sees in biennials intrinsically subversive spaces that have been traditionally discredited by academic criticism, which recognizes in them an epiphenomenon of global capitalism. Although acknowledging that biennials have emerged “in tune with the transformation of neoliberalism and global finance,” Basualdo nevertheless identifies in the biennial form a capacity for challenging the primacy of museums and the Western values associated with them, thus “perform[ing] an insistent de-centering of both the canon and artistic modernity” (60). For Basualdo, “[biennials imply] the articulation of a reflection capable of linking forms of local culture and history with the horizon of internationalism that appears as a founding element in these events” (59).

From a more skeptical perspective, Angela Dimitrikaki and Terry Smith insert biennials into larger economies of cultural production. Dimitrikaki argues that, despite being autonomous fields of artistic expression, biennials are very much bounded by the relational capacity of capitalism to concatenate different forms of labor and production under the same logic. She recognizes that biennials often offer the perfect location for displaying art (including participatory art and art claiming social relevance) for a reduced, privileged audience: “This is the normally socially privileged constituency who exert their right to have access to art, even by means of documentation of an art that first does its work elsewhere, often outside the institutions that privilege the exhibition form. The document is the means by which even project art ends up as an exhibit, re-establishing the links to representation and, arguably, reinstating the role of the critic-mediator who must now explain to the art community in what ways ‘this’ is art” (Dimitrikaki 2012: 314). From this perspective, biennials appear not so much as antithetical to the strategies and intentions of socially engaged art, but rather as mechanisms that can be used for restaging “old” aesthetic privileges even for such art overtly opposed to them. Dimitrikaki dismantles the apparent innocence behind the adoption of a documentary form oriented toward a secondary audience, thus allowing for an impression of art’s global relevance: the dominance and ubiquity of the exhibition form does not just play a central role in launching art as commodity. Above and beyond this, it is commensurate with a service and experience economy that reduces the aesthetic to an outcome of affective labor to which only a privileged constituency can afford access. Under this logic, art’s potential for political and social transformation remains untouched as biennials become “the social sites for […] intervention” (Dimitrikaki 2012: 137).8 As she masterfully puts it, “On the one hand, the document is essential for an art striving to articulate a politics of knowledge (of the social) and on the other hand, the document permits the continuation of the exhibition form, thus reproducing representation” (314).9

For his part, Smith recognizes a certain erosion, and wonders whether biennials should constitute the main object of curatorial thought: “If I am right that the biennial has become structural, then this recent history might indicate a certain ossification of the large-scale mega-exhibition, a lowering of its su...