C107 article
DISLOCATE,
RENEGOTIATE AND FLOW: GLOBALISATION'S IMPACT ON ART PRACTICE
This is Part
1 of a three-part investigation by Regina Gleeson into
globalisation's impact on art practice. This work was
commissioned by The Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon
in association with Critical Voices 2003.
Cultural
categorisation of artists and their production by nationality
- classifying an artist as being from Ireland or Slovenia,
for example - is ubiquitous. It can afford us a way of
tapping into developments in the realignment of social,
political, economic and cultural trends in Europe and
around the globe. Such categorisation allows a nation
to assert itself in terms of its delineation of cultural
terrain, however organically amorphous the loosely bound
identity of a nation might be.
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Marc
Bjil: United States of Persia, 2003, installation
shot, Prague Biennale; photo/courtesy the author
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Art can be
a peaceful, democratic, political platform from which
to make public the difficulties of dissolving nations
and the ensuing disorientation caused by dislocation -
a dislocation often brought about by an imposed identity
change or even by nonidentity. Global resettlement of
peoples, who have their own ideas, culture and spiritual
homes, has understandably given rise to huge unrest. Such
unrest can be recounted and expressed through art in a
way that is accessible to a foreign audience or to one
at least that is unfamiliar with the complexity of the
national background of the artist.
In addition
to this cultural relocation is the emergence of the global
nomads, not so much a fall-out from dispossessed humanity,
but more a reaction to and repercussion of the global
economy and the global village.
But does global-nomadism necessitate a rejection of the
validity of national categorisation in visual culture
and creative endeavours? Surely not! We carry our cultural
background with us as subconsciously as we speak in the
accent of our mother tongue. The more pertinent question
appears to be: why does the validity of national representation
in the sphere of international culture have to defend
itself as being other than a relic of the past? Is the
answer as simple as this: fashion has moved on?
Patriotism
is passé in these global times. Nationalism is naff. If
identity is, as Patrick Wright has suggested, a set of
relationships instead of a set of rules torn out of a
chapter in history, then we must choose our fragmentary
identities.
More often than not, the attributes of a national identity
are only explored when their foundations have been severely
shaken. Our current times - of post-utopia
and the digital extension to postmodernism - are too exhausted,
after decades of cynical deconstruction and scepticism,
for us to be naïve enough to be open to the ideas of either
cultural or general utopias, considering the unbalanced
economies of first and third worlds, the devastation of
genocide, the euphemistic 'ethnic cleansing' we have experienced
in recent decades and the globalised, branded lifestyle
that infiltrates every fibre of our society. However,
what is emerging at international exhibitions of visual
art is that the dream, or even the idea of a utopia, has
found a place, specifically in the freedom to express
hopelessness in our collective disorientation and/or reorientation.
We are bound by a human need to contextualise our experiences.
Where economies collapse, politics explode, societies
implode and geographies dissolve, our cultures are the
voices of the instinct to survive, but they are also the
price which has had to be paid in order to tell the tale
of survival.
It is enormously
difficult to know how to represent one's country when,
for example, what were Yugoslav citizens from Belgrade
on Monday are Serbian citizens from Belgrade on Tuesday.
But this difficulty is not reason enough to reject a mode
of categorisation, representation and questioning of identity,
on the grounds that it is difficult and painful to do
so. In fact, it can be argued, it is all the more necessary
to continue with cultural, national representation. Yes,
there are numerous other valid ways to unite and divide
visual culture other than by geo-political boundaries.
But surely, because of the very extent of dissolution
and re-formation of nation-states, subsequent global migration
and the threatening potential of homogenisation by globalisation,
it is vital that we continue to engage in national representation.
In addition,
digital communication, particularly cyberspace, lays down
a new geography existing outside of the dimensions of
nationality. Even the wave of well-intentioned multiculturalism
can have an atrophic affect on ethnic cultures in its
effort to be all-inclusive. Semi-homogenised versions
of mixed cultures can produce a multi-cultural blanc-mange
rather than the intended recognition of individual cultures.
Last
summer, the Venice Biennale curator Francesco Bonami tried
to instate a Palestinian pavilion at the exhibition. This
reportedly caused consternation because the Biennale is
funded by the Italian government, and it only supports
the work of recognised states.
The Serbian representative, Milica Tomek, struggled with
having to exhibit her work in the pavilion of "Jugoslavia"
- a place that no longer exists. In a way, she was representing
the non-place of a negative space in a reliquary of her
former home. This non-place is the reality at the centre
of the conflict referred to in the Venice Biennale title,
Dreams and Conflicts: The Dictatorship of the Viewer.
The hope of creating a sense of Place, with a capital
P, is the dream and the utopia that can never be addressed,
I believe, by avoiding the difficulties of national identity
and representation.
Throughout
the Utopia Station section of the Venice Biennale,
perhaps because of the weight of the sense of crisis in
our time, there was little evidence of artists engaging
in a design or stylistic aesthetic for its own end. Anri
Sala's video, Dammi i colori, 2003, articulated the
fact that the banality of everyday living is the utopia
of the dislocated, disenfranchised, lost citizen of the
non-place. This work speaks of the liberation and rebuilding
of a city and its people after the fall of the communist
regime in Tirana. Its conceptual undercurrent speaks of
a place on the periphery of Europe defining its own parameters.
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Kadir
Attia: La machine à rêves (detail),
2003, installation shot, Venice Biennale; photo/courtesy
the author
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It is a very
complicated business for a peripheral location to assert
itself as its own centre and point of reference, while
being able to engage in a global discourse of culture.
On the one hand is the difficulty in being received as
equals as opposed to ethnic curiosities. On the other
lies the danger of cultural prostitution if the periphery
takes on the cultural code of the 'centre' in order to
gain recognition; it may lose respect as a result of its
abandonment of its own cultural tones and semantics. It
would seem more valuable for the periphery, whether it's
Tuam or Tirana, to embrace its status and affirm its own
identity, rather than the tragic relocation into the bosom
of the 'center'.
This raises
the questions of whether the periphery is a phenomenon
only visible from the privileged vantage-point of the
centre, and of whether or not a peripheral artist exists
only in the minds of those cosseted in the centre. It
is a case of "do you feel peripheral today?" Stefan Bruggemann
from Mexico engaged with this concept in his wall-text
installation, THIS MUST BE THE PLACE, which drew
the viewer to its location from a distance and then left
one to wonder what made that particular area the place
and to question its relegation of every other place to
an abyss or even the periphery. This very same idea was
expressed at the 2003 ev+a exhibition in
Limerick by Paul Dowling and his collaborators; their
work alludes to the efforts to locate one's sense of Place.
Where is our Place? was the title of Ilia and Emilia
Kabakovs' work in Venice this summer. Its questioning
of 'place' was from a critical and ethical viewpoint which
expanded the domain of the periphery and centre. These
works are only a quick sample of the many that speak of
the search for reference points in identifying one's cultural
place.
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John
Paul Dowling with Clare Gilmour, Ernest Bishop,
Simeon Babo Tresor, Annette Young and Babatunde
Longe: Where are you coming from?, 2003,
mixed-media installation, Limerick train station,
ev+a 2003; courtesy Limerick City Gallery
of Art
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2003 saw the
very first Prague Biennale, which sought to rezone its
own cultural centrifugal force by making its central theme
The Periphery Becomes Center. Prague, as the capital
of the Czech Republic, has undergone huge changes over
the last decade, as Czechoslovakia dissolved and two separate
republics - the other being Slovakia - were formed. The
Prague Biennale employed a similar mode to that of Venice
in that there was a panel of subcurators, but in this
show the categorisation by nationality was more subtle.
The work of a specific geographical location responded
to a theme, so instead of the focus being on the country
it was on the social and cultural issues faced within
the country. For example, instead of there being a Russian
section, there was a section, Overcoming Alienation,
made by Russian artists; instead of a Czech section, there
was a Mission Possible section by Czech artists;
Leaving Glasvegas by Scottish artists and so on.
It was an interesting and successful model, as the viewer
could compare the perspectives of artists from different
geographical locations to an issue that can be of global
interest as well as local, but a large part of what made
the interrelationships among works interesting was the
reading of the work within at least a vague geo-political
context.
It
is possible that globalisation is the new colonialism,
because its forces have the potential to be all-encompassing.
This being so, it is vital that we are sensitive to every
single shift it creates and not slip unquestioningly into
a new internationalism, where we all share the same global
catalogue of history and our individual cultural accent
is neither evident nor important. Global exchange is enormously
enriching but vigilance must be exercised to prevent a
neutering of our deep-rooted cultural accents.
Part 2 of
this series (to be published in CIRCA 108, summer
2004), will investigate how the global renegotiation of
identity, and the effects of dislocation and re-orientation,
have affected art practice. This discussion will lead
on to Part 3 (issue 109) that examines how this shift
in art practice has reverberations in the practice of
curation, which has undergone its own adjustments in response
to a world in flux.
Regina
Gleeson is a writer on art and technology.
