Three scenes from the contemporary art world:
A traditional ink painter in Guangzhou uses the money he earns selling his work in his regional market to fund an art center which provides the means for Cantonese artists to make artwork that circulates in the international art scene.
A nation buys “its artist” an international spotlight at the Venice Biennale, validating and increasing the value of her art by placing it in view of the international market.
In the co-curator model, a regionally embedded curator is invited as an agent of a specific scene to collaborate and contribute to an international exhibition at a museum, a fair, or a biennial in the ether of the international art scene.
A global art synonymous with contemporary art emerged in the 1980s at a crucial turn for international politics and trade. Art production at that moment followed the geopolitical expansion of a liberal agenda, integrating once seemingly isolated art scenes into the “international art world.” Through globally standardized infrastructures such as the international biennial, art fair, or residency program, the international art world now seeks to fabricate and represent a multicultural and inclusive globalism that embraces difference and complexity.
Facilitated by expansive production systems and new markets and financial structures, as well as possibilities for leveraging outsourced labor, “being global” functions through this networked community as a vector of symbolic capital. On the one hand, “difference” is a label of inclusion, a currency that grants the newcomer a seat at the table of the post-exhibition party. Yet, on the other hand of this greater inclusivity, what is in fact put in place by the international art scene? Are the terms of engagement still located in the art world’s metropolitan centers? Does “the global” serve to hide from view the still-hierarchical system of regional markets that feeds the “international” market with art, artists, curators, and liquidity? Does movement between the centers and peripheries of cultural production and circulation permit the development of cultural and artistic ecologies distinct from the monopoly formations constituted by state or private patrons? Does prominence—in some cases, mere presence—on the international art scene grant the mobile cultural producer the leverage to negotiate with regional and local power holders?
This survey invites Zoe Butt, Patrick Flores, and Ingrid Schaffner to respond to a series of prompts on the relationship of their own practices to the global in view of both the term’s seeming ubiquity, and the way in which it functions as a name for the operating conditions and assumptions for contemporary art. In asking three curators whose work, in varying ways, substantially engages the global networks and infrastructures that define the field, we look to shed some light on the mechanics of what we now call the international art world. The emphasis placed in diverse ways throughout the discussion on how local art contexts are increasingly embedded in the global vectors of the art world’s cultural currency, begs a question that cuts across those mentioned above: Who has access to this elusive “global”?
ZOE BUTT
1. Is there a global ecology for contemporary art? Can you elaborate on your broad working concept of “the global”? For example: What is the working notion of a global ecology of contemporary art? Who takes part in it? What is the “utility” or cultural currency of being a member of a global milieu? Here, we look to identify structures and conditions rather than individuals.
The “global” is an attitude. As an attitude, I want it to embrace difference as dynamic potential. It is within differing perspectives of reality that new approaches to making and meaning arise—this is a form of potential, for it acts as a vehicle for innovation. I want such potential to be anchored in a respect for all forms of life, with all its myriad methods of connecting value to our spiritual and material selves. A global ecology of contemporary art should be socially interconnected and rhizomatic, an interdisciplinary network that is both on- and offline. It would embrace a conversation as a non-linear and cyclical space.
The utility of such a network today is dependent upon whether you can speak English; whether you have the comparative education (and thus the confidence) to contribute; whether you have the steadfast openness to hold true to your local context and its social practices while provoking the gaze of that “other”—for, as idealistic as I am about the possibility of embracing difference in that “global,” it is not easy to face up to the Language of Imperialism, Colonization and Capitalism (economical spheres of social dominance and control) and successfully engage with them using your own words and systems.
2. What was the moment of the “global” for you? Can you identify the moment or era of globalization in which the technologies or network key to your own practices were inaugurated?
The moment of “global” for me is as early as 500AD, when the Buddhist monk Zuanzang set out from Chengdu in search of crucial Buddhist texts from India. Monasteries along the ancient Silk Road of trade facilitated his travels, which took him across Central Asia on foot. It is the record of such journeys that reveals the attitude of the “global” in its most integral form. The search for knowledge was at that time bound to spiritual quests, to a pursuit of humanity as opposed to pure science. This is the kind of network that I seek to explore in my practice, a network that casts its eye beyond the Western circulated texts of teleological rationalism, a curatorial practice that moves beyond networks as career ladders listing exhibitions, towards networks that are conscionably responsible for nurturing sustainable and creative communities.
The era of a “globalization” that had an immense impact on me was that of the accessibility of the World Wide Web in the mid 1990s, for it could connect like-minded people and enable conversations of equality, bringing hope to those who felt socially alienated (often artists). The WWW also coincided with a rising foreign interest in contemporary art from Asia, which spectacularly monopolized the interpretation of the artists’ struggle in coming to terms with Languages of ‘Independence’, of the ‘Other’, of ‘authenticity’. The WWW is an incredible intangible space of globalizing potential, but it is owned by dominant power structures, as we would do well to remember. Google is not a Church; the BBC is not a priest; Wikipedia is not a God.
3. Does “the global” still have to be mediated or contextualized? In a global art world, everything has to be contextualised in a bid to respect “difference,” but does the global as a universal category itself have to be so contexualized? What difference does it instantiate? Are these contextualizations the same everywhere and, if not, what in particular do these variations mean with regard to the supposedly-common fact of “globalization”?
If the “global” is an attitude, it is theoretically a concept of moral and ethical grounding. Practicing that attitude, however, will always require an articulation of context. The tools we use to describe our reality, the rituals we practice, and the language we use to communicate are full of highly coded metaphors steeped in cultural particularities. Artworks are prime examples of the impact of that context: their narratives are incredibly site-specific, and are often the only documentation of a contentious history. The translation of these aesthetic narratives is a critical task of mediation for all forms of knowledge engaged in historical reflection.
I would not say that “the global” is a “universal category,” for that lends itself to a thinking of space and time as uniform. The globe is not physically uniform, and neither are we as a human race; time is a mental construct physically enacted differently across cultures. The differences revealed between contextualizations feed creative innovation (think of the role of feng shui in ensuring one’s bedroom is facing in the correct direction in China and Vietnam); expand human imagination (think of the role of text as representation across the Islamic world); and energize the human race in its evident globalizing thirst for the “new.” The “global,” like Buddha’s belief in mindfulness (where the present moment is the most powerful emotional, psychological, and sensorial space of negotiation), will always require mediation.
4. What does “practical globalization” offer you? How is your practice advantaged by the structures of globalization, such as access to new offshore opportunities via expanding markets for travel, changing tariff and trade structures, crossborder financial flows, and the technical and labour conditions underpinning international cultural and institutional networks?
Here in Vietnam, where our artistic community has no financial support, where we suffer from an educational system that forbids the teaching of foreign ideas and conceptual analysis, and where the political system surveils all forms of individual expression, it is through our strategizing of an online habitus and of our off-shore legal entities; our seeking to validate our labor through showcasing it abroad; our seeking of transnational maneuverability—all of this “practical globalization” enables our sustainability, our survival. This “practical globalization,” however, can at times be a one-directional lure, with information and opportunity largely focusing on trajectories that mirror our colonial past (think Goethe Institute; think foundational grant funds between Asia and the EU) or follow locally invested trade flows (Korea and Japan are top investors in Vietnam, and their pop culture dominates). All tools of strategy and discovery have a need of balance—our mindfulness matters, our “global” matters, our local memory matters.
PATRICK FLORES
1. Is there a global ecology for contemporary art? Can you elaborate on your broad working concept of “the global”? For example: What is the working notion of a global ecology of contemporary art? Who takes part in it? What is the “utility” or cultural currency of being a member of a global milieu? Here, we look to identify structures and conditions rather than individuals.
I imagine the global to be an intersubjective space, and its being so should make everyone in it vulnerable, prone to relation, and exposed to the various interventions of the political. Taking part in it means taking up the agency to engage with its thickness and density, as well as its atmosphere. There are relays and circuits of exchange and also nodes of exclusion. The algorithm is promising, but it is also repetitive. There is always the “now,” the “new,” and the “again.”
I think the algorithm is contingent on the methodologies of research of art worlds and ecologies. How do curators, for instance, gain access to and represent artists across the globe in specific milieus such as the exhibition or the biennale? And how do artists and other players mediate these modes of reinscription in curatorial contexts? If the curatorial reinscription is altogether surmounted or totally negated, what is produced in its place? Or is this “place” radically rethought so that either the artistic agency becomes exceptionally polytropic (that is, the artist can do nearly everything) or it motivates a redistribution of sympathies so that the creation of an ecology would rest on hyphenated, constellated personae: artist-curator-networker-activist-polemicist-speculator-visionary-theorist? What modes of engagement between agents are generated in instances of contact and encounter? Are agencies reciprocally braided or are they merely vertically arranged? And so the now, the new, and the again are predicated on techniques of observation, means of co-implications, and possibilities of interlocution.
2. What was the moment of the “global” for you? Can you identify the moment or era of globalization in which the technologies or network key to your own practices were inaugurated?
For me, it was 1996, when I was asked to write for a catalogue for the Asia-Pacific Triennial in Brisbane. I saw the constellation of a hyphenated region unfolding in relation to both country and world. It was a potent time, one that forged friendships that have prevailed to this day.
This was a heady moment primarily because the Philippines found itself in another context, that of the Asia-Pacific, which is distinct from, let us say, Asia or Southeast Asia. Not that there had been no earlier attempts to ordain another order of things. Havana in the eighties, for instance, was seminal. So the further declensions of the conception of the “world” away from the “universal exposition” gave way to reconsiderations and renominations of the “international,” the “nonaligned,” the “third world.” This gesture reorganizes tenacious axioms underlying modernity, the avant-garde, the postcolonial, the postmodern, and, inevitably, the contemporary.
For me, the moment was also significant because my art-historical training was recognized as critical in the formation of a discourse. The moment of the global in Southeast Asia to some extent came by way of the practice of a different art history, one that was engaged with the representation of modern and contemporary art in the world. The series of symposia, conferences, workshops, and fora was pivotal. Here we might discern a shift in intelligence, from the artist-curator of the seventies to the art historian-curator; but in many ways some personages merely reoriented themselves as they embodied these multiple agencies within a singular authority.
3. Does “the global” still have to be mediated or contextualized? In a global art world, everything has to be contextualised in a bid to respect “difference,” but does the global as a universal category itself have to be so contexualized? What difference does it instantiate? Are these contextualizations the same everywhere and, if not, what in particular do these variations mean with regard to the supposedly-common fact of “globalization”?
The global has to be mediated by equivalence, and it has to carve out a space for postcolonial mastery and not only a mixture that is at times reduced to hybridity and slips into decadence. Difference, therefore, need not be about a context of the other, but can be a cosmology of alterity that exceeds the dialectic of critique.
I think the discourse of hybridity needs to be rethought, because it oftentimes lapses into the question of purity and authenticity, which takes us not very far. There ought to be another word for the recovery not of purity or authenticity—which is usually seen as the opposite to hybridity—but of integrity, a kind of disposition that inheres and inspires as well as inclines. This is the alterity that is required to find a way out of the impasse of critique. The latter, therefore, must be dispersed and made to play out as a critical condition, a criticality, an activity of deliberation, as contemplated in more ancient times.
4. What does “practical globalization” offer you? How is your practice advantaged by the structures of globalization, such as access to new offshore opportunities via expanding markets for travel, changing tariff and trade structures, crossborder financial flows, and the technical and labour conditions underpinning international cultural and institutional networks.
For me, it is about connections with friends from long ago and with strangers from different disciplines. I am always pleased to build on sustained solidarities and to initiate conversations from those perceived to be lying afar.
Sustained engagements with colleagues nurture initiatives across long durations of practice, refinement of ideas, exploration of other terrains, instantiations of projects. This is why, for a while, the same people attended kindred gatherings; and out of these, new gatherings were eventually convened, sometimes independently of the original structure of consolidation. This was part of the thickening of the discursive. This is the moment of the “again,” because friendships prevail and hospitalities deepen. But do we say that this limits the field of options to friendships? Yes, of course. But it is a choice, just as it is a choice to forge new ones and to nourish other rhizomes of sympathies as the contingencies require and as tangencies materialize.
INGRID SCHAFFNER
1. Is there a global ecology for contemporary art? Can you elaborate on your broad working concept of “the global”? For example: What is the working notion of a global ecology of contemporary art? Who takes part in it? What is the “utility” or cultural currency of being a member of a global milieu? Here, we look to identify structures and conditions rather than individuals.
This question catches me on the verge of exploring that very thing, which up until now, I have only ever referred to using air-quotes. More an economy than an ecology, the “global art world,” as far as I know, appears to be an ever-expanding proliferation of art fairs, biennials, symposia, and other platforms circumnavigated by a coterie of artists, curators, and collectors, whose feet rarely touch the ground. But that stereotype only speaks to the limits of my own experience, which is exactly where I am beginning work on the 2018 Carnegie International. The next three years will be a process of seeing how much more demanding and full of imaginative possibilities being a curator in the global art world actually is. To abet me in this research, I am inviting six colleagues to each accompany me on a journey. The six will be selected for their expertise in various geographic and disciplinary areas of the art world. However we will travel to places that are unknown to both of us. This way, we are equally responsible for finding our way, for getting lost, and for being open. I find, too, that I process a lot more when I’m traveling with a companion. These six will not be co-curators, rather we will be fellow navigators on a trip that will mutually inform our curatorial perspectives. It seems important to embrace a certain ignorance, since, even operating on an exclusively local level, none of us is ever expert in a contemporary art world that is constantly changing.
2. What was the moment of the “global” for you? Can you identify the moment or era of globalization in which the technologies or network key to your own practices were inaugurated?
Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s at the Queens Museum in 1999 was revelatory. Fittingly held in the grounds of the historic New York World’s Fair, this exhibition was inclusive and vast in a way I had never before experienced in contemporary art. It was organized by Luis Camnitzer, Jane Farver (whose death this spring was a loss to the art world— she so ethically enriched), and Rachel Weiss, who had, in turn, invited 12 curators to represent 11 regions. Installed chronologically and geographically, the exhibition not only presented 240 works by some 130 artists; it also provided a sense of the political and historical contexts that gave those works specificity and urgency. Yes, there was a lot to read. I distinctly remember that each section’s wall text was authored by its curator, so that the show did not have a unified voice or perspective. Rather, it sounded the noisy start of questions, research, and a conversation that had as much to do with curatorial practice as it did with globalism. There was excitement, too, in using one’s understanding of the rather mandarin grammar of conceptual art to unlock all of this new content. To say nothing of how important it was to see so much work for the first time (by Lygia Clark, Victor Grippo, Hélio Oiticica, Neung-Kyung Sung, Tucumán Arde, among others) as well as to see iconic works (by Marcel Duchamp, Yves Klein, Martha Rosler, for instance) gain global currency. Ultimately, however, what this exhibition’s look at points of origin showed was that the global simply doesn’t exist.
3. Does “the global” still have to be mediated or contextualized?
Wall text is strikingly absent from the central exhibition of this year’s Venice Biennale. Given that the curator is Okwui Enwezor—the organizer of the Africa section of Global Conceptualism, and who has been shaping curatorial and global discourse ever since—it’s an approach that stands decisively against mediation. There are labels of the tombstone variety (artist, title, date), but you have to hunt. In corners and doorways, on darkened walls, wherever seems most inconvenient is generally where you will find them. Once found, however, they provide valuable information. Simply by indicating where and when the artist was born, and where she or he now lives, the labels act as coordinates, locating the work in time and space, in an exhibition that bursts with the force of artists and realities from outside of the West. Itself a rumination on global capital, this Biennale refuses easy consumption on every level. It demands our time, energy, commitment, awareness, imagination, and presence—making the work of viewing contemporary art corollary and intrinsic to being an engaged and responsible citizen of the world.
4. What does “practical globalization” offer you? How is your practice advantaged by the structures of globalization, such as access to new offshore opportunities via expanding markets for travel, changing tariff and trade structures, crossborder financial flows, and the technical and labour conditions underpinning international cultural and institutional networks.
This question—which seems to makes a false distinction between globe-hopping and more localized curatorial practice, as if the problematic politics of access, travel costs, financial support, and labor conditions are new to the field or to the structures of capitalism—makes me think of the frogs in the Alcohol House. As part of beginning work on the Carnegie International, I’m exploring the Carnegie Museum, which is renowned for its natural history collections, including thousands of herpetological specimens. Preserved in ethanol and packed like pickles in jars, they occupy their own library-like section. As I zeroed in on a shelf to read the handwritten labels, the frogs mapped out a strangely suggestive itinerary: Angola, Surinam, West Virginia, Columbia, India, Ukraine, Arizona. Though I don’t plan to follow the frog itinerary exactly, the ambition and absurdity of its global reach and local specificity are instructive.
ZOE BUTT is Executive Director and Curator of Sàn Art, Vietnam’s most active independent contemporary art space and reading room, in Ho Chi Minh City. She was Director of International Programs at Long March Project in Beijing, China, and worked at the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia, where she assisted in the development of the Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT) and making key acquisitions for the Contemporary Asian art collection.
PATRICK FLORES is Professor of Art Studies at the Department of Art Studies at the University of the Philippines, which he chaired from 1997 to 2003. Flores is also Curator of the Vargas Museum in Manila, and Adjunct Curator at the National Art Gallery, Singapore. He was a grantee of the Asian Cultural Council (2010); a member of the Advisory Board of the exhibition “The Global Contemporary: Art Worlds After 1989” (2011), organized by the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe; and a member of the Guggenheim Museum’s Asian Art Council (2011).
INGRID SCHAFFNER is the curator for the forthcoming 57th Carnegie International, which examines the world’s different art scenes through curatorial research placements and collaborations between curators not native to the scene they are exploring. From 2000 to 2015, Schaffner directed the exhibition program at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) at the University of Pennsylvania.
Commissioning Editors: Kathleen Ditizig, Adriana Blidaru, Tim Gentles, Wang Jing.
