Global art after 1989

Throughout the 1980s post-modern theory had embraced the theory of regionalism but in practice this was mainly concerned with centre/periphery oppositions within the Western mainstream avant-garde.  

In Australia Aboriginal art began to take off as a market commodity and to be included by curators in surveys of contemporary art.  Internationally Russian avant-garde art began to be celebrated towards the end of the 80s when of the modest relaxation of control under glasnost began to make communications possible.  It was clear that there was a growing appetite for difference of another kind to relieve the enervating repetition of the new.
 
Rubin�s exhibition Primitivism at MOMA in 1984 stimulated heated discussion about appropriation of tribal art by modern artists but it was not till 1989 that Jean-Hubert Martin really attempted to bring objects from different cultural sources together as contemporary art.   Magiciennes de la Terre was a landmark exhibition.  The thesis was that you could exhibit tribal and sacred art from other cultures along side western avant-garde practices by embracing it under the umbrella of spiritual commitment to the earth.  

The fall out from this project has been extraordinary and we all know the arguments for and against Jean Hubert�s strategy.  Because spiritual attachment to the earth is not an end normally embraced by conceptual art it seemed inappropriate to many, however it was an attempt to be inclusive and to find a cultural strategy to in some way contain the diversity.   Art that had been subject to anthropological study now needed to be seen in the light of contemporary visual art theory.  Some more acute artists and curators from the third world saw this as moving from one hegemony to another.

There is a critical issue here for the West; if objects created under different systems of belief could be included within the cannon of contemporary art we might no longer be able to understand art through a system of shared histories and theories.  If this was to be the case, what was to become of all our art historical and theoretical scholarship?  Some saw this as undermining their life's work while others revelled in the inevitable relativism that this would bring into our discourse.

In 1990 at the Venice Biennale there was a major conference organised by Arts International from NY where for 3 days we broke up into small groups of curators to discuss specific topics within the agenda of the expanded international as we called it then.   My group included a curator from Benin, another from Cyprus one from Slovenia, a very senior US museum director and another leading US curator.    It was a fascinating experience.   At the end of each day we reconvened for plenary sessions where each group presented their findings and members of the audience responded.

I recall The Yugoslavian artist Braco Demitriejvic saying " The avant-garde is exhausted we are all tired, here is some fresh blood lets drink!"   Vampirism was often referred to in anticipation of the market response to come.  We were already seeing African exhibitions in the west, mostly based on Andre Magnin's, research for Jean-Hubert.   I recall that we finally agreed that this was an interesting and urgent challenge but I am still not sure if we have lived up to that challenge.  

I think there are still very good arguments to be made for recognising categorical differences between systems of signs and the weight of cultural traditions that inform our art.   One of the bonuses of this new dispersed perspective has been to draw our attention to differences that exist within the cultures that have already been loosely integrated into modernism.  Arte Povera for example carries a great deal of baggage from antique Greece and Rome as well as an interest in science and nature.  Like wise Gutai and Monoha in Japan drew on ancient Japanese traditions. 

Italy and Japan clearly navigated modernism and the avant-garde in their own ways but what would happen where modernism had never been part of the language and is not relevant to the cultural and spiritual source of the work?  Aboriginal art has been adapted to work in a contemporary market context but its driving ethos is traditionally based on tribal practices where the meanings of the work are often sacred secrets not necessarily exchangeable, even between clans of aboriginal people. There are also complex sign systems in Voodun and other cults in West Africa that fundamentally inform readings of the work by those who make use of these traditions.  Would such work have to be detached from its origins to participate in a wider community of ideas or could some third way be established that would exceed purely formal relations without falling back on spiritual claims?  It has been suggested that Anthropology might be brought into the equation but this is not always popular with those who are emerging from a century or more when they were suitable objects for study.  In my view the jury is still out on this issue.

Curatorial Strategies to accommodate diversity
It was against this background that I began work on Boundary Rider the 9th Biennale of Sydney.  Sydney Biennale depends substantially on participating government's contributions to bring the artists and their work to Sydney.  This typically restricts the ambition and scale of work that can be brought from developing countries or from places with no government infrastructure to support the arts.   However I was determined to include as many artists not represented by the wealthy and traditional participants and had to find strategies to deal with the issues of difference outlined above and to avoid obvious demarcations between the haves and the have nots as well as to attempt some kind of rational for their inclusion.

I decided that if the spirit of place was found to embrace works that were incommensurable and set up false correlations perhaps politics might be a more coherent guide to my selection.   It was after all a time of heightened political tension coming at the point when the cold war alignments were unravelling and economic realignment seemed inevitable.  This was to be my underlying guide; however I needed an aesthetic or curatorial strategy to make sense of the diversity.

Put very briefly I employed two strategies; Material strategies by artists that related to bricollage and then juxtaposing works of differing levels of apparent sophistication or �finish� from both developed and developing countries.   Dan Cameron noted the latter strategy when he developed his exhibition Raw and Cooked,  Cocido y Crudo in 1994-5.   It was no coincidence that we both drew on Levi Straus; this is in part an anthropological debate.

I decided to work as much as possible with artists who use found materials or other forms of cultural bricollage.  In this way there would be a material consistency that might diffuse the technological divide while providing a shared language facilitated by the capacity for everyday objects to trigger memories and associations.  For example Anselm Kiefer might have been one of the most celebrated artists of the day but his choice of poor material and rough finish might make the work open to aesthetic juxtaposition with works that were emerging from less known artists around the world.

The following slides demonstrate a few examples of how these strategies played out in practice.
Ashley Bickerton Stylepiece headtrip 1992
Kamol Phaosavasdi  Repercussions of Agriculture 1992
Phaosavasdi made a work critical of the process of modernisation concentrating on the pollution that is poisoning the once beautiful countryside and urban waterways of Thailand.  Kamol used found objects to make his point including the rubber gloves provided to protect us from the poisoned earth.

Mladen Stilinovic Dead Optimism 1989-90
Like many artists emerging from the old soviet block Mladen looks back to the old avant-garde for inspiration rather than to an easy adaptation of everything capitalist or American.  His installations take the form of Suprematist exhibitions but make use of found objects.

Doris Salcedo Los atrabiliarios 1990-92
Was in many ways the central figure of the exhibition for me.   Her installation of Los Atrabilliarios depicts embodied memory as it addresses the dialectics of violence that have ruined her country of Colombia.  It is a personal memorial that in a way breaks the silence imposed by the disappearance of villagers all over the country.   The shoes of the disappeared are enclosed behind animal caul sewn into niches in the wall as a silent testimony of loss.

Dolly Nampajimpa DanielsUntitled (my place)1992
Dolly normally made dot paintings of the landscape but her main concern was working to improve the lot of her people.  Through an interpreter I invited her to show us about her life - not in painting that would have been at odds with the prevailing strategies of the exhibition - but rather to find some way of bringing objects from her daily life that would convey her circumstances to the world.

After some Months Dolly called for a truck and loaded her home and transported it in its entirety to the Biennale.  For some time she lived within the exhibition, playing cards and talking to the curious.   It could not more clearly have shown the world the extraordinary conditions many Aboriginal people experience.

Jean-Hubert Martin of all people asked my if I thought it was really art, It was not a question I had even considered in the context of this exhibition, it was certainly in keeping with the artistic strategies outlined in the theme and it was one of the most articulate political expressions in the Biennale.  Could it be a question of intentionality?  Dolly certainly liked the outcome and subsequently repeated the exercise elsewhere.  It was a significant curatorial intervention however It was my clear understanding from Dolly that she was more interested in getting social change than in showing paintings which she said were also a means to an end.

Cocido y Crudo
In 1994 Dan Cameron presented his exhibition Cocido y Crudo..... He wrote in the catalogue:
"When it became clear that the interchange between multiple cultural positions was in fact the primary topic of this exhibition it was necessary to indicate as clearly as possible that an alternative was being proposed to the West's dichotomy of raw vs cooked, and that this alternative could be signalled through an attempt at dehierarchizing the point of view of the speaker.   In other words, although reversing the order of the variables might assist in signalling our awareness of the dilemma created once any form of culture is relativised, it was not enough to indicate our wish that the contrast become defused, or that the variables actually be brought together.   To achieve this, it has been necessary to eliminate the ingredient that has been cooked or left raw from the proposition, and concentrate instead on the activity involved.

....A certain ambiguity is created for the role of the artist as one who discovers and then recontextualises found materials, images, sources and situations.  Is this a shamanic figure we are speaking of, or a kind of grand chef to the public? Or perhaps it means that the artist is the one who prefers to keep the distinction between the one who acts upon situations and the one who records and interprets those actions, as deliberately blurred as possible.   Either way the title seems apt for incorporating a breadth of interpretive possibilities within its scope, and not limiting the viewer's imagination to a finite number of meanings.�
Doris Salcedo The widowed house 1993-4
Mark Dion  Collectors/collected 1994
Martin Kippenberger Don�t wake up daddy 1994

This strategy reflects the tendency in certain conceptual art practices since the 1960s to weaken the boundaries between the authorial voice and that of the interpreter, curator, and between studio, white cube/museum or other public space as both medium and content in artworks.   It seems the Avant-Garde contained all the techniques for its dissolution or put more positively for a new way of adapting to difference.

Subsequent strategies
Several independent curators since then have elected to work with this situation to further loosen the definitions, blurring art and life both in the works selected but also in the design of exhibitions and the manipulation of site as content.   Curators have directly collaborated with artists or created scenarios in which the role of the artist becomes ambiguous within a broader scheme devised by the curator and or architect.
I think it is fair to see these strategies as a continuation of the attempt to avoid the hegemonic aspect of western art history.   Cities on the move may be a clear case in point.   It had no fixed shape but changed as it toured.  I saw it in London at the Hayward Gallery but they had goner out of their way to disrupt the logic of the building such as it is and to bring the street into the space which was further articulated temporally and aesthetically by the recycling of the props and furniture from the previous Fashion in Art exhibition.

Many of the projects designed to be inclusive such as the APT in Brisbane have favoured installation art, the use of found objects and new technologies.  The exhibition strategy in Brisbane has been to have a very strong exhibition design and presentation that suppresses the appearance of difference.  This has been critiqued as undue interference and even the emergence of installation art where none was to be found before has been put down as a curatorial intervention by Apinan Poshyananda. 

New technologies have also appeared as a material solution to the problems of difference particularly the prevalence of documentary film - is its rise connected to the fact that it does not require the history of the avant-garde to interpret the work?  Has it has been an interesting coincidence that these media have come to the fore during this interesting decade?   They are certainly favoured by many artists from Africa, India and the Middle East; take the example of Documenta 11.

If such strategies are to prevail what of Thomas Messer's point made at Venice in 1990 �I have spent my life working within a historical and theoretical framework and see no reason to simply abandon that now!"   Cameron argued in Raw and Cooked that this was a view that protected an increasingly obsolete privilege of the west, however simply finding ways to have cultures meet does not replace the valuable role of a common theoretical framework.  I am still wondering how much we do need to abandon and whether a bundle of theories can be developed (and by whom?)

Anthony Bond