Cross-Border Shopping

In a recent issue of Artforum, arguably the journal-of-record for American contemporary art, seven of the leading lights in international curating and artmaking were invited to discuss the new globalized art events. The panel included Catherine David, the high-powered French curator who organized the deeply political 1997 Documenta show, widely considered to have marked the coming of age of the new, globalized art event. It also featured the Nigerian-born, New York-based theorist Okwui Enwezor, another globe-trotting power-house on the international-exhibition circuit and David’s successor at the 2002 Documenta (which was even more political than her 1997 version), and Yinka Shonibare, a British artist of Nigerian descent whose art centres on issues of imperialism. Despite the apparent diversity of the participants, though, what was most noticeable about the round table was that the scholastic, distinctly Western debate barely extended beyond issues dear to the seven specialists involved. It didn’t even try to engage with people or issues beyond the art world, let alone outside the West. The new international exhibitions were declared to be “grand collectors and translators of subjectivities under the latest phase of globalization.” But it’s hard to know what someone with a genuinely foreign “subjectivity” would make of the insider interests and ideas at stake.

Of course, there is art that is genuinely different from what we see at home: printmaking traditions in India, textile traditions in South America, hair-braiding in Nigeria, even Modernist painting in rural Cuba. And, very occasionally, these truly “foreign” forms get a room or two at a global exhibition. (The Asia-Pacific Triennial, held in Australia, has taken some steps in that direction.) But, for the most part, truly indigenous forms are left out of the international mega-shows. When curators look for art in foreign cultures, it isn’t with a neutral, scientific eye for all the stuff that gets produced. They don’t usually want a knowledge of the current state of Indian or Bolivian or Nigerian visual culture; they want just those things that connect with the cutting edge at home.

On those rare occasions where some truly local heroes do squeeze into an international show, their art can look hopelessly out of place. At the Havana Biennial, a Senegalese artist named Ousmane Ndiaye Dago presented photos and a video from a project he called “Femme Terre.” It consisted of the artist, a fifty-something man, smearing mud and paint over much younger, suspiciously pert-breasted naked girls, while his pals snapped pictures of the moment. This art made most of the exhibition’s Western visitors cringe; many voted it the worst work in the show – and yet I bet that the artist, who is celebrated in his own country, would have been baffled by this reaction.

Occasionally, one of the global shows will feature a really successful work of genuinely “foreign” art, made far outside the standard contemporary-art circuit. When that happens, however, chances are the work is being used as an artistic ready-made – along the lines of Marcel Duchamp’s urinal or bottle rack, which started life as non-art objects, and only became Western high art by the artist’s fiat and with the acquiescence of curators and collectors.

Bodys Isek Kingelez, a self-taught artist from Congo, makes fantastic, room-sized cardboard and plastic models of Jetson-style cities of the future. They have now been shown in high-end exhibitions all around the globe. His work speaks to many of the Western art world’s current preoccupations. Echoing one stream in recent high-cred art, a Kingelez installation has a certain retro, Hanna-Barbera styling; echoing another, it explores the Utopian dreams of modernist architecture for their purely decorative potential – a lively contrast to the stodgy maquettes that the West is swimming in these days, for downtown Manhattan’s never-ending redevelopment, or for all the new museums and performance spaces that are springing up. Meshing with yet an-other current trend, a Kingelez rejects the hard-edged sobriety of 1960s abstraction and conceptualism, or the dour theorizing of 1980s work, and replaces them with a prankish celebration of a weird and wonderful mess.

And yet it’s not at all clear that any of this is what Kingelez, a hobbyist and former teacher, had in mind. There seems to be a genuinely Utopian dream behind Kingelez’s work, and an out-sider artist’s pure love of bricolage. But its original functions have little to do with recent trends in art. Kingelez’s constructions may be made to function as relevant contemporary installation art, but does that make him a contemporary installation artist? You have to wonder if any new body of work he made might be so in tune with contemporary Western art – given what little access he’s had to it. (Actually, he is now on his way to becoming another with-it artist, clued into the new contexts of his art, but that is only a result of more than a decade’s exposure to the Western contemporary art world.)

It is possible – just – to have a truly anthropological approach to artefacts brought in from foreign cultures. It is possible to understand an African mask, say, as a ritual object whose cultural job is almost completely different from the work done by modern Western art. But once you’ve done that, you’ve also pulled it right out of the ambit of Western curators, critics, and art lovers – who have no interest, one assumes, in engaging with foreign religious practices. Even to treat foreign objects as the subject for rationalist scholarly study, of course, is to situate them in a peculiarly Western system of thought. Is there that much difference between “using” foreign artefacts, Picasso-wise, as sources of our own kind of aesthetic satisfaction, and “using” them as sources for our own kind of intellectual pleasure? Either way, the objects aren’t being used in the way their makers had intended.

Actually, I’m not sure there’s anything wrong with the appropriation of foreign art. Ready-mades can be wonderful things; any culture can be invigorated when it steals images from far away and puts them to new use. When the Dani of New Guinea used empty sardine cans as exotic ornament, it was a good move; likewise when Mughal miniaturists and Japanese printmakers stole elements of Western perspective, and used them to their own, more purely graphic, ends. It’s what we’re up to when we understand Kingelez’s cardboard cities as installation art.

But it’s still important to recognize that our newly internationalized biennials are less about a generous openness to other artistic cultures than about an egocentric wish to energize our own. Modern Western art has a dedication to the new that other cultures don’t always share – it’s one of the hallmarks of our peculiar conception of art-making. The real reason contemporary curating has expanded its horizons is that there is a shortage of new work at home, and it seems likely we’ll find novel forms abroad. The harried visitors to the massive international biennials – critics, artists, high-end collectors, rival curators on scouting trips — don’t tend to pay too much attention to the complex curatorial agendas of the organizers. Instead, they inevitably switch into a kind of shopping mode, hoping to find good stuff to take away with them. You could even argue that this represents a new kind of colonialism: we in the West want a new supply of interesting goods to feed our appetite for aesthetic commodities, and we also wouldn’t mind a larger foreign audience, to provide demand for the art we make at home.

There can be a positive side to all this. For one thing, artists from abroad are finally getting to play in the Western art world’s game – a game that can be lots of fun and even makes some players rich. After all, it would hardly be fair to insist that foreign artists stick to some notion of an authentically “foreign” art; we can’t very well deny them the right to make the kinds of work for which we praise and pay our own artists. In Cuba, contemporary artists who’ve found success abroad are some of the richest members of their society – even when they work in installation or sound art.