HOW LATITUDES BECOME FORMS : Vincent Sekwati Koko Mantsoe

Motswa Hole (video clip), 2001
Vincent Sekwati Koko Mantsoe

Vincent Sekwati Koko Mantsoe

Vincent Sekwati Koko Mantsoe b.1971 (Soweto, South Africa)

Born and raised in the township of Soweto, South Africa, dancer-choreographer Vincent Mantsoe (b. 1971) is accustomed to living dual realities. Still a young boy at the time of the 1976 Soweto uprisings, he watched as the community around him slowly rebuilt itself and township dance reemerged as a volatile cultural force in the new South Africa. The son of a Sangoma (an initiated priestess), Mantsoe began ritual drumming at the age of six, later becoming fascinated with Michael Jackson and what was then known as "street style" dance. He received his first formal dance training in Afro-fusion under the guidance of the highly influential Sylvia Glasser, artistic director of Moving Into Dance, of which Mantsoe is now associate artistic director. His solo works fuse traditional African dance forms with an inspired mix of Asian and European elements, classical ballet, and modern dance vocabulary in the exploration of spirituality, modernity, and tradition. His work combines themes of cultural alienation and identity with an intense physicality infused within each gesture.

As a parallel element to How Latitudes Become Forms, Mantsoe presents a spell-binding triple bill: Phokwane (an integration of his parents' names), an abstract, yet autobiographical tribute to his ancestors; Barena (Chiefs), which examines the complexities of power and leadership; and Motswa Hole (Person from far away), the tale of a stranger whose stories affect everyone they touch.

--Diana Kim

Globalization from the Rear: "Would You Care to Dance, Mr. Malevich?"
Philippe Vergne

The problem now is how to nail down this notion of modernity. Is modernity to be considered a purely European phenomenon born in the early nineteenth century with Kant and Hegel? Is modernity to be defined as an epistemological practice that privileges reason and knowledge over faith? Is modernity a theory that claims universal truth? Is modernity tied to a historical period, geographical latitudes, or philosophical attitudes? Or is it all of these things? Michel Foucault seems to embrace the "attitudes" interpretation when he writes about Kant: "It is the first time that a philosopher has connected, in this way, closely and from the inside, the significance of his work with respect to knowledge, a reflection on history and a particular analysis of the specific moment at which he is writing and because of which he is writing."[17] In this case, modernity would be away of relating to contemporary reality within a culture, within a history, within a location, and within a geopolitical construct. Even though the debate on modernity is much larger than the scope of the current project, the most satisfactory interpretation at this moment and in this specific context might be the one developed by Stuart Hall, in which he questions artistic modernity as a history of triumphal practices located in the Western world. He stresses the concept of modernity as a language or a set of languages to be translated: "The world is absolutely littered by modernities and by practicing artists, who never regarded modernism as the secure possession of the West, but perceived it as a language which was open to them but which they would have to transform."[18] If we go along with Hall, does the history of modernities (and again the plural is crucial) trace the history of practitioners giving themselves latitude with regard to a language, taking liberty with a canon?

Perhaps for this reason of languages and translatability, the Walker Art Center decided to invite a multidisciplinary committee of advisors from seven different locations/latitudes in order to rethink its premises in light of the global discussion; this collaboration initiated How Latitudes Become Forms.[19] Our seven "latitudes" were Brazil, Japan, China, India, Turkey, South Africa, and the United States (the Walker's home). Each location should be understood as an example that could, metaphorically, suggest other territories in the world. Each latitude is a case study for an analysis of current artistic forms and practices.

It may be useful here to trace the genealogy of the project's title. How Latitudes Become Forms builds on the exhibition that Harald Szeemann curated in 1969 in Bern, Switzerland, titled When Attitudes Become Form: Live in Your Head. This project was--and still is for many practitioners in the contemporary art world--a model, a starting point. It defined the form of many international exhibitions that followed (institutional or not). It marked the moment when the curator became an author, but more importantly, it gathered very early on a group of artists who radically affected the notion, the process, and the site of art-making.[20] Under the categories of "multiformal or non-rigid art," "conceptual or ideational art," "earthworks and organic-matter art," "geometric abstraction," and "procedural or process art," Szeemann identified a range of practices sharing at least two parameters. The first was that most of the artists in the show were developing site-specific works, or works that relate to their location. The second was that all of the artists liberated themselves from the illusionistic and anecdotal function of art in order to privilege forms and processes. They defined an international language of art, still available and active at the center of many young artists' practices today. It would be legitimate to

17 Michel Foucault, "What Is Enlightenment?" in Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), p. 38.

18 Stuart Hall, "Museum of Modern Art and the End of History," in inIVA Annotations 6 (London: Institute of International VisualArts, 2002), p. 19.

19 See the listing of global advisory committee members on pages 8-9.

20 The artists in When Attitudes Become Form were: Carl Andre, Giovanni Anselmo, Richard Artschwager, Thomas Bang, Jared Bark, Robert Barry, Joseph Beuys, Mel Bochner, Alighiero Boetti, Marinus Boezem, Bill Bollinger, Michael Buthe, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Paul Cotton, Hanne Darboven, Jan Dibbets, Ger van Elk, Raphael Ferrer, Barry Flanagan, Ted Glass, Hans Haacke, Michael Heizer, Eva Hesse, Douglas Huebler, Paolo Icaro, Alain Jacquet, Neil Jenney, Stephen Kaltenbach, Jo Ann Kaplan, Edward Keinholz, Yves Klein, Joseph Kosuth, Jannis Kounellis, Gary B. Kuehn, Sol LeWitt, Bernd Lohaus, Richard Long, Roelof Louw, Walter de Maria, Bruce McLean, David Medalla, Mario Merz, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenburg, Dennis Oppenheim, Panamarenko, Pino Pascali, Paul Pechter, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Emilio Prini, Markus Raetz, Allen Ruppersberg, Reiner Ruthenbeck, Robert Ryman, Frederick Lane Sandback, Alan Saret, Sarkis, Jean-Frédéric Schnyder, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, Keith Sonnier, Richard Tuttle, Frank Lincoln Viner, Franz Erhard Walther, William Wegman, Lawrence Weiner, William T. Wiley, and Gilberto Zorio.

Just How Did Latitudes Become Forms?
Aimee Chang, Douglas Fogle, Olukemi Ilesanmi, Philippe Vergne

culturally subversive use of a colonizer's language against that very colonial power (in the case of Joyce's Ireland, the British). So Maharaj reinscribes one of the canonical texts of European literary modernism within the context of an anticolonial struggle.

PV: In a similar way, claiming tradition might be a sign of modernity. How do you deal with that when our understanding of modernity means to do away with tradition?

DF: Sheela Gowda is playing with that by using traditional materials associated with vernacular India to create conceptual installations. It's a strategy that has become part of a contemporary art language even if the mediums being used are more traditional or folk.

And what do you do with someone like Takashi Murakami? He's a really interesting example to think about, because he's coming out of the tradition of nineteenth-century Nihonga painting. Murakami learned that tradition and is playing with it while also developing a set of issues around Japanese popular culture. Nihonga painting itself is an interesting example of the problematic nature of conflating "authenticity" with tradition. It was invented to counter the prevalence of a European style of history painting that was growing more popular in Japan in the nineteenth century. Nihonga had a very self-consciously nationalist agenda and attempted to bring together a number of stylistic elements that signaled "Japan," but it was not pure. It was already artificial in its inception and in that sense frustrated any notion of purity.

OI: It becomes this kind of pit of authenticity. At least some of the resistance and discussion I encountered in South Africa was around what it means to look for something authentic. How is one South African? What are these different colliding histories and how does that come out in the art-making process considering the disparity in exposure to Western, or even local, art history due to the political and educational structure pre-1990, a system that continues in more subtle ways today?

Robin Rhode, for example, can list off artists that we both recognize, from William Kentridge to Glenn Ligon to Marcel Duchamp. He plays with his local history of Khoi-San cave painting and with contemporary cultural practices such as hip hop, graffiti, and guerrilla filmmaking. His references are often tongue-in-cheek, yet highly informed, strategically savvy, and aesthetically intriguing.

PV: One of the common denominators, either formal or in terms of practice, that we are talking about is the decision, conscious or not, to be on the left of things, to talk from left of center. Unlike the Pop and post-Pop artists who undermined the center from within the center, this new generation of artists locates itself outside of the mainstream. These artists give themselves latitude in terms of how they interact with a mainstream economic, cultural, media language. Whatever medium they use, there is a way in which they take themselves outside of the world, not ignoring the world, but finding a distance from which to comment on the world. For me, that's what links someone like Thomas Hirschhorn, born in Switzerland and working in Paris, with Wang Jian Wei, who lives and works in Beijing, even though they are completely different in other ways. I think what they are addressing is similar in the end.

DF: You said, Philippe, that there is an international language of art and that you don't have a problem with that. But maybe you could explain what you mean by an international language. Is it a set of signifiers that artists from various parts of the world share? Is it an intellectual currency that they share?

PV: I don't think it's a shared signifier. The question arose when I began looking at the way the artists in the exhibition use form and looking at the means they deploy to put together content. I was struck by the idea that, in a way, there weren't any new forms in what they were doing. For me, it was very interesting that some of the strategies they were using in their work echoed those from very precise historical moments in art history. When I say I don't have a problem with an international language, I'm not saying that what these artists are doing is the same. Let's take, for example, Song Dong's video Jump (1999) and then look at Bruce Nauman's Bouncing in the Corner No. 1 from 1968. Song's strategy--this repetitive motion in a very specific place, trying

9 See Daniel Birnbaum, "In Other's Words: Daniel Birbaum Talks with Sarat Maharaj," in Artforum (February 2002), pp. 106-110.

The Local Tango and the Global Dance
Vasif Kortun, Cuauhtémoc Medina

in cultural exchange, or do you mean the emancipation of our local elites from the demands of their own interpretation of modernism? But to keep the conversation interesting, I'll say a few words on this issue first.

The pursuit of inclusion and the battle against modernizing local dreams are clearly two different issues, which our "global discussions" do not always allow us to distinguish with clarity. I grant you that Camnitzer has a great deal to say about the division of labor that exists between the expectations of the local kingdoms and the question of how to repoliticize their participation in "wonderbread" global art. But to be honest, I guess we (the privileged, doubly displaced ones, as you clearly pointed out) always knew that the center was expecting from us an illustration of "cultural difference" that was mostly a matter of their own needs--the need to deal with local, multicultural politicization around immigrant communities. In response to this yearning, local artists who had no particular interest in that field found a way to insert themselves into the global circulation where (I hope) they intervened more in the direction of questioning the assumptions about cultural practice than of pretending to have anything to do with a "local dialect." They (we, in fact) took advantage of the expectations of exporting a form of local taste to actually champion something I prefer to call "periphery bad taste" or "sophisticated maladjustment"--to address a manifold of both local and metropolitan cultural concerns using any means at our disposal.

My question is in fact a form of confession: I currently am not overtly interested in issues of inclusion. The local dynamics of this place make me feel that I am concerned more and more with the radicality of the specific artistic projects emerging from my surroundings. These works do not need from me anything like a "translation"; they have increasingly integrated, in the sense of carrying within them, the elements that make them readable to informed art audiences from Argentina to Helsinki. What I attempt to do, and at times probably with some narrowness of spirit, is to preserve their local significance in relation to their global circulation, even inside my own city. I'm the one who struggles to keep them slightly localized, at least for the sake of argument, both to have something to say about them and to prevent them from being merely a free signifier in the global arena, in the way Orozco's work became a deterritorialized but nevertheless nationally branded type of production in the early 1990s. I probably fool myself into believing that this is a way to preserve their political meaning: wanting to make it seem that they are advancing a new form of local culture when in fact their work has a built-in internationalism. But perhaps the only thing I am achieving is a brief (and increasingly ephemeral) moment of local consumption (mine at least), before or while these things find their natural way into the global arena. All of this is obviously perverse. At times it is nothing more than the worst kind of justification: I feel that without the center/periphery power games I would end up moving to New York because the art here will become (again) really bad!

The operation has to a certain extent backfired; because this criticism is written for international consumption, it has begun to work better abroad than in this locality, where, if originally written in English, I myself mistranslate it into Spanish and read it to people who justly find it abstruse and removed from their own perceptions. I call this pantomime (retrieving an old surrealist slogan) a form of literary magnification, of inflationary criticism. Surely these contemporary things we like are, as we talked about the other day, forms of cultural practice that have little if any relation to the local academic discourse and to its modern/humanist assumptions. I entertain the fantasy that the good thing about art in Mexico is that globalization caused it to escape the thrust of Mexican culture, and I do not mean any essential ethnic trait but simply the styles and the issues that Mexican writers and intellectuals continue to find so engaging, for example, the critical writings of Ernst Jünger and Paul Valéry. I am certain that those local dynamics of culture are very much unscathed by globalization in art; the local academia and cultural discourse have been forced to accept globalization as "the current thing" without feeling in any way challenged by its implications. Let me use my perpetual example: Orozco's work is now seen by the Mexican cultural authorities as a useful currency to claim, inside more than outside, that we Mexicans are as contemporary as any other culture. Even the minister of foreign affairs says that he is going to promote Mexican creativity abroad, from Francisco Toledo's painting to Orozco's installations! For the administrators, contemporary art is simply another of "our" tickets to appearing modern. What I find so displeasing about that brand of new cosmopolitanism is that it tends to be so easily absorbed; compared to this, even folklorism is politically significant.

Vincent Sekwati Koko Mantsoe

"The world is absolutely littered by modernities and by practicing artists, who never regarded modernism as the secure possession of the West, but perceived it as a language which was open to them but which they would have to transform."

. . . claiming tradition might be a sign of modernity. How do you deal with that when our understanding of modernity means to do away with tradition?

The pursuit of inclusion and the battle against modernizing local dreams are clearly two different issues, which our "global discussions" do not always allow us to distinguish with clarity.