HOW LATITUDES BECOME FORMS : Santiago Cucullu

Santiago Cucullu and assistant place wall papers for Santiago's mural, January 30, 2003
Photo: Philippe Vergne

Santiago Cucullu

Santiago Cucullu b.1969 (Argentina)
lives and works in Houston, Texas

launch interview with Santiago Cucullu

In recent years, Santiago Cucullu has adopted the wall as the primary support for his paintings, working almost exclusively on large, site-specific wall paintings that occupy a space between autobiographical reminiscence, fiction, and collective memories. Drawing from a wide field of references ranging from the novels of Dostoyevsky to the rock band Led Zeppelin (Brothers Karamazov, The Led Zeppelin Saga, both 1998), Cucullu questions the possibility of painting history objectively and examines how specific historical figures have been represented and digested by Western culture.

1978 pt2 (1999) is a mural painting showing a blurred image of the Argentinean soccer team that won the World Cup in 1978 amid rumors that Peru might have been illicitly induced to throw the final match. It is a "souvenir" of the artist's childhood, and it suggests a larger historical context: the imposed military dictatorship of General Jorge Videla that made the political situation in Argentina unbearable for many. By bringing to our attention an "off-center," long-forgotten event, Cucullu gives a voice to the subaltern.

Abstract Yet Riel and Individual (2000) depicts a historic tale of resistance involving Louis Riel, a heroic leader and early organizer of the Métis, Canadians of mixed ancestry. In this mural, Cucullu combines appropriated fantastic images of a mounted warrior by illustrator Frank Frazetta with representations of land-surveying equipment. Both refer symbolically to the early conflict between the native populations and the colonizing powers that annexed their land. Although this episode in history takes place in a specific geographic location, it resonates with larger issues surrounding the position of the marginalized in relation to the structures of power.

For Cucullu, history is an uncertain system of fallible truths. And yet he embraces, and challenges, one of the most disregarded genres in painting, namely, history painting. In his latest series of works exploring the death penalty in America (And do they kiss? They try, Capital punishment machines fucking, both 2002), he is acutely aware that to challenge such a genre he must avoid anything that sounds like a voice of authority. For him, there is no more truth in painting than there is in history.

Before moving to Houston, Cucullu resided in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where his work has been shown at Franklin Art Works (2002), the Soap Factory (2000), and the Walker Art Center in Dialogues: Bonnie Collura/Santiago Cucullu (2000). His work has been included in a number of group exhibitions, including Officina America, Bologna, Italy (2002); Fresh: The Altoids Collection (traveling through 2002); and "Pictures" at an Exhibition, Artists Space, New York, New York (2001).

--Philippe Vergne

Interactions/Intersections: Cultural Globalism and Educational Practice
Christi Atkinson, Susan Rotilie, Sarah Schultz, Kiyoko Motoyama Sims, Meredith Walters

on Uttar-Priyadashi.[2] This work could be perceived as traditional East Indian theater-dance from the Westerner's point of view, but from the East Indian's point of view it's a very contemporary interpretation of the traditional forms. It made me rethink how I might design programs with different resident artists and art forms that we bring in from around the world. When the Walker presented Uttar-Priyadashi, our solution was to invite a scholar of Indian dance and theater, Dr. Sunil Kothari, who was traveling with the company, to speak to students in theater and dance classes at Macalester College and also to have him give a talk before the show. It helped to frame the performance within a more nuanced context than simply traditional or nontraditional. It conveyed that these artists are carrying forward--and adding complexity to--longheld traditions, but using a contemporary vocabulary.

MW: Making those many vocabularies available is so important, and your solution is a perfect illustration of it. Westerners, Americans, anyone removed from that culture, really, have limited vocabularies for that form of dance. As you said, traditional and nontraditional are terms that don't illuminate anything and are in fact misleading. Audiences unfamiliar with these complex histories are forced to make analogies to what they do know--or think they know--about a foreign culture, which is usually a mix of news reports, a few facts from world history class, or artifacts seen in museums. In a contemporary arts context we had the opportunity to distinguish between flat representations of a culture and the actual artistic process of contemporary dancers from Manipur.

SS: I valued hearing about the various issues and challenges the committee members faced in their own communities surrounding the presentation of contemporary work. Walter Chakela, for example, is dealing with a particular history of revolution and apartheid in South Africa. He was struggling to convince his audience, consisting of primarily black South Africans, that their literature and theater are as good and as valuable as the works of Shakespeare and Chekov. Because European drama was all they ever read or learned about in school, Shakespeare is perceived as literature with a capital L, and they needed to be convinced that their stories, about revolution and apartheid, were equally "Literature." Though the details vary from locale to locale, in a strange way it was reassuring to discover that everyone around the table was wrestling with the challenge of overcoming audiences' preconceptions and apprehensions about contemporary art.

Christi Atkinson: One thing this initiative has reinforced for me is the power of certain words, such as global and globalism, and how those words can mean dramatically different things to different people. For example, one of our advisors felt that globalism was just a buzzword for the new American imperialism. And yet, no matter how strongly we all felt that these words were problematic, there were no agreed-upon, adequate alternatives to these terms. When our vocabulary itself is shifting, the intended discussions can't even be realized.

KMS: There is a connection between a person's perception of a word--such as globalism, community, local--and the cultural background and history that he or she grew up in. I'm working in an American institution, creating programs for an American audience, yet this process has made it clear that my ideas of internationalism or globalism stem from being Japanese and growing up in Japan. I have a double perception in a way.

I am sensitive to how Asian culture is often wrapped up into one big category, which hides all the unique qualities and differences within Asian cultures and art. Asia includes China, Japan, and Korea as well as the expanse of Southeast Asia, and we all have very distinct cultural and artistic traditions and histories, although we have a lot of things in common too. From the Westerner's point of view, the commonalties are often emphasized more than the differences. I am much more aware of the need to accentuate differences within Asian cultures, rather than to simplify them in one cultural category.

SS: Do you think there is a tendency in America to lump everyone from one country or continent together?

2 Uttar-Priyadarshi (The Final Beatitude) is a music-theater-dance work conceived and directed by Ratan Thyiam, a leading East Indian director, and uses stylized movement and vocal techniques that reference traditional performing and martial arts of Manipur. Uttar-Priyadarshi was performed by the Chorus Repertory Theatre of Manipur, India, which was established by Thyiam. It was copresented by the Walker Art Center and the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts at the Ordway Center, St. Paul, Minnesota, on October 2, 2000.

Musings on Globalism and Institutional Change
Vishakha N. Desai, Kathy Halbreich

ON JANUARY 26, 2002, Kathy Halbreich, director of the Walker Art Center, and Vishakha N. Desai, senior vice president and director of the Museum at the Asia Society, New York, sat down to discuss the pitfalls and the grace notes of addressing globalism in one's institutional and curatorial practices. Following is an edited version of that conversation.

Kathy Halbreich: Some people think of the Asia Society as a culturally specific institution that focuses exclusively on traditional art. Since joining the Asia Society in 1990, you've been clear that it is, quite literally, a multicultural institution that highlights contemporary as well as traditional practice across the disciplines. Can you talk about some of the challenges of being involved in an institution that represents half of the world?

Vishakha N. Desai: It is interesting that even though the purview of the Asia Society covers more than half of the world, we call it "culturally specific" whereas institutions that typically cover Euro-American cultures are often seen as being "universal" or encyclopedic. Such perceptions are at the heart of how Asian art is received in this country.

One could argue that throughout the last century the ways in which the histories of Asian art have been told in the United States, and in the West in general, have tended to differentiate those stories from the present and from one another. When I began to ask why the study of Asian art so often excludes the twentieth century, I became increasingly aware of my own hybridity, which is also a reflection of the hybrid history of modern Asia. Clearly the study of this history, embedded in the history of colonialism, undermines the "purity" question that is equated with traditional Asian art.

KH: What is the "purity" question?

VND: Once you acknowledge colonial history, even for those countries that were not colonized in the twentieth century, the history of twentieth-century Asian art cannot be discussed without considering the intervention, influence, and hegemony of the West. It cannot be done. One of the things we've learned from the debate going on in cultural studies is that when you look at other cultures, if you keep them "pure" or "authentic," you also keep them ahistorical, nonchanging, static. But cultures can no longer be examined in isolation. The minute I ask myself, "Who am I? What composes my identity?" I realize that the privileging of Asian cultures as pure and as "other" is an ideological position that is not acceptable.

KH: I'd like to examine how art historians have tended to differentiate one culture from another, acknowledging neither the hybridity nor the perils of nationalism. But is it possible that one of the positive outcomes of glob-alism today is this sense of differentiation between and among ourselves, between and among our cultures, between and among continents, countries, and generations?

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

This era has been identified with the emergence of the globalized world, the world of globalization. What is globalization? Ali A. Mazrui provides a concise definition: "It is the processes that lead toward global interdependence and increasing rapidity of exchange across vast distances."[5] This phenomenon, facilitated by political shifts, relies on international economic mergers--the intermeshing of money markets, stock exchanges, and banking systems--as well as on the development of new information networks across the globe, each of these different sectors being inextricably linked. In the economic world, this new form of internationalism--understood as the product of the association between late and predatory capitalism and the nation-state--is contributing to the development of deterritorialization, to the acceleration of environmental degradation, and to an increasing social gap within and across societies. Indeed, globalization could be seen as just another form of totalitarianism hiding new structures of economic or cultural power.

The question that arises is one of the indigenization or homogenization of other cultures and traditions, and more specifically, of an Americanization of the world under the guise of globalization and multiculturalism. These concerns were violently addressed by the recent protests in Seattle, Prague, and Genoa against the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the G8. It is fully legitimate to raise such issues, but it is equally important to understand--in a non-Manichean way--their full complexity, as Arjun Appadurai does when he expounds on Americanization: "But it is worth noticing that for the people of Irian Jaya, Indonesianization may be more worrisome than Americanization, as Japanization may be for Koreans, Indianization for Sri Lankans, Vietnamization for the Cambodians, and Russianization for the people of Soviet Armenia and the Baltic republics."[6] This multicentrality critically alters the notion of Euro-American centricity by not stopping there. Such a binary division (the West versus the Others) must be exploded.

What we are witnessing in the era of globalization seems to be a new stage in world development, not unlike the Enlightenment, that is affecting the political, social, economic, historical, and cultural situations of people all over the globe. We are facing a chaotic world in which every cultural space, every edge, every form of theoretical knowledge is about to be epistemologically rearticulated in order to identify the genealogy of the global subject. This genealogy should be explored so that the others do not remain other.

In the field of art and culture, we have been observing an expansion in the scholarship and methodologies used to investigate the cultural formation of the global subject. In the last twenty years, many exhibitions (for example, Les Magiciens de la Terre, the Johannesburg Biennial, the Istanbul Biennial, the Shanghai Biennale, The Short Century, the Gwangju Biennale, Documenta, to name a few) have opened the door to what economist Roger Burbach has called a "polycentrism," which challenges the established canon of Euro-American art.[7] By questioning the cultural dominance of Western art and civilization, these projects compel the curators and the audience to look beyond what we understand as the "modern world" and offer the possibility of an alternative that corrects a unilateral history of art. These initiatives, along with an incredible range of scholarly research (from Edward Said and Fredric Jameson to Homi K. Bhabha, Stuart Hall, Arjun Appadurai, Masao Miyoshi, Saskia Sassen, and Etienne Balibar to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Geeta Kapur, Sarat Maharaj, and Jean-François Chevrier), are forcing institutions to recognize that it is no longer possible to picture the world as it was envisioned by European and American foreign policies and strategies before the historical ruptures of 1989. In recent decades, the efforts of international biennials, freelance curators, universities, and think-tanks have clearly revealed that the old ways of planning and thinking about exhibitions; of programming films, performances, and concerts; and of writing art history no longer make sense.

5 Ali A. Mazrui, "Western Culture in a Globalizing Age," in Unpacking Europe: Towards a Critical Reading, eds. Salah Hassan and Iftikhar Dadi (Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 2001), p. 97.

6 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 32.

7 See Roger Burbach, Orlando Núñez, and Boris Kagarlitsky, Globalization and Its Discontents: The Rise of the Postmodern Socialisms (London and Chicago: Pluto Press, 1997).

Santiago Cucullu

Audiences unfamiliar with these complex histories are forced to make analogies to what they do know--or think they know--about a foreign culture, which is usually a mix of news reports, a few facts from world history class, or artifacts seen in museums.

Once you acknowledge colonial history, even for those countries that were not colonized in the twentieth century, the history of twentieth-century Asian art cannot be discussed without considering the intervention, influence, and hegemony of the West.

. . . the old ways of planning and thinking about exhibitions; of programming films, performances, and concerts; and of writing art history no longer make sense.