Aimee Chang, Douglas Fogle, Olukemi Ilesanmi, Philippe Vergne
ON MARCH 7, 2002, Philippe Vergne, Douglas Fogle, Olukemi Ilesanmi, and Aimee Chang engaged in a roundtable discussion of the Walker Art Center's global initiative and the mounting of the exhibition
How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in a Global Age.[1] Following is an edited version of that conversation.
Aimee Chang: Let's start with the title of the show . . .
Philippe Vergne: It was the result of a process that started with a discussion about what the exhibition should be and whether or not we should look at a specific theme. We went through many, many options;
Once Upon a Place and
Total Architecture were two early possibilities.
Douglas Fogle: When we first started organizing the exhibition, we used the notion of "metropole" as a structuring principle, relating to the cities we were visiting, but that quickly fell out as a strategy.
PV: Another idea was to use the show as a reflection of how art practice changes when we change locations. We tried
The Third Place, making a distinction between place and space, after the theory of Homi Bhabha.[2] We tried
Globalism, using that word like the word modernism to see if a comparable shift could be identified in the development of late twentieth-century art. None of these initial ideas were completely satisfying. In the end, we did not want the show to be about a specific theme, to illustrate a theme. We wanted to keep our eyes and minds as open as possible when we were traveling and identifying artists.
But we did want to place the exhibition in a historical perspective and to position it with respect to a specific history of art.
Harald Szeemann's 1969 exhibition When Attitudes Become Form was seminal in that it highlighted shifts in practice that are still very active today, framed the way institutions and curators worked, and identified a very specific range of aesthetics. It reflected a major change in the world during the late 1960s. Mário Pedrosa, in one of his essays on Hélio Oiticica, speaks of an experimental exercise of freedom.[3] Such an "exercise" was firmly in place in
When Attitudes Become Form, and it became, for us, a way to position our title:
How Latitudes Become Forms.
When we discussed this title with the global advisory committee, Paulo Herkenhoff found the reference to Szeemann's show very interesting. For Paulo,
When Attitudes Become Form was a very important exhibition that signaled both the beginning and the end of a very specific way of working--the beginning of international exhibitions but also the peak of Eurocentrism. The artists involved in
When Attitudes Become Form were almost
exclusively from America and Europe.[4] In selecting our title, I really liked this idea of using latitude in both meanings of the word.
Geographically we were changing our own latitude, looking at other latitudes. And we were also giving ourselves latitude with regards to the way our institution functions.
The other element that appealed to me about Szeemann's exhibition was the subtitle:
Live in Your Head. Looking at the way art practice has developed over the last ten years, I like the idea of substituting "world" for "head": Live in your world.
The world is increasingly entering the artworks as subject and material and more and more artists are trying to address issues in our world in a responsible way.
We also discussed the problematic aspects of our title: Is it okay to borrow from the title of such an important exhibition by such an important curator? It was interesting to see that when we tested the title on our colleagues in the visual arts, they were nervous about it, about us encroaching on something so mythic, so iconic. On the other hand, our colleagues in other fields, who might not have knowledge of the Szeemann exhibition, were completely fine with the title. For them, the title made sense, almost a literal sense.
It's really an homage to what Szeemann identified in 1969, not only in terms of what artists were doing but in terms of the methodology and the language of exhibitions. It's an awareness about where we're coming from, our roots in a specific field, and our working methods. It is a marker and a point of reference. In giving ourselves latitude we don't want to forget or deny our own history. Putting the exhibition in this perspective was a way for us to acknowledge that.
DF: Yes. The neutrality of the white cube as we know it in terms of gallery space is so linked to a history of European essentialism and universalism that goes back to the Enlightenment. It's very interesting to think about the ways in which Szeemann's practice and the artists he was bringing to the fore started to challenge that assumption of neutrality. There is, I hope, a continuation of that critique in the work we're doing today.
PV: With Szeemann's show, and the idea of site specificity, the white cube became a structural part of the vocabulary of artists. That site specificity is still in place in the way artists work, but
there is also an enlarged understanding of site in the work we're considering: that of a cultural site. These artists are active not only in a physical space but also in a cultural space.
AC: Tell me about the global initiative and the process of deciding to work with a committee.
PV: In 1999, Kathy Halbreich, the director of the Walker, proposed that we challenge our way of working and expand our practice beyond our comfort zone. The question that Kathy initially raised was: Is there a new form of internationalism linked to the globalization of the world, and how could we, as an institution, embrace the resulting changes? She was following an informal Walker tradition of looking beyond the United States. The museum has a long history of working in an international field, with exhibitions such as
Tokyo: Form and Spirit,[5] which at the time was not a mainstream practice. The museum opened its doors to a spectrum of artists, including Marcel Duchamp, Hélio Oiticica, Mario Merz, Lucio Fontana, and Michelangelo Pistoletto.
DF: The global initiative followed a number of other initiatives during the last ten years through which the Walker attempted to look at itself self-critically, to look at its own practice and to transform that practice. The previous initiative focused on developing our audience and our programmatic response to our audience.[6] We targeted three different audiences: teens, people of color, and low-income families. The global initiative is, in my mind, the next logical step. We are now looking at the relationship between an institution that happens to
be in the middle of the United States (in what is often snidely called the "fly-over" zone by people living on the coasts) and the rest of the world.
Olukemi Ilesanmi: Part of it is not forgetting where we're speaking from and acknowledging that, demographically, Minneapolis is increasingly diverse and increasingly international. The 2000 census was really amazing because it showed the incredible shifts in the communities that make up the Walker's potential audience.
This initiative reflects not only the larger issues of globalization but how our local context is also shifting and changing. We have to make fundamental adjustments in the institution to keep it fresh and innovative. Luckily, that kind of strategic self-reinvention is part of our history. This initiative is not a baby step; it's a giant step.
PV: In 1999, when we began this initiative, there was a lot of animated conversation around the idea of biennials and how they have been changing curatorial and artistic practice. Istanbul, Gwangju, and Shanghai could all be used as case studies. We asked ourselves: How can we sustain the effort started by freelance curators with those biennials? How are they affecting the way artists work and the way institutions work? How can we learn from that?
AC: What was the impetus for working with a committee?
DF: One of the first realizations the institution had after deciding to take on the project was that we couldn't do this work without having a group of people helping us.[7]
PV: We decided that, because of expertise, or lack thereof,
we could not just parachute into a country, understand the situation, master the network, and bring information back home. We did not want to be predatory "global curators." We needed people with expertise, people who belong to the places we wanted to look at.
OI: The idea of admitting when you don't know something and when you don't have the expertise became a valuable lesson and model. In my travels, the ability to say "I don't know" was an important marker of integrity. In South Africa, there was some suspicion of curators coming from abroad and assuming that they understood what was happening and that they could determine the art scene from afar. It speaks positively to a particular kind of attitude here at the Walker that it's okay to not know and to turn to others who might.
PV: We had many discussions about selecting the committee. One of the first things we needed to do was to establish parameters. We began by looking at biennials in the field of visual arts and at festivals in the fields of performing arts and film/video.
We decided to focus on countries that were under "biennialization" and to use them as case studies for examining art practices in a changing institution. Shanghai was a perfect example. Three of our committee members were directly involved with biennials. Hou Hanru was co-curator of the 2000 Shanghai Biennale and co-curator of the 2002 Gwangju Biennale. Vasif Kortun was chief curator of the Third Istanbul Biennial (1992). It was interesting to us that he had had a professional life in America, at Bard College, and then decided to go back to Istanbul to develop contemporary art programs. For him, an important goal was to create an institution--something permanent. The other person linked to biennials is Paulo Herkenhoff; who was director of the XXIV Bienal de São Paulo in 1998.
AC: Working with the committee has been very interesting for me; I think that our methodology has been unique. How would you describe it?
PV: It's a think tank.
DF: Yes, think tank is a really good way of putting it. Our meetings usually take place over the course of four to five days. The people present at the meetings are the committee members and Walker staff from the various programming departments. Early on, members of the committee presented their projects to the group: Hou Hanru talked about the exhibition
Cities on the Move, which he co-curated with Hans-Ulrich Obrist; Paulo
Herkenhoff gave us a sense of the larger sociopolitical, cultural situation in Brazil; Otori Hidenaga did a very interesting lecture about J-culture in Japan.[8]
The global initiative supported three of our exhibitions:
Let's Entertain,
Painting at the Edge of the World, and
How Latitudes Become Forms. Both Philippe (
Let's Entertain) and I (
Painting at the Edge of the World) presented our projects to the committee and offered ourselves up for critique. We got a lot of feedback, which was sometimes difficult, but extremely useful.
PV: It's important to mention that the committee members determined, very early on, not to be co-curators of our exhibition. Instead, they decided to act as markers or guides.
DF: Advisors.
PV: They didn't take us to their favorite studios. They gave us the first layer of information and then let us do the work. We shared with them the people we wanted to meet and they acted as conduits. I think they decided that if we wanted to do it this way, we'd have to go all the way. Our comfort zone was totally challenged. This was very important and we learned a lot from that.
OI: I've traveled to South Africa twice now. It was somewhat difficult to prepare for my visits there, and I was very reliant on guides. I also looked at past exhibitions that included South African artists, such as the Museum of African Arts'
Liberated Voices and the Guggenheim's
In/SIGHT: African Photographers, 1940-Present. The Web was a useful tool for finding updated information about curators and artists currently working in South Africa. A particularly helpful resource was a site called ArtThrob.com, which is run by Sue Williamson, an important artist based in Cape Town.
AC: What was it like going to South Africa as an American curator?
OI: It had its challenges. I was very aware of a lingering perception of curators as poachers. There have been a number of South Africa-themed exhibitions in the West, particularly in Europe; this was apparent just looking through the résumés of many of the artists I met. It was very rare that their work was put in a context other than South Africa post-1994. When the artists had moved beyond that, more often than not it was into biennials--a very different international context but, again, not institutional. Many of the artists I met were no longer interested in being in another show just about South Africans. I stressed the fact that the Walker is trying to build long-term relationships with artists and with cultural institutions, and to foster fundamental change in our own institution.
Race and color are still very much hot-button issues within South Africa. The art community is still somewhat subdivided by color. There seemed to be a lot of tension around who holds power in the art community and how that power is negotiated. Many artists complained about the state of art criticism in South Africa and the fact that it's mostly written by white South Africans, who have traditionally had greater access to education and art institutions. Black people have only recently been entering the premier universities in expanded numbers. The effect this has had on professional resources and opportunities--on what people are able to do and how they're able to build and lead discourse around their own work--is a central concern.
PV: This became apparent when we asked Walter Chakela to name some South African artists of interest to him. From our vantage point, we were thinking of William Kentridge as a South African artist. Walter's response was, "Kentridge? We know he makes art but we never see it. We don't know where he lives, in what part of the community." His visibility is a Western phenomenon. Traveling was a way for us to broaden our scope.
OI: You bring up an interesting point. A number of South African artists I met remarked that far too often their work is not seen in South Africa. It only functions as a marker and symbol in the outer world. Often due to
lack of institutional support, and a dearth of art institutions in general, they're not showing at home and they're not participating in the internal discussion.
PV: If we talk about what we learned from our travels and what the greatest challenges were, for me it was the question of
how to position yourself as a curator and a decision-maker when you enter an artist's studio.
OI: I remember the lively discussion sparked by Walter's slide show of South African artists during a global advisory committee meeting. We at the Walker were forced to articulate what we were looking for, i.e., what type of work our comfort zone includes. I do have certain ways of looking at art, certain expectations about what is interesting to me--issues that are addressed or how work is approached conceptually and aesthetically--which are not always identical to what some of these artists are producing. Yet, as artist Amelia Mesa-Bains has insightfully noted,
"Quality is a euphemism for the familiar." That recognition has been pushing me forward. What parameters of the comfort zone are necessary within the established mission of the Walker as a forward-looking institution for contemporary art practice, and where should we make a leap?
PV: How do we move beyond the models and aesthetic categories that are already in place and how can we expand our language? How do we talk about our project when we enter the studio? What does it mean when you enter a studio in Johannesburg or in São Paulo or in Beijing and say, "I'm here because I'm doing a global show and you're a global artist"? Clearly, that would be problematic, as would going to Minneapolis studios to mount a "local" show. Geography is not particularly useful as an organizing principle. In fact, it's a conversation we had over and over again with the committee and in our internal monthly meetings about the project. Should we conceive of the show as a global show, or should we find a theme around globalization, or should we talk about something else? Is the show about art and practices? I also have the feeling when entering the studios that artists really want to be included in exhibitions about something else. They don't want to be in a global show. They want their work to be addressed, it may be a stretch to say this, in almost formal terms.
Globality is a methodology, not a theme. It is really about developing another alternative, another vocabulary for art. Is it possible to talk about an international language of art?
DF: That's a complicated question. We were talking a few months ago about the definition of art. It doesn't really exist in the Japanese language. They have a completely different relationship to what we think of as contemporary art--at least in the early part of the twentieth century. The reality of the situation is that our institutions in the West do have power in the art world because that's where the resources are. It sounds so dogmatically Marxist, but it does come down to a certain kind of power relationship. This is where the money is. Museums can buy things. Galleries can sell work to collectors. In a lot of these places, the collector bases simply aren't as strong.
PV: Last week I was talking with a friend and she was getting uncomfortable because I mentioned the idea of an international language. She felt that we're not here to identify an international language, that we should not be promoting an international language through what we choose.
DF: She felt that we might be putting a frame on the work.
PV: Yes. I don't have a problem with that. Then she questioned the idea that I don't have a problem with an international language.
DF: I'm not in the camp that suggests that an international language, whatever that might be, corrupts some kind of authentic tradition. There are issues of tradition and modernity that are specific to each place and wildly divergent. These battles are happening there; they are not solely being imposed from the outside. It makes me think of the critical work that has been done by Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, or by Stuart Hall, around the question of "articulation." The questions they pose are certainly ones of power, but they center on the ways in which language can be a site of cultural struggle in the sense of Antonio Gramsci's notion of hegemony. A colonial language, for example, can be turned against its originating source and be specifically articulated within different contexts. Sarat Maharaj made an interesting point regarding this idea recently in a discussion with Daniel Birnbaum published in
Artforum.[9] He suggested that James Joyce's
Ulysses is in fact a provocative and
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
to raise a question about his own status in this specific place--might have things in common with the 1960s.
I don't think we're interested in artists who are going to spontaneously reinvent the history of modernity. I don't think an artist should be an art historian, totally aware of every step in the development of a specific language. We hope that the artists we are inviting will be considered the equals of artists working in every part of the world. I'm sure Song and other artists are aiming for the same status. I don't know if he knows Nauman's work, but I would think that he does and that the work he's producing in a very specific cultural situation is also an acknowledgment of a specific art history, that in choosing a specific art-making language he's producing almost a meta-criticism. Not only does his work comment on a specific situation--the artist in China--but it also acknowledges a history of form and artistic production. That would be this international language I'm talking about, not just displacing Nauman's strategies in time and place but acknowledging them in such a way that you can forget about them, but they're still there. Does this make any sense?
DF: Yes, it makes sense.
AC: I'm really glad you said that because I think Song's aims and intent are very different from Nauman's.
PV: Why do you say they're very different?
AC: In my view, Song's piece is about futility and perhaps some kind of existential dilemma. Nauman's work is more about physical endurance and space. Nauman seems much more architecturally oriented whereas Song seems much more philosophically oriented.
PV: You have a point, but you could also argue the opposite. Nauman is totally involved with a theory of perception, phenomenology, but the existential idea of the cornered human being is also the content of his piece. There is a question of the artist's status and role. When Nauman was making these videos, those questions and the question of the function of the studio--you call it architecture--were very much in circulation. The notion that the studio is somewhat dependent on what an artist produces is present in both pieces.
AC: Yes. And that raises another interesting issue. In a way, it is the difference between thinking about the studio and thinking about Tiananmen Square. During one of our meetings someone asked, "Does Song have the association with Tiananmen Square that we do?" It was very quickly brought up that he does, but that he also has many other associations beyond that. To backtrack a little bit, I think you're right in what you're saying about Nauman, but there is a difference.
The difference I'm pointing out is the one between the studio space and the public space, very fraught with meaning, of Tiananmen Square.
PV: Kemi was saying that "quality is a euphemism for the familiar." Is it a surprise that when we talk about Song Dong we need to go back to Bruce Nauman?
AC: For me, it's not a question of whether it's problematic to talk about Song and Nauman in relation to each other. The fact is that we always do--that is our field of reference, and we need to make that transparent.
DF: It's inevitable. It has to do with our location. It is important to acknowledge, in a very situational way, where each of our discourses derives from. When you said earlier, "It's almost impossible that there isn't an international language and that's okay," what's interesting to me about that is--going back to phenomenology, to situational aesthetics--the situation in which you are coming from in terms of locating that language and talking about it. I don't necessarily have a problem with talking about Song's work in relation to Nauman as long as we're not talking about an anxiety of influence, trying to trace some teleology back from Song through Nauman, or as long as it's not a completely formalist type of deductive reasoning that takes you back to the original Hegelian moment or Kantian essence or whatever. That's where you get into trouble with notions of imperialism, intellectual and otherwise. It's much more complicated than that; there are multiple centers from which various ideas emanate, whether they're economic, philosophical, or political.
Last night, I was watching the film
Lumumba, about the Congo. Marxism is a great example of something that originated in mid-nineteenth-century Europe, provided an ideological basis for a revolution in the Soviet Union, and was subsequently translated into various local contexts. The same could be said of liberation theology in South America, taking the Catholic liturgy and radicalizing it. It emanated out of what we would consider an intellectual imperialist sort of mode, if you want to call it that, which is Christianity, but it was used differently. To suggest there is no such thing as modes of thought that become more dominant and less dominant and disseminate is disingenuous; but it is equally problematic to suggest that these modes of thought are hermetic and monolithic.
Take, for example, the unique trajectory of Brazil's colonial situation vis-à-vis the development of art history. If you look at the way in which the Neo-concretists adopted suprematism as well as Soviet constructivism, it was very much, initially, a formal set of practices--geometric abstraction--that was politicized. Oiticica's
Bolides, with their containers of pigment, or Lygia Clark's
Bichos--her multiform, interactive aluminum sculptures--as well as her performance works involved a radicalizing of phenomenology, making the body interact with the object when normally the body was passive in relationship to the art object. During a time when Brazil was under a military dictatorship, when having art that was didactically political would have gotten you thrown in jail or "disappeared," it was a way to sidestep a direct form of political propaganda, or whatever you want to call it. It anticipated the post-1968 philosophical politics of Michel Foucault and others who started talking about the body as a political conduit.
I do think there are these so-called dominant languages that circulate, but I also think it's a question of how they are situated.
OI: One of my favorite book titles is Coco Fusco's
English Is Broken Here. Just this weekend, I was at a symposium during which Nuno Ramos, a Brazilian artist, joked that
the universal language is broken English. Like any language, English mutates as it travels. So, yes, it has become the conversational language of business, but the way it's spoken in China is different from the way it's spoken in India, different from the way it's spoken in Nigeria, different from the way it's spoken in Minneapolis or even in different neighborhoods of Minneapolis. Perhaps there are recognizable or familiar elements in the language that artists speak, but from case to case they are radicalized and changed and used differently. That metaphor of broken English has influenced the way I think about the visual language of the work we're looking at. There are these intersections and moments of connection, moments of recognition, and then there are other times when it veers off in very different ways and to different places. The language becomes new, reinvigorated--Homi Bhabha's third way.
PV: If we're trying to talk about an international language or to define art practices while relying on this international language, there is another model that we're overlooking. It's the multidisciplinarity of many of the artists we're looking at. Many of the works we are considering are totally "in between," drawing on or explicitly using elements of film, video, performance. Where does this come from?
The artists want to produce work that doesn't belong specifically to the white cube, doesn't belong to the field of the object. They're producing an event more than an object, a project more than an object, something that needs to be experienced in time. Many of the works we're looking at--especially from Brazil--seem to involve these multiple fields of reference. I wonder if, rather than reflecting a traditional view of multidisciplinarity, this idea of looking at art beyond our borders, our cultural borders, is taking us somewhere else.
Oiticica provides such an important model. He was not positioning himself against but rather toward something else. Toward something that includes a history of art that we know (concretism, etc.), but involves his own particular cultural context, a very specific way of understanding popular culture or a popular event, such as Carnival. He attempted to meld all of these different parameters to produce something else, which he explicitly said is not a work of art. He was producing something different, and that's an important boundary for us. Maybe, at some point, we are looking at projects that are not works of art. And then we can go back to Duchamp, who said, "Can an artist produce something that is not a work of art?" So Duchamp is back and kicking.
AC: We've talked a lot about biennials and how we might be able to do something different because of our position as a permanent institution.
PV: It's a question that some of the artists have asked: "How is what you're doing different from a biennial?" I don't think we know yet how it is different; it's something that's going to develop over time. Not only at the level of exhibitions but throughout the institution--from educational programs to collection-building to our hiring practices.
DF: We're in the middle of it right now. I think that structurally the difference will be that there's a continuing institutional memory.
This process that we're going through intellectually will, we hope, transform the institutional memory in terms of how we work with people. Another part of it--maybe a smaller part of it--is that we are a collecting institution. This is a huge difference in terms of being able to build ongoing relationships with artists, as we have done with many artists in the collection. We can't do it with everybody, but it's a different philosophy of working with artists over the long haul.
OI: That was a common question from artists when I was traveling in South Africa. There are a number of artists there who participate in biennials or are in private collections, but not necessarily in institutional collections. So we had conversations about institutional history and being contextualized within a collection. The Walker's collection can, ostensibly, comprise contemporary art from anywhere, which is one context; being collected by the Smithsonian African History Museum is a different but equally important context, illuminating in a different way. So this sense of being collected, becoming part of a larger conversation and part of scholarship so that people can look at your work fifty years from now rather than just reading about it in a catalogue is an important issue for artists. It's a different way of being situated within the context of art history.
DF: This brings us back to an awareness of our responsibilities as curators, as representatives of an institution. When we look at something, when we buy something, how does that action change it? It comes back to being self-critical, self-reflexive about who we are, where we are, what we are doing, and how our actions affect other people. We are an institution. Institutions have histories. Institutions have an effect on people. Institutions have power in this world. We have to acknowledge that we, in many ways, could create a market for an artist by selecting him or her. That power is not necessarily a bad thing. And it's not a given that an artist will attain a strong recognition in the art market simply by being shown at a museum. But it is important to be aware of that responsibility.
AC: One thing that strikes me is that in any given country there are artists who are operating inside the country and artists who are operating on an international level. Can we talk about that?
OI: In South Africa it relates to the fact that there are very few opportunities for exhibiting. There is virtually no government support for the arts. Within the small gallery system, you often have to pay to be exhibited. As an artist you might produce the work and then pay the gallery to show it. There's not a huge collecting public. Being successful outside the country can mean having more opportunities to show. It's about having your work collected, privately or institutionally, and it's about getting exposure and having your work take part in a larger narrative.
DF: It's hard for me to generalize about the Indian context after spending only fourteen days in the country, but my perception from talking to people while I was there is that there is an art market in India, not so much for installation and video work, but for painting and sculpture.
PV: I wonder if this difference in the support system affects the strategies developed by artists. In China, there are two options. There is a support system of dealers and galleries, but if you want to show in this context you have to work in painting, drawing, classical sculpture, or, at the extreme, photography. The other possibility is to do your work--video work, performance work, or installation work--but to have absolutely no market, no support system. The only way to gain visibility is through these very unstable places, artist-run spaces, where works go up and down very quickly for a number of reasons. This reality affects the way artists practice.
What is interesting is how different support systems enter into the making of the work--how the formal or aesthetic strategies that artists are using reflect the fact that the white cube is not the obvious space to show their work. The profusion of video is informative here. It is an easily accessible form of production and offers an alternative
way to distribute your work. For many of the artists I met in Japan, Turkey, and China, video monitors are a convenient way to show work. You don't have to have a studio. You can get a digital camera and produce moving images that you can to show in film festivals. But then you can also show the work in galleries. Wang Jian Wei is an example of that strategy. At some point the support system, or lack of support system, or a different kind of support system, totally enters the equation of making art and showing art.
DF: Almost all of the artists I saw in Brazil were represented by galleries, white-cube galleries, where they could have shows very similar to any show in New York or Los Angeles. Traditionally, the gallery system in India has been about traditional painting and sculpture and is somewhat more conservative, but there are a few major commercial spaces that take risks and produce less traditional kinds of work and exhibitions.
PV: For me, the question is particularly relevant to the use of vernacular materials by someone like Franklin Cassaro. When we talk about the aesthetics behind this exhibition, we often talk about "modesty"--a discreet mode of production, almost from scratch. I wonder if this is sometimes a pragmatic decision on the part of the artist, if there is an economic situation at the very beginning of the process that leads to making work with very, very limited production values.
DF: With Franklin, I don't know. He has a gallery. He sells work. I think that his choice of materials has more to do with the legacy of Oiticica and Neo-concretism--a philosophical decision. He calls his version "bio-con-cretism," a reference to the biomorphic nature of his work and its biological aspects. He uses simple, readily available, cheap materials, such as aluminum foil, food packaging, and newspaper, to do his work.
PV: If we look at Thomas Hirschhorn, whose work makes a certain political, social statement . . . at some point, the means he's using to produce his work are going to match the philosophy of the work.
DF: That's equally true for Cassaro. It's not about "I can't afford plastic or PVC, so I'm going to use duct tape."
PV: There is something important about being able to produce a meaningful object or project from nothing. I wonder if this conversation resonates with the artists we've selected, if there was a conscious decision on their part not to have, I hate to use this term, high production value?
DF: Glossy versus matte. I would think that, yes, that's probably the case for Cassaro.
PV: And Cabelo?
DF: With Cabelo there's something philosophical that determines what the work ends up being materially. His relationship to concrete poetry, vermiculture, and science--all this comes together in his work to create a philosophical position. It weaves its way into the performative spaces he creates and the sculptures he makes for those spaces. The work has a very ad hoc quality to it in terms of both its formal elements and his selection of materials.
PV: The building of something from the discarded is an important idea. The choice of the aesthetic makes up part of what the work is about.
AC: It's key to Robin Rhode.
OI: Yes, definitely. Think about how his drawings are linked to graffiti and to cave painting. His work is created very much on the fly.
AC: And deals with desire, creating what you want from nothing.
OI: Absolutely. For him, the low-tech nature of his methods is linked philosophically to what the project is about. There are similar aesthetic/conceptual motivations at work for Usha Seejarim and Moshekwa Langa.
DF: Also for Sheela Gowda. Her choice of cow dung, Kum Kum dye, thread--it's a fairly simple practice in terms of materials, but she does very interesting things with them. She chooses those materials because of what they are, what they represent within the context of the collision between urban and rural India.
AC: Are we supporting a certain "modest" aesthetic?
PV: We're acknowledging such an aesthetic. And I would be very cautious about not situating the entire exhibition under this notion of "modesty" because there are plenty of works in the show that do not belong to this aesthetic. The artists in
How Latitudes Become Forms are using a wide variety of strategies and aesthetics. Perhaps it would be more to the point to ask:
Are we posing a question about the role and the responsibility of the artist? For example, it was a very powerful experience for me to realize the political difficulties and the physical and financial risks that Chinese artists are taking when they decide to work outside of the official art circle. It's not a career in the same way that it's a career here. Because the system functions differently, the repercussions and consequences of being an artist and of showing your work entail a range of implications that don't exist in the United States or in Europe. Being aware that the artist has a responsibility and is taking risks reinformed the way I look at the work and the way I make decisions. I know this is what the work of every artist should be about, but maybe the Western world has been in a bubble. It's something that was a little lost, at least for me, in the way I was looking at art.
OI: As far as the issue of this aesthetic is concerned, we're certainly not trying to say that this exhibition includes all of the interesting work or artists, or the only modes of creating work that were relevant in these countries. It's simply what fit into this exhibition, at this time, for a variety of different reasons.
DF: The point you raise is important. All of us have had to ask, as we've traveled to all of these different cities, "Why am I interested in that particular artist?" We've been questioning ourselves. Do I like that work because quality is a euphemism for the familiar, as Kemi brought up? When you're an arbiter, when you're someone out there choosing work to be seen in a public context, it's important to ask that question. Context is key, and the more we can understand about where an artist is coming from--for example, Marepe vis-à-vis Carnival in Brazil, samba music, Neo-concretism, etc.--the more the work is going to resonate with you, resonate in terms of grasping the different levels at which you might read it. Levels that go beyond a more conventional reading through the lens of Western art history or through the lens of the history of music in Brazil, which itself traces back to African music.
AC: Every object has its own set of evocations for each particular viewer.
DF: That's true. As Roland Barthes suggests, it's the transition from the notion of the work to the notion of text.[10] The notion of the work is that there is a book. You read it, biographically, psychologically; it has one interpretation. There's the work and you just have to get at the true meaning. This is hermeneutics, as opposed to Barthes' notion of textuality, which is about the context:
how it's read, how it's read by different people from different places. Think about how cricket is played and reappropriated by people in Pakistan compared to how it was introduced by the colonial power into that area.
In the end, when we are operating from a different place--we're not in Brazil but we're trying to understand and interpret Brazilian work--it goes back to that language of context. I might be wrong, but I imagine that most of the artists we're talking to have some knowledge of what's happening here, in our place, and obviously much more knowledge of the history there, more than we do, at least.
OI: That is the traditional place of the Other, right?
The Other always has to know the dominant language as well as their "own" language. So a black person in America, for example, has to know not only African American literature but also the dominant literature. It's important to reveal those cracks in our own knowledge systems. Many South African artists I talked to would put their work in a context that I didn't recognize, making historical
linkages that weren't familiar to me. Certainly, the sociopolitical context of South Africa came up far more often in discussions of work than did art history--even though that came up as well.
DF: The crucial thing is to catch yourself applying a cultural lens. Building on that, I really want to add just two more points. First, I want to stress the multiplicity of viewers in Minneapolis who walk through that door. There are people from all over the world who live here now, and we hope our audience becomes even more and more diverse. Somebody who was born and raised in India and has been living here for fifteen years is going to read content into Sheela Gowda's work that I'm never going to see, and I truly value that. Maybe they can illuminate the work for me. As much as I want to learn more about the Indian context, I can only learn so much. Gowda's piece
And Tell Him of My Pain (1998/2001) is going to mean something different to an Indian woman of a certain age who lives in Minneapolis than it's going to mean to me.
Second, at some level, I don't think there's anything inherently problematic in this notion of a canon. If a canon is reified, if a canon is exclusive in terms of us versus them or Western versus whatever, that's a problem. Museums and institutions work with canons. To a certain extent, not completely,
we think of ourselves as a countercanon, an alternative canon, an off-center canon. Adding these artists into our collection as another kind of a canon is a way of challenging the canon of Western-European artistry.
AC: One of the unique things about this project is how multiple departments in the museum are involved. Can you describe how the concept evolved of the "exhibition" as a museum-wide project?
PV: It was important to us, from the very beginning, that all Walker programming departments be involved. We didn't really know what the end result was going to be, but we were trying to work outside of our comfort zone. We wanted to shift the way we talk about art and ideas. It was challenging for us to break our habits. We tried to start from a point where nothing is a given. We had to take ideas back to the beginning in order to explain them across disciplines. We were talking the other day about translatability, an idea that applies across departments as well. That said, it's really important that we stress the difference between multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity. Our programs do not have to cross over at every moment.
DF: It's not about the complete hybridization of all media into some Gesamtkunstwerk. It's about focusing on different media and having them interact in some way, but not blending them all into one large medium.
PV: Learning from the gap that lies between the different disciplines is a remedy against an academicism in which practice starts to become overly self-reflective, self-indulgent.
DF: Even within the visual arts department itself, it's significant that we don't subscribe to the nineteenth-century segregation of disciplines: we don't have a painting department, a photography department, a drawing department, etc.
PV: The overlap between departments that occurred naturally was surprising, and reassuring. If you take what Philip Bither, the performing arts curator, Cis Bierinckx, the film and video curator, or Steve Dietz, the new media curator, were presenting to us, in terms of the content we were all headed in the same direction. The performances Philip was thinking about, what Steve was exploring with Raqs Media Collective, the work of a young architect from Turkey, Can Altay, it all resonated.
AC: Can we connect that resonance to a shift outside of the context of this institution--maybe to a shift in art practice itself? Is there a way in which things are becoming more multidisciplinary not only in the institution but outside of it as well?
OI: Wang Jian Wei, who is in the exhibition in the galleries, is also going to be the artist-in-residence in the film and video department. His documentary film work resonated equally with both departments.
PV: You're right. His source material and references are not from a visual art or museum culture. Theyreally derive from theater performance and documentary filmmaking, but his work is now shown primarily in
galleries. The multidisciplinary agenda that we have is reflected in the practice of some of the artists, but not systematically.
Something very interesting and new about the way we're working is how this coming together of departments at the Walker is formalized in the publication. It might be one of the first times that everything--the exhibition, the film program, the performing art program, and the educational curriculum--has a voice in the catalogue.
This crossover is embedded in my own researches.
Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed[11] and Oiticica's philosophies were equally important touchstones for me as a curator of the exhibition. They are both helping me to reconsider the word "popular."
OI: Working across departments is something that we have been moving toward through exhibitions such as
Art Performs Life,
Let's Entertain, and
American Tableaux. An important part of the institution's vision has to do with making connections cross-departmentally so that our audiences for film, for example, are not completely separate from our audiences for visual arts. If we make those connections inside the building then people outside the building can also make those connections. It was exciting, sometimes confusing, but mostly informative and thought-provoking to be at the table with all of the other departments and with our advisory committee and to make links--conceptually, thematically, and art historically--in the work we all do. The underlying goal of this initiative is about making fundamental changes that will help us formulate more expansive ideas and programming in the future.
PV: To wrap things up I'd like to read this statement by Raymond Williams, which I find helpful in understanding the goal of such an institutional initiative:
The innovations of what is called Modernism have become the new but fixed forms of our present moment. If we have to break out of the non-historical fixity of post-modernism, then we must search out and counterpose an alternative tradition taken from the neglected works left in the wide margin of the century, a tradition that may address itself not to this by now exploitable because inhuman rewriting of the past but, for all our sakes, to a modern future in which community may be imagined again.[12]
This question of communities is central to our efforts. What communities are we talking about and to? How do we address them and why? How are they affected by and how are they affecting art practices, institutional practices?
The real challenge that we are facing as curators and museum workers is how to unfold an "alternative" within the social constructs of cultural institutions.
