What "global art" and current (re)turns fail to see : a modest counter-narrative of "not-another-biennial (original) (raw)
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What is the scope of 'global art' and who drives its framing within the current climate of corporate globalization? In what ways do the recent global turn and curatorial turn underwrite meaningful global inclusivity and visibility, and to what degree does this globally shared art constitute mutuality? Does 'global art', including the accompanying process of biennialisation, allow for local narratives in a way that seriously accounts for a geopolitical view of contemporary art in the twenty-first century? While the inclusion of 'new art worlds' in what Belting, Buddensieg and Weibel (2013) term 'global art' is framed as a democratisation of contemporary art and the demise of the western art canon, it is important to raise questions regarding the blind spots of this supposedly global, post-1989 expansion. In this article I analyse the current discourse of 'global art' as articulated in The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds (Belting, Buddensieg & Weibel 2013), focusing on its origin, transcription, mapping, consumption and ultimately, I suggest, its emergence as a function of privilege. Challenging the charting of supposedly new art regions (Belting et al. 2013:100), which 'writes-out' local narratives and counter-narratives, I argue for a logic of subtraction in place of a logic of addition. While the latter triumphantly implies that 'new' art worlds have been added to the dominant core, the former is useful to a geopolitical perspective that strips away normative vision and actively seeks that which people often fail to see. In this paper I analyse the work of CAPE Africa Platform in South Africa, which, while briefly and erroneously used as "evidence” of biennialisation and global expansion in The Global Contemporary, was locally referred to as 'not-another-biennial'. Discussing what some see as the shortcomings of the Cape 07 and Cape 09 exhibitions, I propose a reconsideration of measures of 'success' and 'failure', suggesting that an embrace of 'failure' can enable new ways of seeing the privilege of the contemporary art world. It is only when blanks, failures and things presumed not to exist are carefully regarded, that the goal of achieving mutually shared art on a global scale might become possible. Only then does it become apparent that the global south can have a certain edge over what is viewed as the prevailing art world.
Situating Global Art. Topologies - Temporalities - Trajectories.
Ed. by Sarah Dornhof, Nanne Buurman, Birgit Hopfener, Barbara Lutz, 2018
In recent years, the term global art has become a catchphrase in contemporary art discourses. Going beyond additive notions of canon expansion, this volume encourages a differentiated inquiry into the complex aesthetic, cultural, historical, political, epistemological and socio-economic implications of both the term global art itself an the practices it subsumes. Focusing on diverse examples of art, curating, historiography an criticism, the contributions not only take into account (new) hegemonies and exclusions but also the shifting conditions of transcultural art production, circulation and reception.
Nonsite. Peer-reviewed quarterly journal of scholarship in the arts and humanities, 2024
This article contributes to an interdisciplinary journal issue in which four art historians responded to "The Global Rules of Art." I begin by considering the epistemological foundations of multidisciplinary exchange, drawing a comparison with the field of world literature studies and Franco Moretti's notion of “distant reading.” I then clarify what I mean by “global field,” describing how the term allows us to see the “globality” of contemporary art in new ways and to distinguish different global art circuits. Ultimately, I argue that a sociological perspective can offer a particular way of "distant seeing" global contemporary art that complements, rather than contradicts, art historical accounts' traditional preference for micro-level narratives related to material objects, artistic creation processes or artist case studies.
New geographies of the biennial: networks for the globalization of art
GeoJournal, 2021
In order to explore global biennials of contemporary art, this study provides a geospatial analysis of eleven global biennials to examine where artists are drawn from in these international exhibitions. The project aims to cut across a broad scope of biennials held in multiple regions to examine how artists are circulating in the contemporary world, where they are showing and, most importantly, how biennials are defining international contemporary art in the era of globalization. By mapping a series of biennials held around the globe over several iterations in the 2010s, this study provides unprecedented evidence of the geography of biennial selection among major exhibitions, how this has changed over time and whether patterns emerge for participation in global art world events. More than half of these biennials are held in countries that are in the Global South; this means that most of these locations are emerging art centers responding to new economic patterns under globalization. The use of maps to show the geographic distribution of biennial participants will point to various, competing models of the geography of global contemporary art and will allow reflection upon how new biennials are changing the geospatial dynamics of international art exhibitions today.
Desire and Form: Transnational Art Events and Artistic Positions
Active Withdrawals: Life and Death of Institutional Critique, 2016
The collapse of the bi--polar world order with the demise of the Berlin Wall has triggered a previously uncharted cartography of the art world. The incorporation of the newly emerging contemporary art contexts into the globalized art scene, which operates on the claim of democratizing the art system and absorbing yet "undiscovered" cultural territories, has arguably followed the trajectory of neo--liberal economics. The newly discovered art worlds for the increasingly globalizing art system have been those with natural resources, financial markets and geopolitical currencies. This economic and cultural expansion has been often coupled with the post 9/11 Bush doctrine that hails negative liberty as a positive notion by coercively imposing "freedom" onto various post--colonial contexts formerly aligned with one of the Cold War vectors of power. We can call these contexts post--peripheries since with globalization and increasing transnationalization of capital, the age--old center--periphery distinction is no longer viable. However, this does not mean that peripheries are extinct, but rather this suggests that power itself is dispersed to the extent that it becomes intangible. Dispersion and fragmentation of power and the subsequent complexity of center--periphery distinctions mask the real operation of capital that is always a totality. I define post--peripheries as discursive, geographic and cultural spaces that can and do exist in traditional centers of power and not only in the formerly colonized territories: increasing marginalization of the working classes and the structural exclusion of the unemployed from social life in the UK and the US post 1980s is one example of a post--periphery. Post--peripheries are those spaces and discourses wherein technologies and techniques developed in the center are consumed rather than produce. But these can also be consumed subversively, by misuse or misappropriation. Transnational art events such as biennales and festivals structurally reproduce the characteristics of the post--periphery: the means of representation and the discursive tropes emanate from the center, yet these are used and consumed in other geographies sometimes with conformism and at other times critically and subversively. Geographically dispersed and varied, transnational art events often promote a mobile cast of cultural workers and artists with repeated appearances in Gwangju, Sharjah, São Paolo, Istanbul and Dubai sequentially or at time synchronically. What the political and cultural geographies of various post--peripheries share is the ways in which the globalized art scene has constructed the notion of the art event which in turn relies on the
A Genealogy of the Global in Art Exhibitions: The Gap between Westkunst and the Global Contemporary.
EU-topías. Revista de interculturalidad, comunicación y estudios europeos, 2017
ABSTRACT Between Westkunst (Cologne, 1981), an exhibition that can be considered as the highest paradigm of the celebration of modernity according to the old Western and international system, and The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds, (Karlsruhe, 2011) a celebration of the “global paradigm”, the world of exhibitions experienced one of the big epistemological turns that we could call “rites of passage,” from a monocultural world to another world that was gradually becoming multicultural, intercultural, and globalised. KEY WORDS: Transnational dialogues, ethnoscapes, deterritorialisation, cosmopolitanism, New Internationalism, Interculturalism, Primitivism., afropolitanism. PDF:https://annamariaguasch.com/pdf/publications/A\_Genealogy\_of\_the\_Global\_in\_Art\_Exhibitions:\_the\_Gap\_between\_Westkunst\_and\_the\_Global\_Contemporary.pdf
Globalism in Art and Culture: Toward an Alternative Paradigm
Globalization is the defining character of the present world. It references the interconnectedness of nation-states and communities of people. It is a highly contested arena of social science discourse. There are those that criticise it for its negative consequences, for example commercialism. Those that favour it, often focus on positive social goods, such as democracy. These two opposing views are not unlike Karl Marx critique of capitalism and Adam Smith's defence of it. The following brief essay follows a particular thread in the relevant discourses, which is focused on culture and art. It concludes with a discourse on two examples of transnational cultural exchange practice.