Forgetting the Art World

210 Pages·2012·116.104 MB·English

by  Pamela M. Lee

I am forgetting the art world. It's going now-and fast. With a strange sense of pur
pose (or is it resignation?) I have shelved the magazines and tl1e annou11cc1ncnl cards.
Given up on the galleries and their established and emerging artists. No longer can
I retain the names, details, gossip around this new phenomenon or that; this new
current in theory or in art criticism; the fever dream around auctions, art fairs, bien
nials, MFA programs; the movement of curators, collectives, collectors, and dealers,
the cultural emissaries dujour. I am forgetting the art world because tl1e art world, at
least as it has been theorized for nearly fifty years now, is subject to conditions that
may soon cease to sustain it.
This is not to say that the art world is disappearing, diminishing in size, or slow
ing down in its capacity to generate capital and hype. The opposite is the case. The art
world, as it is generically understood, is both escalating and accelerating, appearing
to turn so fast- always on the brink of its next obsolescence-that its maps can no
longer be read as fixed or stable, its borders blurred at best. For this reason, forget
ting the art world is not the same as ignoring or standing outside it, as if one could
lay claim to a space beyond its imperial reach by wandering just far enough afield.1
I mean nothing so naive as tlus outside or distance, the fabled Archimedean point
from which to survey the workings of the art world as they take place down below.
Instead, to forget the art world is to acknowledge that what made its activities,
operations, and communities so distinct or memorable in the past- a kind of figure
to a social ground upon which it was historically fixed and dialectically established
has now given way to a pervasive routinization of its norms and procedures. When
contemporary experience is ever rationalized through the logic of design; when the
word "creativity" is taken as a cognate to the "market";2 and when social relations
are relentlessly mediated by a formidable visual culture- a culture of the image writ
large through the peregrinations of global media- the art world as we once knew it
begins to lose its singularity and focus, to say little of its exclusivity. From Benjamin
to Adorno, Debord to Jameson, we've been told of both the promise and the threat of
tlus culture for a very long time indeed.3 This culture is such that whatever grasp we
thought we had on the relative autonomy of works of art becomes increasingly tenu
ous, a condition exploited for reasons both progressive and reactionary. To update
this by now familiar set of critical tropes, contemporary art has been increasingly re
cruited in the service of politics, economics, and civil society, a condition that George
2
Introduction
theorizes ,vhen he ,vrites of culture as being an expedient "resource" to the in
t·
c<•ssantly managerial ethos of the global age.4 What this condition suggests for these
prl'sent reflections, among many important things, is a certain eclipse of a historical
notion of the art world.
No doubt one forgets the art world because thecompetinglogics of"globalization"-
a word as banal as it is ugly- do not permit us to remember.5 The longstanding con
troversies around that term have everything to do with the current state of the art
world and its forgetting.6 A typical shorthand on the topic describes a historical com
pression in time-space relations- the social acceleration of time and a virtual eclipse
of distance-continuous with the liberalization of markets and the rise of the network
society. Historians debate the periodization of the term; anthropologists its impact
on indigenous cultures; activists haunt cities flush with capital or crowded witl1 the
poor, from Davos to Brussels, Porto Alegre to Bamako. Still, little consensus exists re
garding globalization's consequences for the work of art; and still, the relay between
contemporary art and globalization, by far the most important curatorial rubric of
the last two decades, remains stalled in something like a critical holding pattern. Pro
visionally, one might take a cue from the phrasing of Immanuel Wallerstein, who in
a formative analysis of world systems theory described the period between 1945 and
1990 as "The Age of Transition;' a title that usefully captures a sense of the phenome
non's duration, restlessness, and motility. That globalization is an "act;' a "process;· or
is "happening"-the ready-to-hand definition furnished by the OED- does indeed
suggest a fitful relation to category that curators, critics, and art historians alike have
earmarked as a historical "crisis:' Whether or not this process is itself singular or di
rected to a unique objective is the source of what thinkers from Arjun Appadurai to
Ulrich Beck identify as globalization's principal questions: whether its motivations
are univocal or, conversely, what is the reach of its differentiation on both economic
and cultural grounds.7 This book takes as its project to interrupt, or at least to slow
down, our view of such processes through charting what I call the work of art's world.
Globalization, to follow this brief, issues a challenge to representation equal if
opposite to the colonizing impulse ascribed to it. It is a kind of informe: a new "allover"
which seemingly trumps our collective efforts to give shape to its multivalent inter
ests, let alone contain its deterritorializing mandate. Indeed the word "globalization"
and its linked phenomena ("globality," "glocality," and even "globalism;' the "ism"
Forgetting the Art World
3
here connoting eitJ1er an ethos or a period style) bear the distinction of being both
ubiquitous and a1norphous: ubiquitous because inescapable to any world citizen
and yet amorphous because subject to infinite shape-shifting in both mainstream
and alternative n1edia. No doubt ilie student of globalization knows full well that the
term does mean many iliings, at once bound up in ilie rhetoric of galloping free mar
kets and ilie lingering specter of Marx; ilie homogenizing of culture on ilie one hand
and radical hybridity on ilie oilier.6 Is it ilie Battle in Seattle or the so-caUed war on
terror? Jihad or McWorld? The multitude or ilie Nike army? The controversy around
ilie term is arguably what endows it wiili boili its acute frisson and the capacity to be
generalized ad infinitum. As with ilie art world's treatment of postmodernism two
decades earlier, the semantic stalemate around globalization is typically resolved by
conceding to ilie plurality of its representations.
And iliat's part of ilie problem as well. In the weakest iterations of the topic wiiliin
ilie art world, it all seems like so much old-school pluralism, the bad dream of the
postrnodern iliat Hal Foster presciently warned against in observing iliat "the plural
ist position plays right into ilie ideology of ilie 'free market:"9 Globalization, to follow
iliis model, translates into ilie far-flung from all over, sponsoring an anyiliing-goes ap
proach to recent art in which terms such as "conflict:' "tension;• and "contradiction''
inadvertently license this pluralistic approach without recourse to the conditions en
abling it. Tracking ilie implications of such conditions for ilie work of art is indeed
central to what follows. But what need to be stressed at ilie outset are the equally criti
cal implications of ilie work of art in the very enabling of these global conditions. The
concrete processes motivating this dynamic of reciprocity-the way globalization is
materialized wiiliin and by contemporary art-are at ilie crux of this book.
This introduction outlines the logic at work here. Our first task is to sketch ilie
ways in which ilie art world has dealt with the global problematic described above
,
crystallizing around ilie doubled valence of representation. I suggest that a founding
paradox animates ilie art world's collective efforts to confront this question. To start
wiili, if ilie art world has necessarily taken on globalization as a curatorial or thematic
rubric, ilie art world is itself boili object and agent of globalization, both on struc
tural grounds (its organization and distribution) and in workaday practice. Indeed,
in responding to ilie geopolitical and transnational preoccupations of ilie work of
4
lntroducllon
1n,1. , colltl'll1porury nrtists, the art world enlarges at once its geographically overde
tenninl'd hurdcrs and its conventionally Eurocentric selr-definitions in the process.10
Tn\..t•, ror cxnn1plc the \,Vork of Bani Abidi, who lives and works in both Karachi
1
and Ne,v l)t•lhi, rcc'cived her MFA in Chicago, and has held residencies in Japan and
the Unitl'd Stutes. l lcr incisive Shan Pipe Band Learns Star-Spangled Banner (2004) is
a t\vo-chnnncl video rcuturing traditional Pakistani musicians squawking out a pain
ful rendition of the national anthem of the United States on the shan pipe. The split-or
is it a convcrgcnce·?-bctween identity and culture, as formalized through two simuJ
taneous projections, appeals cogently to discussions of hybridity, nationalism, and
-.vhat \Vas once coiled cultural imperialism. And yet in seeming to do Uttle but "docu
ment" this n1usical perfonnance in an ambiguously parodic vein, this canny work
acn1ally iterates such conditions through its own itinerant display in Stuttgart, San
Francisco, New York, or Singapore.
Or consider Lonnie van Brun1melen and Siebren de Haan's Monument ofS ugar:
Hou, to Use Arlislic Means LO Elude Trade Barriers (2007) as it was encountered at the
2008 iteration of the Shanghai Biennale, "Translocomotion:' In this mixed-media
installation consisting of film, sugar, and documentation, the artists fashioned sugar
into quasi-1ninin1alist cubes in order to explore the protocols of international trade
regulation, whereby exporting sugar as a "work of art" effectively iliwarted payment of
protectionist tariffs.1he narrative intrinsic to this work cannot help but be read extrin
sically against its reception on the ground in Shanghai, a port city with a long and frac
tious history of colonialism and the international trade relations standing behind it.
This is to say that the art world assumes the world-historical changes its objects
or iconography projects, but effectively approaches the state of its historical forget
ting in doi11g so. What it forgets is what made an art world such a distinct and singular
",vorld" in t11e first place, held at some distance from the workings of something so ba
nal as commodities in sugar. In the process of this forgetting, the art world naturalizes
tbe condition of its apparent groundlessness as "global"-a sphere of influence gen
eralized to the world at large-even as its penchant for the representation of global
themes remains largely undertheorized. 11
These opening comments might seem rhetorical gamesmanship of a type; but I
would insist that this circularity is both historically and historiographically instruc
tive. ln the following section I argue that what is lost with this forgetting is not merely
Forgetting the Arl World
5
•
l'igure 1.l
Baru Abldi, Shan Pipt Band Learns Star-Spangled Banner, 2004. Double-channel video. Courtesy the artist.
6
Figure 1.2
Lonnie van Brummele n and Siebren de Haan, ,Wonument ofS ugar: How to Use Artistic Means to Elude Trade Barriers,
2007. Installadon view, Palais deTol..-yo, Paris. Courtesy the artists and Wllfried Lentz, Ronerdam.
a matter of identification \Vilh, or collective belonging to, that exclusive space called
an "art,.vorld:' My clahn is that an older formulation of an art world is critical to retain
ifwe are to u·eat the relation between globalization and contemporary art in the most
conceptually workable tenns, fro1n its inaugural philosophical articulation by Arthur
Dant o in the 1960s to the notion of the art world as a network born of a cybernetic age.
Not that I am suggesting we can go back to such a world, nor that we would want to
if we could. Yet it is only after considering this notional art world as something past
that I can properly situate the attenuated goals of this book, a deliberately partial ap
proach to a topic that eschews the panoptic-or better put, global-responses the
subject would seem to den1and.
To such ends, to,.vard the end of this introduction I introduce a phrase that dra
matizes the book's stakes, followed by a reading of such interests through a single
work of art. Rather than think about the "global art world," such as it is, as both a
phenomenon of divisible sociological or economic import and through the imagery
it stages and sponsors, I endeavor to treat the work ofa rt's world as an intercessory
or medium through ,.vhich globalization takes place. This language gets at the work
of art's mattering and materialization-a larger debate on the status of mediation
and production- and the ways such processes lay bare that dynamic of reciprocity
earlier described. A reading of Steve McQueen's 17-minute film Gravesend provides
such an opening onto these worlds. For to speak of "the work of art's world" is to
retain a sense of the activity performed by the object as utterly continuous with the
world it at once inhabits and creates: a world Mobius-like in its indivisibility and
circularity, a seemingly endless horizon.
Crisis of Representation
Let us begin with our current crisis of representation, an overused shorthand that
takes on new meanings under the pressure of globalization.12 The virtual shapeless
ness that is both condition and reflex of globalization has been met by crucial efforts
on the part of artists, curators, and critics. Representation, in this context, means
something appropriately multivalent. We shall see that the ways in which representa
tion is addressed by the art world- as an institutional matter on the one hand and an
8
Introduction