5. The decline of modernism
It was again in the MoMA that William Rubin celebrated the modernist myth for the last time with two famous, complementary exhibitions, which showed a nostalgic longing for a lost history. I am speaking of the great Picasso show that opened in 1980, six years after the artist’s death, and the show Primitivism in 20th Century Art, which stirred still largely unconscious resistance in me when I saw it in 1984. The Primitivism exhibition could just as easily have been called “Picasso and Primitive Art.”(15) Its aim was to reconcile the two mainstream traditions of modern and ethnic art, but in fact, it once again reconfirmed the old dualistic perspective of “tribal art,” as so-called “primitive” art was meanwhile called, whose masks and fetishes still functioned as “inspiration” for avant-garde art in the same way they had had nearly one hundred years before, in Picasso’s early years. One could have likewise spoken of an appropriation of ethnic art in modern art history, meaning the influence of ethnic artifacts on modern artists, a process that amounted to the transformation of religious practice (collective) into artistic creation (individual).
It is nearly unconceivable that only five years separate Rubin’s show from the project that Jean-Hubert Martin realized in 1989 in the Centre Pompidou with his exhibition Les Magiciens de la Terre.(16) This show cut the ties to the earlier project in that it presented non-Western production as contemporary rather than primitive ethnic art and did so for the first time on a global scale. Not only did Martin choose fifteen living artists from the so-called “third world,” he also displayed them alongside an equal number of Western artists. With this juxtaposition, he intended to relate them in an imaginary dialogue rather than identify either as an “influence” on the other. Martin did not use the word “art” and instead applied the term “magic” in order to avoid confusion and criticism about mixing concepts. He nevertheless disappointed most critics, those in the West for undermining the autonomy of modern art and those from the third world for not having promoted their artists to the first ranks of modernism. He explained his exhibition as “une enquête sur la création dans le monde d’aujourdhui.”(17) In retrospect, we have to credit him with having created the first event in the emerging new presence of contemporary global art.
Rasheed Araeen, who participated in the event, later objected that the show did not represent “the cultural heterogeneity of modernism from all over the world” and that it had stabilized the division in which “the self represented a modern, universal vision” and “the others” were still trapped “in their ethnic origin.” He devoted the whole of the sixth issue of Third Text to a critique of the exhibition. Two years before, in 1987, Araeen had founded this periodical in London “with the aim of providing a critical forum for third-world perspectives on the visual arts,” as he writes in the first editorial.(18) The magazine was to represent “a historical shift away from the center of the dominant culture to its periphery” and to view the center with critical eyes. In the first decade of its existence, Third Text was mainly “devoted to revealing the institutional closures of the art world and the artists they excluded, the second began the enquiry into (the new phenomenon) ...of the assimilation of the exotic Other into the new world art,” as Sean Cubitt reminds us. A new type of “art-institutional racism” forced the newcomers “to see their work assimilated into the system…. For some artists, the struggle has led to a retreat from international arenas and a return to the local…. Others have abandoned the concept of art altogether” and look for “alternative modes of cultural practice” in order to escape the assimilating forces of the art world.
On the other hand, the global space absorbs the privilege of representing history including the variant of art history in the Western world. It also threatens to undermine the system of the art world. The new presence of those who were formerly outsiders was not yet in sight when Araeen launched his project in 1987. In the meantime, art geography, too, has been changing rapidly, as is indicated by a new terminology. The term of the so-called third world no longer characterizes the new art geography. It now seems appropriate to speak of a “global South,” as Beral Madra, the founder of the Istanbul Biennial calls it. The “global South” emerges as a new periphery in relation to other emerging centers with new economic power, (such as China), which rival the West in global dimensions. In this respect, the global art market has become a distorting mirror. Success in the market does not necessarily mean local acceptance in the societies whose problems are addressed by the local artists and vice versa. The art market and public acceptance are strangely divided. The market often deprives artists of their critical voice and their political significance, and their critical potential needs clients outside the “system” whose judgment is not neutralized by assimilated global art criticism.
Acceptance in the art scene was still the issue of Peter Weibel’s 1996 Graz show Inklusion: Exklusion, which was an important step forward in discussing (and promoting?) such a change.(19) But “inclusion” (of whom and for what reasons?) happened only in the newly emerging, global exhibition culture, whereas acceptance in museum collections is another matter. The Graz exhibition succeeded in drawing “a new map of art in the era of postcolonialism,” as the subtitle says. Nonetheless, “global migration,” the second part of the subtitle, remains a personal experience. Migration is reflected in the artists’ imagination and shapes individual memory. Museums, on the contrary, do not migrate (even if their collections travel), but have to shape a new audience or are themselves shaped by a local audience. But, then, how do museums lend themselves to globalization in the strict sense, if such a sense exists?
6. The future of art museums
It may seem that “art” in the terms of Western modernity, in whatever application, has won the game and has even become a global experience, thus defeating ethnic production and leveling off any cultural difference. In this case, art museums would expect a global future where they look the same everywhere. But such a conclusion is premature and rests on superficial observations that conceal new and unexpected developments. Certainly, we watch the explosion of art museums in many parts of the world. They represent a new geography of institutions that sometimes are less than ten years old. They usually reflect economic prosperity and serve the representation (and global share value) of local capital. Thus, they often are sponsored by big companies with global investment, whereby the museum aspect is assigned only a secondary role within a given foundation, a situation already ridiculed by the description “restaurant with museum.” In their mission statements, they still make the claim to serve as cultural labs or urban centers of culture, culture meaning a local outpost of advanced economy that, in this case also means global conformism with the art market. But museums are by definition local, and they ultimately live from the expectation of local audiences. This also involves a notion of art that, presently, does not divide one society from another, but instead, separates the economic elite from the majority in any given culture.
It may be useful to situate museum foundations in opposition to new art fairs and biennials, which, after having initially turned up in places such as Istanbul, have meanwhile reached Shanghai. The difference is that such events are ephemeral and reflect a marketing strategy whereby local artists are granted only the privilege of being shown within the context of accepted international art. Thus, the responsible curators, mostly foreigners, guarantee or pretend to guarantee a high level of acceptance and attention for local artists. The Johannesburg Biennial opened in 1995, one year after the first democratic elections. It surely served high political goals. But such events, more often than not, foster participation in what is identified as the “contemporary art world.” The latter, however, always needs new sensations and soon loses interest in a local art scene, as was sadly the case in Sarajevo.
Museums, by definition, are local institutions that cannot keep pace with such fashionable exhibitions. Though they may even serve as hosts for them, their key problem is the collection, which calls for a difficult choice, even if we exclude the intervention of private collectors: Either a museum collection is local and thus cannot capture the interest of the visitors and sponsors, or it represents an international level that is economically inaccessible and puts off local artists. Finally, such public institutions ultimately rely on a local audience that does not share the taste of the art world. Its strategies of representation link it to local culture.
The question is whether, and to what extent, contemporary art can represent local culture, even with critical aims, or whether art is simply explaining its own existence. We can also turn the question around. What does a local audience, which in many parts of the world remains unfamiliar with art, expect to see in an art museum? To quote Colin Richards, we may ask ourselves: “What remains distinctive and beguiling about art?” He maintains that it is art’s “relation to wider social and political dynamics” and reminds us that in South Africa, as soon as the art movement had gained momentum, there began “an ongoing debate about the autonomy of art vis à vis the social and political worlds in which it is embedded, and further, how the relationship between art and these worlds is best understood.”(20) On the one hand, art may be said to be “one of the few spaces left for imagining a less managed and administered life.” On the other hand, art’s claims for protection and autonomy easily become an obstacle to its public presence, and thus museums face a challenge that directly affects their traditional role.
As long as the outcome of globalization is still a largely clouded mirror, the art museum’s future remains unpredictable, both with respect to its survival and its possible change of profile. Yet we can guess that the museum is predestined for the representation of “contemporary worlds” to take up Marc Augé’s formulation. Augé spoke of “an anthropology for contemporary worlds” in order to devise a structural change for traditional anthropology. “The world’s inhabitants have at last become truly contemporaneous, and yet the world’s diversity is recomposed every moment: this is the paradox of our day. We must speak, therefore, of worlds in the plural.” Anthropology’s situation “has to do with the coexistence of the singular entity implied by the word contemporaneous and the multiplicity of worlds it qualifies.” He goes so far as to say that “every society is made up of several worlds.”(21)
Applied to the case of museums, it is obvious that “the art world” may become more heterogeneous and increasingly less defined. This does not mean only that it has multiplicity within itself. Rather, we must accept that it changes from one place to another. This is valid even for collections whose art works change meaning wherever they are shown: They do not simply own one possible meaning or, alternatively, a universal significance, but are subjected to the comprehension of a local audience. Thus, the art world may eventually become a permeable, porous entity that disintegrates within a larger whole or yields to a diversity of systems. Its traditional opposition between “art” and “ethnic production” is thus exposed to new practices where such a dualism loses meaning. Even in the West, the museum age is not considerably older than what we call modern art and is thus not independent from clearly circumscribed historical and social conditions.
