Colin Richards
is participant at
Where is Art Contemporary? The Global Challenge of Art Museums II
Abstract
Contradiction. Contemporary Art, Globality’ and a (South) African National Institution
This paper considers aspects of an exhibition titled ‘Graft’, curated by the author as part of The second (and last) Johannesburg Biennial in 1997. This event took place at a me of intense historical crisis and change. The last decade of the twentieth century was replete with auspicious moments, and 1997 proved no exception. The post-Apartheid era was in early consolidation. The long afterglow of the first democratic elections held In 1994 was waning, while revelations surfacing in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings reverberated across the country and beyond. Relations between South Africa. Mica and the wider world were opening up in new ways. Historic alignments and solidarities were dissolving and reforming In an energetic state of cultural liquidity and new ‘global’ networks. Museums, archives and art practices were all implicated in this unfolding scenario that ended the century. Contradictions constituted by and consequent on these cultural shifts were alive and visible in the 2nd Johannesburg Biennial. While most the core exhibitions of the Biennial were assertively ‘global’ and ‘international’, the single ‘national’ exception was ‘Graft’. In addition, this show also took place in Cape Town, some 1,200 kilometers from Johannesburg. It shared this city-site with Kellie Jones’ gender-focused ‘Lifeis Little Necessities. ‘Graft’ and the 2nd Biennial more generally were emblematic of the larger historical moment in which they Were embedded. Some works on the exhibition pointedly engaged the institutional world in which they were shown; others converged, cut across, or collided with that world. These works – specifically their internal and external relatedness – will be the focus of the paper. This focus will, however, be geared to grasping changing retations between all works, practices and institutional worlds in which they are embedded, Part of my concern is engaging the familiar one of shifting cultural power and reconfiguring institutional, frameworks under pressure from globaitzing energies; specifically the kind of ongoing hinging and unhinging process in which hitherto dominant frameworks and art practices lose their stability and tip, slide, reverse and fold back on one another. The paper will also contain e positive provocation. Contradiction – In an as elsewhere – is a necessary form of violence, be lt institutional or otherwise. The violence embodied in the historical and ongoing trauma of concrete contradiction may in fact be a necessary cultural resource, part of what resists a globalizing collapse into the pluralist torment of cultural assimilation, inertia and stasis. Violence (or, more pointedly, a critical, practice-shaping performance of violence) can be an vital energy resisting the torpor and political quietism of arch pluralism and consumerism. Violence also bears on pleasure. In increasingly commoditled global culture, surprise, pleasure and cultural dynamism seem ever more intensely flattened out in a game of ever-inflating cultural promise and diminishing returns. The resources of contradiction, of edginess and energetic risk so much part of critical artistic practice antagonize passive pluralism and consumerism from within. This would include the curse of the faux multiculturalism’ which so ossifies our public art institutions and indeed many representations of the ‘global’ artworld. Visible contradiction makes a case against our falling for and into false utopias, reminding us of the violence within this fall, lt also offers a case against the comfort of dystopian cynicism and pessimism, and reveals them to be more world weary than wise. Contradiction becomes the awkward, often unpalatable tissue that connects difference and counters the splintering of community effected by the homogenizing Impulses of global capital and its ‘free’ markets. Importantly, contradiction also counters the drag of reactionary, reified cultural ‘traditions’ and the parochial parade of a past that dreams of an insulated, pre-lapsarian wholeness. Finally, oontradiotlon also means to undercut the idealization of perpetual instability. Notes below are not for publication Some of the specific themes. all of which actively constitute and elaborate relations between various geo-political and cultural localities (localizations) and globelisrns – which will arise in the paper (not all of which can be discussed for obvious reasons); Internal topographies of Graft; here through an analysis of specific works, relations between works and relations with the institution and its holdings. Part of this discussion necessarily involves the question of nation-building and nationalism more broadly, and engages locality within the country (between Cape Town and Johannesburg in this instance). Moving outward, this will also address some of the continuities and conflicts between whet we might describe as national, continental and global frameworks. The rise of the curator as artworld agent and curating as creative activism. The focus on critical creativity Is important here and intersects with the human rights culture which has been developing apace since the fall of the Berlin wail and the end of legal Apartheid. Artmaking as an exercise in freedom and Its limitations in an increasingly administered, creatively contracting world. Part of this discussion is configured locally In terms of access to institutions and to art itself. I consider the virtues of contradiction, controversy, and confusion as stimuli rather than inhibitors of cultural development. The temporal dimension of this event This would be articulated in terms of temporariness and contemporaneity. The spatial dimension of this event: The challenges of site specificity in a spatialised world in which specificity is easily dissolved or rendered liquid. The economic dimension of this event: The restriction of commodity form in exhibitions and collections. The discursive dimension of this, event Wail texts, catalogues, and the discursive response to Graft and the Biennial as a whole. The resources for and different mediations of critique. The material dimension – crucial infrastructure, policy and so on. The published paper will refine and develop the presentation.
