Dear friends and colleagues
A long time ago… well twenty six years ago, to be exact, I was in Paris. I had been sent by Art in America to review what seemed a very interesting show at Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. The director of ARC, Suzanne Pagé had just been made director of the museum and had asked a number of artists to make site-specific works in response to the museum. There were intriguing and memorable works by, amongst others, Annette Messager, Ange Leccia, Christian Boltanski, Daniel Buren and Sophie Calle. Boltanski’s piece I remember best: it consisted of shelves of second children’s clothes filling a cellar that was not normally used for “Art”. I believe it may still be there.
Boltanski, Storage Area of the Children’s Museum, 1989, in Histoires du Musée
I had a bit of extra time after looking at and thinking about the show so before catching the train back I went over to see the exhibition at the Centre Pompidou. I was not exactly confused, but non-plussed by what I saw there. It seemed such a muddle of disparate things: a poster by Barbara Kruger facing a giant dance costume from Ghana: paintings by Sigmar Polke beside a room of drawings by someone from Ivory Coast; Anselm Kiefer next to papier mache monsters made for Mexico’s day of the Dead[1]. Perhaps if I had had more time I might have gone to the second part of this exhibition at a converted old abattoir, La Villette, and realised exactly what the exhibition was trying to do. Alas, I did not.
I had, of course, been to what must be the most important exhibition of the last thirty years, Magiciens de la Terre.
Its curator Jean-Hubert Martin has said he did not want to show artists from the ex-colonies who had been to art schools because, “everyone would have said they were imitations of Western art.”[2] Instead he showed fifty “tribal” or “outsider” artists next to fifty “western” artists.
A few years later I asked the Nigerian writer and artist Olu Oguibe to give a lecture to my students and he railed against this decision to exclude people like him who had studied at art schools. I agreed with him, and still do: it was patronising. You could have found even then some “Western” style work made in Indonesia or Philippines, for example, that of Santiago Bose or Srihadi, that was clearly as engaged with local themes as with Western styles. But the only work from South-East Asia that was included was the Front of a Men’s House of Apangai by Nera Jambruk from Papua New Guinea (if that counts as South-East Asia, not Oceania).
Nera Jambruk (Papua New Guinea),
Front of Men’s House of Apangai,
1988, 1000 x 500cm
Talking about this last Saturday to twenty highly educated Filipino and Filipina students this still seems not only insulting but dumb. Not that I have anything against Mr. Jambruk or art like his. Why do the tribal and the urban art have to be seen as mutually exclusive and kept apart?
In 2010 I asked the Indonesian curator Jim Supangkat whether he could include in the exhibitions of Indonesian art he curated some traditional (tribal) wood carvings from Nias or Flores where such a tradition is still alive. He said, “not possible”. I think that is a problem too. It is like saying you can’t eat fish and meat at the same meal. And here I agree with Martin who in the same conversation I quoted earlier, talks of how art from outside the West is now collected and shown, “by the Western system of galleries and collections. What is totally ignored is what is happening outside this incestuous network: for instance, religious art and art made in remote communities for their own sake. Can you believe that it is all craft?”[3] Belting, tellingly, declines to answer the question.
Of course, we don’t really have globalism: we have a globalism that is effectively policed and approved by Western curators, collectors and academics. And all too often the artists, curators and writer from outside the West self-censor to those Western predilections.
It isn’t near as bad as in 1989, but one continuing effect is that non-Western artists feel dropped between two stools. If they look to make Western type art they can be accused of being inauthentic, but if they look to use tribal or local sources the words, “craft”, “exotic” or “touristic;’ are thrown at them.[4]
They feel a little uncomfortable, a little awkward… If we take the last Singapore Biennale… but, no, let’s save that for another time. This is a big, messy, complicated subject.
Best wishes
Tony
PS. For similar reasons I want to talk about my walking stick, but, again, another time.
- In fact, works by Mike Chukwukelu Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, Felipe Linares. ↑
- In conversation with Hans Belting, The Global Contemporary, ZKM, 2012, p. 209 ↑
- op. cit. p. 211 ↑
- A rare exhibition that put tribal and “western” together successfully was that of Indian art curated by Chaitanya Sambrani at Asia Society, New York: Edge of Desire in 2004. ↑