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Introduction: Why Australia and Latin America? On Mapping Connections and Its Implications for Knowledge Production Read chapter Read first chapter

2019 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

2. Decolonising the Exhibitionary Complex: Australian and Latin American Art and Activism in the Era of the Global Contemporary

Author : David Corbet

Published in: Mapping South-South Connections

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

This chapter problematises the notion of a Global Contemporary, a term arising in the aftermath of the postcolonial turn in the visual arts, critiquing it from an overarching perspective of geopolitical and cultural decolonisation. This perspective foregrounds activist curatorial, artistic and institutional practices, contextualising them in relation to other art forms and academic disciplines, specifically focusing on developments in Australia, Brazil and Mexico. Some key artistic currents, exhibitions, thinkers and institutional critiques from these regions are explored, including an examination of Euro-American modernism and philosophical thought as vectors of epistemic occupation by a hegemonic Northern ‘exhibitionary complex’. It also considers emerging, technologically-connected artistic and exhibitionary incubators, alongside biennials and triennials, as the primary sites of The Global Contemporary. The focus is on exhibition practice, rather than individual artists’ works; intersections with academic, institutional and museum cultures; and with broader notions of place and place-making. This includes a consideration of a worldwide turn towards socially engaged artistic practices; the ways in which the exhibitionary complex is responding to the emergence of new methodologies and identity formations; and possible futures for latitudinal artistic exchange among independent institutions and collectives within a globalised spectacle economy.

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previous chapter Introduction: Why Australia and Latin America? On Mapping Connections and Its Implications for Knowledge Production
next chapter La Bestia as Transpacific Phenomenon: Indigenous Peoples’ Camps, Violence, Biopolitics, and Agamben’s State of Exception
Footnotes
1
Throughout this chapter the term ‘periphery(ies)’ is used in a critical sense, to indicate historical power relationships between the Northern metropolitan centres and their former colonies, but also with their less-developed internal provinces and dependent vassal states (for instance in the former USSR). Implicit in this usage is the historical hegemony of Northern historical worldviews, epistemologies and histories, now widely challenged if not entirely dismantled. A common Indigenous perspective in many colonised regions is to view their positioning in relation to the North as ‘the periphery of the periphery’.
 
2
The Australian art historian Tony Bennett introduced this term. My usage covers the gamut of infrastructure dedicated to presenting, selling, collecting and curating visual art and artefacts, including museums, galleries, institutions, markets, private collections and Academic research departments.
 
3
I use the term ‘globalism’ here (and ‘globalised’ or ‘globalising’ elsewhere) to indicate a set of attitudes and phenomena, as distinct from ‘globalisation’, which I use to mean the socio-politico-economic forces driving global development and technological convergence.
 
4
Capitalisation of terms such as ‘Contemporary Art’, ‘Modern Art’ and ‘Modernism’ indicates art-historical movements, as opposed to uncapitalised uses (such as modernity, modernisation, contemporary, contemporaneity) which are construed in the ordinary temporal sense. My usage of Modernism here follows the commonly held historiographic position that the concept of artistic Modernity (Modernité) was first voiced by the French writer Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867). In this view (and there are others), it is a movement of European intellectuals and artists following the French Revolution (1789), which rapidly spread to the Americas and the rest of the world.
 
5
Regarding the term ‘post-internet’ art, it should be acknowledged that this imprecise descriptor is something more than a periodising term, and is indicative of what has been described as ‘… an internet state of mind – to think in the fashion of the network’ (Archery and Peckham 2014). As such it is differentiated from other manifestations such ‘(inter)net art’ and ‘data art’, which use the internet as a technical platform for their realisation. Regarding the term ‘post-historical’ art see Danto (1997).
 
6
My usage assumes that the mid-twentieth-century Postmodern ‘turn’ (or ‘reformation’ as I prefer to think of it; Late Modernism to some; the birth of Contemporary Art to others) marked not so much a sudden break as a dialectical development which leads to the gradual epistemological ‘collapse’ of Modernism as a totalising narrative of progress. Its most prominent visual expression was in architecture and urban design, and its principal disciplines were literary criticism, linguistics, philosophy and psychoanalysis. As an art-historical term, it is widely considered to have been coined by the Brazilian writer Mário Pedrosa in 1966, to refer to the end of Modern Art (1975, p. 92).
 
7
The prestigious international Pritzker Architecture Prize, historically dominated by Northern architects, was awarded to Luis Barragán in 1980, Oscar Niemeyer in 1988, Paulo Mendes da Rocha in 2006 and (the only ever Australian recipient) Glenn Murcutt in 2002. It should be noted that the Pritzker has been frequently criticised for its failure to recognise distinguished women architects, with only two exceptions: the late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid in 2004, and the Japanese firm SANAA in 2010, made up of the duo Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa.
 
8
Angry Penguins was an Australian literary and artistic movement of the 1940s, inspired by a magazine of the same name founded by the surrealist poet Max Harris in 1940.
 
9
Australian art historian Ian McLean and others have written convincingly of the ways in which mid-to-late twentieth-century Australian Indigenous painting (led initially by the Central Desert Papunya Tula movement) grew to occupy an important place in the Australian Contemporary Art world, and by extension the Global Contemporary, advanced by a handful of enlightened curators who acknowledged that these artists were making some of the most profound art of our, or any other, time. While distinctions continue to be made between traditional or ‘tribal’ work from remote communities, and that of urban practitioners whose work may more easily fit with international notions of Contemporary Art, all these artists, along with others from the global South, were instrumental in a global paradigm shift away from the anthropological/ethnographic framings that had previously applied (for example to early twentieth-century Arnhem Land bark painting). Bypassing the narrow discourses of local and imported Modernist narratives just as the Postmodern turn got underway, Western Desert artists leaped into the international cohort of the Contemporary as fully fledged members and, in the view of many, rapidly eclipsed the offerings of their non-Indigenous peers (McLean 2011).
 
10
Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie uses this term to describe ‘the political implications of the modernist sublime in relation to African discourses on modernity in art’ (2008, p. 165). See also Bourriaud and Tate Britain (2009).
 
11
Other non-Indigenous Australian writers of note who explore this territory are Susan Best, Vivien Johnson, Stephen Muecke, Vivian Ziherl, Ian McLean and Nikos Papastergiadis, all widely published internationally, however decolonisation per se is not the main thrust of their collective discourses. There is also considerable Australian literature around the so-called provincialism problem (Smith 1974; McLean 2009).
 
12
Arts administrator Dr. Dawn Casey has been Director of the West Australian Museum, The Powerhouse Museum Sydney, and the National Museum of Australia Canberra, however she does not come from a curatorial background. Examples of distinguished Indigenous curators are Djon Mundine, Tess Allas, Hetti Perkins, Francesca Cubillo, Tina Baum, Carly Lane, Stephen Gilchrist; artist/curator Fiona Foley, and anthropologist/curator Marcia Langton.
 
13
Note that in terms of geo-strategic allegiances, Brazil is a longstanding member of the Non-Aligned Movement, and more recently the BRICS alliance, while Australia is a signatory to the ANZUS defence treaty with the United States and New Zealand.
 
14
The British imported no slaves to Australia, only its own convicts, many convicted for minor crimes. During the Atlantic slave trade era (sixteenth–nineteenth centuries), the Portuguese were by far the most prolific slavers, and Brazil is thought to have received nearly four million African slaves up until 1888, when the trade was finally abolished in national law, following numerous earlier attempts to eradicate the practice. In the early 1800s, with a total population of around five million, approximately one third are estimated to have been of African descent, many born into slavery over multiple generations. Brazil shares this painful history with several other colonial ‘plantation economies’ including much of central America and the Caribbean, notably Cuba. However, Brazil is a country of over 200 million people (of whom 800,000 are Indigenous Amerindians), with over 50% of the population classified as non-Caucasian, making it the second largest population of African descent in any country after Nigeria. These Brazilian statistics are drawn from the 2015 Revision of World Population Prospects, the 24th round of official United Nations population estimates and projections prepared by the Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat.
 
15
Indigenous Australians were granted the vote in 1962, full electoral representation in 1967, and the legal fiction of Terra Nullius was only overturned by the High Court in 1992. The secession of Brazil from the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarve was formally signed into law by Portugal in the Treaty of Rio de Janeiro, 1825. Pedro I was born in Portugal, and returned there to salvage his monarchy, succeeded as Emperor of Brazil by his five-year-old son Pedro II, who was born in Rio de Janeiro and was known as Dom Pedro ‘The Magnanimous’, ruling from 1825–1891, under a regency until the age of 14. During Pedro II’s long constitutional reign he presided over a working parliamentary democracy, the abolition of slavery (the last country in Latin America to do so), the elevation of Brazil’s Indigenous peoples to something approaching full citizenship, the establishment of a professional civil service, and a lifelong commitment to arts and science, establishing many libraries and institutions of learning, and himself speaking more than 12 languages. This included the Indigenous Tupi language, one of the largest Indigenous groupings in southern coastal Brazil. Native speakers call it variously ñeengatú (the good language), ñeendyba (common language) or abáñeenga (human language).
 
16
This Portuguese word translates as Mestizo in Spanish, Métisse in French, and I suggest ‘mixed-race’ or ‘bi-racial’ in English. The Portuguese word pardo is also sometimes used. The cultural condition of this ‘mixed-ness’ is referred to as mestiçagem in Portuguese, mestizaje in Spanish, and ‘miscegenation’ or ‘racial hybridity’ in English. In the Latin American world these terms have complex connotations, and are part of a suite of terms used to differentiate different kinds and degrees of racial miscegenation, all with nuanced social significance. While ‘bi-racial’ in English has some negatives, it is arguably a less socially loaded term.
 
17
This is a somewhat contestable proposition, and I am not suggesting there is no sense of a uniquely Australian national character, just that it has not embraced Aboriginality or cultural hybridity. The British monarch remains Australia’s head of state (also of New Zealand and Canada), however while in 1993 autonomy was granted by Canada to the new nation of Nunuvut, and New Zealand’s Treaty of Waitangi was enacted in 1840, no equivalent treaty exists in Australian law, and Indigenous peoples remain unrecognised in Australia’s founding constitution. It is sometimes not fully appreciated how relatively recent this constitution is, with Australia coming into being as an independent nation only in 1901.
 
18
This phrase was introduced, in reference to Australia’s reluctance to face up to the brutality of its wars of occupation, by the Australian anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner (Stanner 1968). For a comprehensive account of Australia’s Frontier Wars which includes Indigenous perspectives, also see Reynolds (2006).
 
19
For a detailed consideration of the 2nd Havana biennial and its influence, see Gardner and Green (2016).
 
20
The other person to direct both Documenta and the Venice Biennale was legendary Swiss curator Harald Szeemann (1933–2005).
 
21
For example, see Okwunodo Ogbechie (2005).
 
22
Examples of itinerant international curators are Hans Ulrich Obrist (Germany), Hou Hanrou (China), Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (Italy), Massimiliano Gioni (Italy), Thelma Golden (USA), Charles Esche (UK), and Stephanie Rosenthal (Germany).
 
23
This term was originated by British critic Claire Bishop, to characterise certain late twentieth-century artistic practices, in response to French curator Nicholas Bourriaud’s influential book Relational Aesthetics. For a fuller context see Bishop (2006) and Bourriaud (2002). There is of course a far longer history of performative and interactive practice in Northern avant-garde art, as distinct from theatre and dance, as well as numerous instances of community-based art projects and place-making of various kinds. However with socially engaged art, or ‘social practice’ as it has come to be known in the United States, we are seeing increasing audience participation and indeed co-creation, to the point where it begins to blur with ordinary life, and the distinction between artist and participants may disappear altogether. Bishop canvasses a variety of views on the implications of these developments, not least that cultural production is moving to occupy a social space abandoned by civic and government institutions. In a later book, Bishop characterises the trend towards Social Practice as ‘a re-turn to the social, part of the ongoing history of attempts to rethink art collectively’ (Bishop 2012, p. 3).
 
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Metadata
Title
Decolonising the Exhibitionary Complex: Australian and Latin American Art and Activism in the Era of the Global Contemporary
Author
David Corbet
Copyright Year
2019
Book
Mapping South-South Connections

Print ISBN: 978-3-319-78576-9

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-319-78577-6

Copyright Year: 2019

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78577-6_2