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The continents. A new iconography "It doesn´t take much imagination to picture the
world in its early incarnation as Pangaea, the
supercontinent that, sometime in the mid-late Jurassic
Period, split up into two land masses (known as Laurasia
and Gondwanaland), which some 80 million years later
broke apart to form the continents as we now know
them. It´s basically a giant jigsaw puzzle. A few
of the pieces are missing, and a couple of others
have become damaged or warped over time, but it
can be reassembled."
- Michael L. Sand : Continental Drift -
Influential pictures depicting the five continents, the world,
have been created in recent decades: the Buckminster Fuller Map
by Jasper Johns, Öyvind Fahlström's World Map, the woven map
pictures of Aligieri e Boetti and many others. All the artists
were well aware that the whole world, even its most remote
secretive areas, has been photographed and surveyed by
satellites and, at the same time, no permanent picture could
possible exist because, more than ever before, its surface is
changing by the hour. The world's skin has become a new type of
puzzle and putting its pieces together lies within the possibilities
of mankind. No blank spaces remain on this skin, and the accessibility
of the entire globe appears guaranteed. Everywhere information on
the continents is being produced and absorbed, leading to an
increase in mutual acknowledgement and familiarity.
In 1999 Thomas Hirschhorn constructed the continents as large
separate assemblies/bricolages, combining their cartographic
contours with pictures that could be connected. In the process
he keeps to the path of the pictorial language of tourism
advertisements (surfers and Toyota land cruisers for
Oceania/Australia; elephant and palms for Africa; Coca-Cola,
Indians and skyscrapers for the Americas; Buddha, Fujiyama
and water carriers for Asia; the Eiffel tower, the Pantheon
and Big Ben for Europe) and attached photocopies on one
wooden board for each: notice boards with texts and
pictures that appear to be random and interchangeable but
require attention. One notices. for instance, a newspaper
article on European court painting of the 17th century with
self-portraits of Velasquez and Rembrandt in Africa, reads
texts by Nietzsche ("Philosophy of the Future, Beyond
Good and Evil, Maximes and Interludes 63-185") in Asia,
and the European notice board shows pictures and reports
on Arno Breker and the notorious Munich exhibition "Entartete
Kunst" [Degenerate Art] of 1937. The American continent is
red, Australia blue, Africa black, Asia yellow and Europe
green.
The allocation of pictures, drawings, symbols, and colours
to the illustrated objects is entirely haphazard, the
contexts are only temporarily mounted. Their claim to
credibility is low. They are in the form of play structures,
inherently humorous.
Under certain conditions those continents that exist in
the imaginations of mankind, composed of contours,
memories, characters and symbols now change slower than
the real continents themselves, but the "great stories"
about them, that have created propagating texts - fairy
tales, novels, epic poems - barely survive in their
iconography. A new iconography and new stories are created.
Some exhibitions
Dialogue between continents cannot, of course, take
place solely at the mobile level of the cultural nomads.
That would too easily lead to a sphere of autonomous art
history that would isolate them from all societal discourse.
Thus I feel an uneasiness regarding a one-sided conversation,
a mismatching of weightings in the wonderful abundance of
valuable material exhibited at the "Art Worlds in Dialogue"
project of Cologne's Ludwig Museum in 1999. While in the Museum's
own backyard the documents of post-colonial discourse and
applications for citizenship pile up (as a result of new laws).
Given this background it seems necessary to consider neither
the wanderers between cultures, nor the neo-colonial
exploiters among the European artists, but rather those
that are trying to settle in a different continent while
retaining their own cultural inheritance.
In 1993 I showed the "AFRICA EXPLORES. 20th century African Art"
exhibition of the New York Center for African Art at the Ludwig
Forum in Aachen meeting artists such as Sokari Douglas Camp from
Nigeria and Chéri Samba from Zaire, who in their works show a very
different relationship to the culture of their homelands than, say,
Frédéric Bruly Bouabré in Senegal, who became well-known through the
"Magiciens de la Terre" exhibition in 1989. He was unconditionally
settled where he had been born, and used the language of the former
colonialist rulers to develop encyclopaedic pictures for an African
identity; for Chéri Samba the conflict between two cultures played
more of a role in the content of his work than in its from, and
Sokari Douglas Camp, who has few material links with her land of
origin, creates extensive picture ensembles of a culture of memory,
at whose heart lies the land of her forefathers. She is settled in
London. The following statement, by Okwui Enwezor, applies to her
and many other world artists who work in European centres of art:
"But we must understand that, in reacting against this notion of
Latin Americanism, of Africanism, one is not necessarily reacting
against stereotypes - one is reacting against expectations. We´re
dealing with the structures of institutions that for many years
have had the upper hand in defining what African - or Latin
American, and so on - means. We shouldn´t forget either how artists
themselves are implicated in producing these clichés of identity.
They´re very marketable."
The CONTINENTAL SHIFT project is the result of many meetings
attended at first by the curator and artist Bernhard Lüthi. At
that time the model for the project seemed to be a photo of an
installation by the Israeli artist Benni Efrat, showing a live
camel bearing video monitors: the caravan not allowed to stand
still. But we also involved non-European artists, writers and
composers in our talks, who suggested that the meeting of the
continents does not take place in cultural locations and the
media but on our streets, in our administrations, on the top
floors of our cultural producers. We had the opportunity to
talk about hosts and guests, and the rights that a guest earns
through their lasting influence on some joint undertaking.
"Black, red, yellow. Cultural variety in Germany" is a project
of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt [House of World Cultures] in
Berlin, that appears ready to take over the theme of these talks
in summer, 2000, through a variety of media.
CONTINENTAL SHIFT developed in other directions because of a
cross-border team of curators from museums in Aachen, Heerlen,
Lüttich and Maastricht. The three countries have different
social backgrounds. The colonial history of Belgium and the
Netherlands is different from that of Germany, and has different
consequences for the composition of their populations. But
the orientation of their artistic experts also differ. Because
many Chinese artists (surrounded by other Chinese) have settled
in Paris during the last thirty years, Lüttich's scientists were
interested in giving the joint exhibition project a Chinese
emphasis and collaborating with the Chinese curator. The Maastricht
experts selected an African emphasis, because the works of African
artists have rarely been shown in the Netherlands. Heerlen
decided on the Iran/Armenia section because it appeared to be
the smallest, the easiest to gain an overview of, best suited
to the small museum (though a larger building had to be found
later). The spacious Ludwig Forum is available for an extreme
contrast: (Latin) America on one side, Japan - Korea on the other.
CONTINENTAL SHIFT shows the works of settled artists who have
made themselves noticeable and known both where they do their
work and beyond, and in whose work traces of both European
artists and artists of their homelands can be found. Forms
of a dialogue between these continental cultures, the focus
of our interest, are to be found in these mutual influences.
The dynamic concept of the nomads characterised the eighties,
its geopolitical turbulences and the breaking down of the
frontiers between east and west. Since relations between the
continents have become more peaceful, thoughts and projects
have increasingly revolved around terms such as "the others",
"altérité", "otherness, "othering", "Der Fremde", and "Der
fremde Blick" [the foreign view], a project of the Westphalian
culture secretariat. Here we find a line of vision whereby two
partners in dialogue ask whether they are not each inventions of
the other - and logically basic elements of themselves. The
"others" probably create their own great "story" of the 20th
century.
The Ludwig collections
When collector Peter Ludwig, from Aachen, began acquiring a large
number of important early works of American pop art in 1966, and
exhibited them in the museums of Aachen and Cologne, he was absolutely
convinced that these works expressed a contemporary "Lebensgefühl"
[attitude to life] that did not just affect him but carried the
vast majority of his generation along with it. (The word "Lebensgefühl"
was included in the title of his PhD thesis "Das Menschenbild
Picassos als Ausdruck eines generationsmäßig bedingten Lebensgefühls"
in 1950.) When he expanded the horizons of his collection and, from
1980 onwards, became more involved in the artistic landscape of eastern
Europe, he did not stop seeking the influences and traces of that American
pop art of the sixties that were at the same time symptoms of the
"Lebensgefühl" that he had discovered in American art. These
symptoms have gradually and naturally become more and more visible
in the art scenes of the former eastern Germany, Soviet Union and
Czechoslovakia, and in Hungary, Bulgaria, Rumania, Cuba and China,
so that today Ludwig's collection, like no other, allows the global
history of the effect of pop art to be followed. The symptoms were
political and heralded the collapse of ideological systems and the
transformation of states. They were also elements of that Americanisation
that was intensifying all over the world.(Selection of illustrations of Russian,
Chinese and other works, that show pop art influences: Tatjana Nazarenko "Publicity and
Information" 84, Bulatov and others)
But in the same way that Ludwig admires the "Spaniard" in Picasso,
he also sought to discover the idiosyncrasies of American art, as
such, that were not shared by himself, a German; and when the west
German artists Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer, Markus Lüpertz, Jörg
Immendorf and the east German A. R. Penck developed a "story" about
Germany, German artists and German history, that reached back to
the "De Germania" text by Tacitus, he bought the important early
examples of their work. He knew that these works also contained a
strong anti-American effect, a resistant awareness, that generated
a Lebensgefühl of "re-convalescence" in the so deeply humiliated Germans.
The question "What is English in English art?", that inspired
Nikolaus Pevsner's well-known book, was the original starting
point for those state exhibition projects that Peter Ludwig's
collection work had led me to. The antagonism between national
characteristics (that could be read out from the art history of
the differently closed societies of the eastern bloc), and those
seen in an international contemporary style of open societies
(that manifested itself chiefly in the traces of American pop art),
was often plain to see. It was not unusual for it to form the
basis upon which artists were divided into two groups: the official
and the dissidents; the members of associations of artists and
the underground - and even Russians and Jews. Ludwig and other
collectors, as well as those critics who followed him, knew that
they increased this antagonism in this way, that they introduced
the laws of the European-American art trade within the socialist
bloc, and that they turned the traditional estimation of the value
of artistic products on its head.
Political conflicts are reflected in the confrontations
between national and international styles. When I attach
an international style to American pop art here, I know
too that its picture world is principally conveying American
civilisation and the ideology of an open society, and reaches
an incalculably large public in its translations in the mass media.
While Ludwig was busy with the setting up of a museum for
international contemporary art in Peking, and we were developing
exhibition projects involving Chinese art, it became clear that
in a highly developed pictorial culture like that of the Chinese
even the acceptance of a medium such as oil painting on stretched
canvas at the start of the 20th century caused great upheaval in a
highly traditional national culture and was always condemned at those
times when it appeared necessary to make calls on a national identity.
The dialectic between particular and universal interests appears
in Peter Weibel's text as a process that leads to a "hybrid". He explains
the term "world art", that can come about as a result of a synthesis, by
referring to "world literature" leading, in an excursion via Goethe, to:
"World literature", as Goethe meant it, was thus a hybrid built upon the
dialectic of the difference of particularity (nationality) and universality
(common property of mankind)." He adds a view and an aim: "Apart from the
literary there must also be a non-Eurocentric comparative art." Projects
such as "Inclusion/Exclusion" and "Continental Shift" attempt to build
upon this comparative art. The Ludwig collection provides excellent
study material for this.
But the term "world art", as Weibel derives it from the concept of
the world literature of Goethe and his contemporaries, is too
general to encompass the dialectic of national and intercontinental
styles because he leaves aside the political background. As much
as the collector Ludwig felt tied to Goethe's inheritance, he also
felt he was a public person, moving political energies. At the same
time as he was acquiring collections of east European contemporary
art he was creating a collection block of Russian avant-garde of
between 1910 and 1920 that exemplified the political significance
of artistic innovation in the 20th century.
Consequently, Peter Ludwig was not interested in the art of
exiles and emigrants and stopped collecting the works of artists
as soon as they moved from their original cultural landscapes.
After the historic fragmentation of 1989 he therefore became
interested in those places where the break had been incomplete:
Cuba and China. He was not interested in North Korea.
I would like to add a qualification to the end of this chapter:
it must be understood that I am using the collector Peter Ludwig
in my discourse to illustrate the historical preconditions of
the CONTINENTAL SHIFT project. A deeper, more differentiated
consideration would be required in order to do justice to his
activities. Abridged, trenchantly portrayed, an influential
position emerges during a turbulent epoch of the second half of
the century.
Old continents
Our perspective is greatly influenced by ideas that question the
concept of the nation, however much we ourselves are attached to
linguistic frontiers, national media, and the problems of the historical
writings, monuments and memorials of our national cultures. I
co-founded a COMMEMOR, a Commission Mixte pour l´Echange des Monuments
aux Morts in Aachen with the French artist Robert Filliou in 1973,
and suggested an exchange of war memorials between the towns of Lüttich,
Maastricht and Aachen, situated near the border. Filliou's project was
branded blasphemous in Lüttich, practicable in Maastricht, and artistic
in Aachen. Differences in national culture gain transparency in border
regions. Their profiles become blurred.
It is without doubt necessary to bear in mind that this relaxed attitude
exists neither in the countries of the former Soviet Union nor in Asiatic
countries. The Indian Arjun Appadurai insistently describes "fears of
tradition in a global context of art": "The desire to represent the
present in the present is a problem everywhere, but perhaps particularly
so in Asia, where the power of the countries, the power of the
educated classes and the prestige of discourses on classics, culture,
civilisation and nation prevailed for so long."
This results in an uncertainty about evaluating pictures originating
from traditional national cultures carried over into intercontinental
contexts. The work of the Iranian Shirin Neshat would seem to be typical
of this. It retains the threatening alienness of the exotic and carries
it over into an area of interest that bursts its borders.
In closed societies with traditional national cultures the constraints
they create strongly impinge upon artistic production and determine
its distribution. Many of these societies today carry the crises of
their national identity more in the form of internal disputes, similar
to civil wars, than acting as nations turning against other nations.
Open societies appear to develop elastic systems of order more easily,
by questioning traditional concepts of nationhood.
Migration itself transforms the relationship of open towards closed
societies in the geographical continental neighbourhood into a
national problem. For emigrants do not just gather at particular
locations within the new "homeland" that they have pinned numerous
hopes upon - they also reconstruct a better old homeland in the new
location. "Chinatown" is a special form of China. In the worst case,
the old homeland is reflected in the new homeland in the form of a
ghetto.
Chinatowns in New York, San Francisco or Paris also attract
large numbers of the inhabitants of these metropoles and tourists,
and numerous artists have devoted themselves to this unique
picture hall of emigrant nostalgia. Playful forms of the exotic
have been created in these branches and enclaves freeing them
of their menace. Andy Warhol did not, so to speak, portray the
Chinese statesman Mao Tse Tung but discovered and exploited the
picture of an idol in an imaginary Chinatown. Chinese artists
followed him without being able to achieve the same cynical distance.
In contrast to the immigrants who collect in such enclaves in
their new homelands, artists seek the training sites for art
- the academies, the intercontinentally well-known exhibition
centres and those metropoles in which the production and distribution
of art is concentrated. They seek advanced technological service
sectors at the locations of production, and alongside these they
expect to find the highly developed mercantile system of agents,
clients, galleries, critics, and curators that developed from New
York outwards during the sixties. Nam June Paik, the Korean
experimental musician, moved to Cologne in the 50s because the
Westdeutsche Rundfunk radio station had allowed the composer
Stockhausen to create a studio for electronic music and provided
a platform for such music. The video-artist Paik later moved on
to New York in order to participate in the development of the
first picture synthesiser.
The broad oeuvre that he has developed, however, is positioned
beneath the emblematic icon of the TV Buddha. In the case of
artists such as Paik or Zao Wouki no interpreter would neglect
the references to the traditional culture of the country of
origin in favour of their "internationality". The difference
is not so much expressed in their works as in the histories
of their effects.
Paik never loses the expression of relaxed amusement, that
attitude that we connect, cliché-like, with Asiatic philosophers,
in the confrontation between continental icons such as the Buddha
with Rodin's Thinker (Illustration ?). It appears to be gaining
in influence in art and is certainly also a result of the
previously non-existent availability of the whole cultural arsenal.
Appadurai develops a vision from this availability of traditional
national cultures: "In this way the Leviathan of globalisation can
be turned against itself, namely when those who work in the production
of a location take flight from the golden cages of their traditions
and adopt all traditions as their potential palettes and toolboxes. ...
Thus locations and local identities are created that are more than just
grist to the mill of national propaganda, or the classification fantasies
of global collectors and tourists. Of course, the desire to acquire all
traditions requires a great amount of effort - and should therefore not
be dismissed too quickly as dilettantism or futile bricolage. ... When
artists and intellectuals seek this way out of the fear of tradition
they may be able to shake off the phantoms of repetition and replication
that dog the project of the creation of "alternative modernities"."
Hybrids - Hybris
Plant metaphors for the history of cultures (and epochal styles
in art) have a long history: they are sown, they take root, they
mature, they form offshoots, they flower, their fruits ripen....
We must now expand them or even update them: plants are, after
all, saved from extinction, regenerated and hybridised. Cultures
too.
One can easily enough transfer this concept to the current state
of the art of the Australian Aboriginal or the Fulani and Shona
in Africa and the Indian cultures of the Americas, but it appears
to be infinitely more difficult to make use of it where we speak
of one intercontinental art. Unless we rely on the definition of
Bronfen and Marius that is most easily applied to international
DJ culture and what we call world music. Does hybrid art, then,
really exist today?
If we take up the discourse of the sociologists and look at
contemporary art in the context of a hybrid culture then we
make it do the splits: it is that part of the culture characterised
by mass migrations where it opens itself up to the mass media and
makes use of them, and not where it excludes them, seeking distance
to them, developing alternative cultural models. It lets itself be
monopolised, and it alienates itself. It earns its disturbing vitality
in this dialectic.
At this point I would like to remind you that in Greek tragedy
hubris means overstepping the laws made by the Gods. The hybridised
person is thus entering a new era in which they leave the old laws
behind them. Bronfen and Marius correspondingly refer to the flux-artist
and author Dick Higgins: "Until about 1958 the cognitive questions posed
by most of the artists of the 20th century, supporters of Plato and Aristotle,
were: "How can I interpret this world, of which I am a part? And what am
I in it?" The post-cognitive questions, on the other hand, that have been
posed by newer artists since then are: "What sort of a world is this? What
can be done in it? Which of my selves should do it?" SHIFT gains a significance
here that can be plumbed from the works of art before the societies, in
which they were created, feel the thrusts to which they are subject.
Finally
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