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introduction to Postmodernism: An Introduction: globalisation
- 2. The concept of globalisation is one of the most discussed subjects, not only in art but in political, economical and academic debates, and refers to the worldwide diffusion of practices, expansion of relations across continents, organisation of social life on a global scale, and grown of a shared global consciousness. Globalisation is not just expansion of capitalism and opening of financial markets round the world. The economical part of globalisation is surely important and perhaps the easiest to notice, but…globalisation is most of all transformation of time and space in our lives. See Giddens, Anthony. The Third Way - The Renewal of Social Democracy. Cornwall: Polity Press, 1998
- 4. Globalisation - A contradictory and uneven process - Pulls away from local communities and nation-states - Pushes down on those same communities and nation-states - Local communities' beliefs and cultural values may be globalised and universalised - Individuals and groups may experience this universalisation as a 'dilution' and 'corruption' of their cultural beliefs - Resistance to this process, sometimes with violence, rise of fundamentalism, nationalism and terrorism could be seen as a response to this
- 5. “ Exhibitions delimited by nationality, continents and other geographical demarcations have been subject to vigorous critique over the last few years, for many of the right reasons. In a cosmopolitan art world, in which artists travel to make work and take part in exhibitions, the fact an artist is British, Brazilian or Chinese is of diminishing significance. To compare artists from the perspective of their geographical origins is often to emphasise the most superficial aspects of their practice. The approach is fraught with the perils of reductiveness and stereotyping.” (FARQUHARSON, ALEX and Andreas Schlieker, British Art Show 6, 2005, P12)
- 6. “ With Globalisation people become move able – physically, legally, linguistically, culturally and psychologically – to engage with each other whereever on planet earth they are” (Scholte, p. 59) “ Instead of the monochrome fixation on nationality that reigned in the mid-twentieth century, identities in today’s more global world have tended to adopt a more plural and hybrid character” (Ibid, p. 225) “ Globalization has tended to generate hybridity, where persons have complex multifaceted identities and face challenges of negotiating a blend of sometimes conflicting modes of being and belonging within the same self.” (Ibid, p. 226)
- 8. Roderick Buchanan Work in Progress (1995)
- 9. Santiago Sierra, ‘Wall enclosing a Space’, Spanish pavilion, Venice Biennial, 2003
- 10. Santiago Sierra, ‘ 250cm line tattooed on six paid people’ (1999)
- 11. From the land of waving palms to the villages of Kosovo, the world is connected through newspapers and airports. Together, they form a veritable "state of the world equation" which is the best way to sum up World-Airport, an installation by Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn. Exhibited at the 1999 Venice Biennale, World-Airport which will fill the entire gallery space, is a homemade, Fisher-Price like airport and lounge area, replete with a runway come parade of nation-states as airplanes emblazoned with logos in national colors sit prepared for take-off - The weather, the war-, business, pleasure- first class, third world - flight patterns and the flow of information have reduced the world to a ball of string with all its crisses, crosses and contradictions - a global Diaspora of businessmen, terrorists and tourists.
- 12. Kader Attia, Dream Machine, 2002-2003
- 13. “ Biennials produce press releases and catalogues that constantly recycle the same buzzwords, ‘exchange’, ‘dialogue’ and ‘hybridity’ among them. What they don’t say is that in the profusion of the biennial these terms become almost meaningless. In Venice, diversity comes across as dispersal, as flattening out.” Marcus Verhagen, Biennale Inc, Art Monthly, June 05
- 14. “ Visitors go to Venice, Kassel or Sao Paulo expecting shows to advance a considered and progressive model of globalisation in the cultural sphere, only to find that biennials are manifestations of a different kind of globalisation, one that is driven not so much by ecumenical curatorial designs as by existing mechanisms of centralisation and dissemination.” Marcus Verhagen, Biennale Inc, Art Monthly, June 05
- 16. “ Seen from the point of view of the art-world as a system [artworks] appear as the component parts of a uniform machine, which produces a large range of novel combinations that are tested against various publics for marketable meaning.” (Stallabrass 2004, p.151)
- 17. What is Globalisation? A process in which geographic distance becomes a factor of diminishing importance in the establishment and maintenance of cross border economic, political and socio-cultural relations. [Ruud Lubbers] A decoupling of space and time, emphasizing that with instantaneous communications, knowledge and culture can be shared around the world simultaneously. [Anthony Giddens]
- 18. Globalization and Art “ The real story of the art world in the 1990s lies in how it subtly embraced and then reversed this trend toward hypercommodification by using the machinations of ‘marketing’ to shift the focus of art patronage away from the artist and back toward the institution... [The] 1990s did not show its unique aesthetic hand in the emergence of any identifiable period style in the visual arts; rather, it did so with a building boom in stylish museum buildings and a concomitant proliferation of international biennial exhibitions.” (Van Proyen, Mark 2006)
- 19. “ It has been said that arguing against globalization is like arguing against the laws of gravity.” Kofi Annan “ Globalization, as defined by rich people like us, is a very nice thing…you are talking about the internet, you are talking about cell phones, you are talking about computers. This doesn’t affect two-thirds of the people of the world.”
- 21. “ All this may make global culture more readily available to the embrace of multicultural aesthetics or a meticulous archival study. But the angle of visibility will not change. What was once exotic or archaic, tribal or folkloristic, inspired by strange gods, is now given a secular national presence and a international future. Sites of cultural difference too easily become part of the globalising West’s thirst for its own ethnicity; for citation and simulacral echoes from Elsewhere.” Bhabha, H. 1997. Minority Culture and Creative Anxiety. From British Council 2003 Reinventing Britain.
- 22. Picasso, Sitting Nude , 1908 Mask from Baule in Ivory Coast
- 26. MetroNet, Geneva
- 27. “ The virtual self is connected to the world by information technologies that invade not only the home and the office but the psyche. This can either trap or liberate people…By virtual self, I am referring to the person connected to the world and to others through electronic means such as the internet, television and cell phones…[These] technologies get inside our heads, position our bodies and dictate our everyday lives.” Agger 2004
- 30. Paul Virilio is a renowned urbanist, political theorist and critic of the art of technology. Born in Paris in 1932 In Speed and Politics(1986), Virilio further elaborates on the influence of acceleration, mobility, and technologies of motion on modern culture. Subtitled "Essay on Dromology," Virilio proposes what he calls a "dromomatics" which interrogates the role of speed in history and its important functions in urban and social life, warfare, the economy, transportation and communication, and other aspects of everyday life.
- 32. Fulcher, J (2004) A very short introduction: Capitalism . Oxford, Oxford University Press. Giddens, A (1999) Runaway World . London, Profile Books Ltd. Stallabrass, J (2004) Art Incorporated . Oxford, Oxford University Press. Steger, M (2003) A very short introduction: Globalization . Oxford, Oxford University Press. Scholte, Jan Aart (2005) Globalization: A Critical Introduction . Palgrave MacMillan, Hampshire. Van Proyen, Mark (2006) Contemporary Art and the Administrative Sublime . In Art Criticism 21 no 2. pp. 25-56, 162-71. Giddens, Anthony. The Third Way - The Renewal of Social Democracy. Cornwall: Polity Press, 1998
Hinweis der Redaktion
- The purpose of this lecture is to offer a wider perspective upon significant changes taking place during the period we’ve studied One of the most important factors to affect contemporary art has been cultural and economic globalisation. Increasingly, international art exhibitions draw their contents from all over the world, and artists address a wide range of subjects relating to this developing situation. So this lecture will evaluate some of the significant shifts that are taking place in, and as a result of, the growth in the contemporary globalised art economy. The meaning is not always clear it has something to do with the idea that we all live in one world, in what ways exactly? We generally accept that globalisation exists, since evidently the world has become financially and materially interdependent. So many debates are more likely to be about the form of globalisation, and how it came into being and where it will lead us. Two major issues of globalisation are: communication as the driving force of social change, and an increasing dependence on mobility. I will also deal with a few of the difficulties that appear in the course of the globalisation process and look at the accompanying discussions surrounding increasingly global cultural spaces as they concern artistic practice and by extension the cultural industries. I will consider the idea that the art world knows no synthetic boundaries; that it realises an actually existing globalisation and that art is the vehicle for the mixing of cultures that challenge the conventional in aesthetics and the hegemonic, or dominance in politics.
- So what is globalisation? I thought it would be a good idea to begin with this description of the process of globalisation by Anthony Giddens, who is one of the main proponents of globalisation debates, This quote is taken from his 1998 book The Third Way. The concept of globalisation is one of the most discussed subjects, not only in art but in political, economical and academic debates, and refers to the worldwide diffusion of practices, expansion of relations across continents, organisation of social life on a global scale, and grown of a shared global consciousness. Globalisation is not just expansion of capitalism and opening of financial markets round the world. The economical part of globalisation is surely important and perhaps the easiest to notice, but according to Giddens globalisation is concerned with the organization and transformation of time and space in our lives. (See Giddens, Anthony. The Third Way - The Renewal of Social Democracy. Cornwall: Polity Press, 1998) Globalisation is a key theory that has emerged since the collapse of the Eastern Block. Most recently, the world wide growth in 'Biennials' has provided the most obvious evidence of the radical changes which have been taking place in the global economies of contemporary art practice. In the past 15 years or so we have seen biennales springing up in for example Istanbul and Johannesburg. So the “international” is no longer what the traditional art centres can aspire to, but equally available to every culture in the world. Alongside this imposing phenomenon of globalisation we have also saw the rise of nationalisms and claims to specific cultural identity. Questions of identity and identification have frequently been raised since the fall of the Berlin Wall, in reaction to the collapse of the old hierarchies and the ideologies of the past.
- Some of the main characteristics of globalisation include: New Communication Technologies Higher speed of information Greater distribution of information Multinational Corporations Increased International trade Increased flows of money across national boarders. (Increased ease of travel!)
- Globalisation operates in a complex and contradictory manner. It can pull power and influence away from local communities and nations into the global arena, especially economic. But it also creates new pressures for local autonomy. Sociologist Daniel Bell put it well when he explained that the nation becomes too small to solve the big problems, but also too large to solve the small ones.
- Along side issues related to globalisation national identity can be seen to underpin the ideas and the work of many artists since the end of the 1980’s and more so has been a major influence on curators. Recently the 2006 British Art Show 6 curators also debated the impact of issues of NATIONALITY AND INTERNATIONALISM. “ E xhibitions delimited by nationality, continents and other geographical demarcations have been subject to vigorous critique over the last few years, for many of the right reasons. In a cosmopolitan art world, in which artists travel to make work and take part in exhibitions, the fact an artist is British, Brazilian or Chinese is of diminishing significance. To compare artists from the perspective of their geographical origins is often to emphasise the most superficial aspects of their practice. The approach is fraught with the perils of reductiveness and stereotyping. ” (FARQUHARSON, ALEX and Andreas Schlieker, British Art Show 6, 2005, P12)
- “ With Globalisation people become move able – physically, legally, linguistically, culturally and psychologically – to engage with each other whereever on planet earth they are” (Scholte, p. 59) “ Instead of the monochrome fixation on nationality that reigned in the mid-twentieth century, identities in today’s more global world have tended to adopt a more plural and hybrid character” (Ibid, p. 225) “ Globalization has tended to generate hybridity, where persons have complex multifaceted identities and face challenges of negotiating a blend of sometimes conflicting modes of being and belonging within the same self.” (Ibid, p. 226)
- It is generally regarded that globalization is a homogenizing, universalizing model which absorbs cultural differences and therefore ultimately rejects them. This raised the question of whether ‘locality’ retains any significance.
- The men in 'Work in Progress' are wearing either Inter Milan or AC Milan football team shirts. The type of portrait is familiar from football publicity photographs, where the players stare ahead with their arms held behind their backs. However, instead of being Italian sportsmen, the players are from amateur five-a-side Glasgow teams. Their separation into two sets alludes to the need of individuals to lend themselves a separate identity, while at the same time maintaining common bonds of knowledge and agreed opinion. The implied rivalry echoes the competition between the two Glasgow football teams, Rangers and Celtic.
- This work by Santiago Sierra puts forward a critical appraisal of the biennial. Bricked up the entrance to the Spanish pavilion and stipulated that only Spanish passport holders could enter, by the back door, and view the interior which was littered with the debris of the last Biennale.
- On another occasion he paid heroin adicts the price of a fix to line up in a row and then permit a continuous line to be tattooed across their backs. This is a new kind of politically-engaged art. True, Sierra is part of the tradition of Conceptual artists going back to the sixties, who condemn art’s unavoidable involvement with capitalism, now taking the form of globalisation.
- The rise of biennials and globalisation has contributed to the creation of a generation of plugged-in artists who are unfettered by geography. As has the ease of travel due to open borders and for a period, low air fares, resulting in the art world itself being less bound to its traditional capitals. This is manifestly clear with dozens of international biennials which now the calendar. All this has raised questions about the ways in which contemporary artists deal with issues of mobility and attachment. What sort of place does art connote if it is constantly evoking the shuttling between places? So if we accept that the authority and permeability of borders and the transgression of national confines, of geographical limits and of specific cultural identities is an essential issue of contemporary life and art, then central to this is the question; what does it mean to be a nation in an era of globalisation when we might expect that the physical/geographical bases of marginality may have become increasingly fluid and uncertain. Thomas Hirshhorn’s World Airport The image of the airport, and transportation systems in general, conveys the expediency of the markets, placenessness, immigration and tourism. Citizenship of the artworld is measured by frequent-flier air miles, suggesting that the activities that constitute the art world are indivisible from the activities of globalisation.
- This work by Kader Attia (Dream Machine 2002-2003) displayed at the Venice Biennale dispensed drink, food and passports alike. It considers to what extent is the abolition of borders an illusion? Do hierarchies still remain? Undoubtledly international exchange has developed but does the art world still have clearly defined centres?
- In many ways we are wadding into familiar territory with discussions of biennales; these global mega-shows that attempt to gather all the world’s art together in one place at one time. One recurring issue with i nternational biennials is that they are seen as a levelling process brushing aside local vernaculars in favour of an international visual jargon, on the other hand are hailed for ensuring the necessary capillarity between the global and the local. They are also often criticised on curatorial grounds with accusations that they are too large to offer a coherent experience and that they pay lip-service to being site specific and inclusive while in reality showing broadly the same band of well-travelled artist. In addition to showing artists who have made the rounds of international exhibitions there are also claims of institutionalised multiculturalism due to the international mandate of such shows which in and of itself asks the question of whether at a certain point "globalism" becomes a marketing term, concerned more with access to consumers than to expanding any notion of contemporary culture beyond its familiar parameters?
- Biennials play an increasingly important role in sanctioning reputations and propagating trends. Most of the artists present are represented by major, commercial galleries. Biennials don’t establish alternative poles in the art world; they extend the reach of old nerve centres of the West. In effect they fill a vacuum left by the museum, which has been slower than commercial galleries to respond to the rise of global market in art.
- “ Globalisation has, as in many other areas of social relations and endeavour, both homogenised and fragmented engagements with and responses to the 'art world'. This has led to a kind of new, postmodern 'International Style' of works which, despite their differing quality, simply appear to be the same in any kind of location. In response to the blandness of such 'airport art', many Biennials have recently sought to encourage a direct 'engagement' with the 'cultural specifics' of their location. The result of this has been, perhaps predictably, a kind of 'parachute documentary art' produced by artist willing to make lightening fast responses to the possibility of a financially rewarding brief. However, in spite of this polarisation of the contemporary art world, into the glibly general and the impossibly specific, many artists have begun to produce works which are intentionally 'de-centred' - dispersed over time, space and location – simultaneously denying the possibility of their works post-biennial absorption into a globalised economy of commodified art objects and further de-stabilising the traditional relationship between artist and artwork.”
- “ Seen from the point of view of the art-world as a system [artworks] appear as the component parts of a uniform machine, which produces a large range of novel combinations that are tested against various publics for marketable meaning.” (Stallabrass 2004, p.151) “ The filtering of local material through the art system ultimately leads to homogeneity. This system – not just the curation but the interests of all the bodies, private and public, that make up all the alliances around which biennales are formed – tend to produce an art that speaks to international concerns.” (Stallabrass 2004, p. 42)
- Several exhibitions have called for attention to the globalization of contemporary art and the emergence of a global art world which has inherent contradictions, being seen as homogenized and diversified, expanding and contracting. Globalization may also signal a general relativism, (relativism being in direct opposition to universalism), this is the position that claims that spectacular international biennials prefigure the end of the hegemony of the USA and Western Europe in contemporary arts. The globalisation debate is one particular debate which is favoured by those working in postmodern geographies, it’s a term that first used in the 60s but intensified in its use after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and it has more recently been popularised by the media In that sense it has suffered the same fate as the word modern or modernist, it meaning has gradually been eroded, it’s being used to describe a whole manner of events therefore weakening its scholarly use as it arose in the early 1990s For many people it seems synonymous with pop culture. But there is much more to this subject than the worldwide spread of Nike, McDonalds and MTV. The term globalization relates to the process in which technology, economics, business, communications and politics dissolve the barriers of time and space that once separated peoples.
- “ The real story of the art world in the 1990s lies in how it subtly embraced and then reversed this trend toward hypercommodification by using the machinations of ‘marketing’ to shift the focus of art patronage away from the artist and back toward the institution... [The] 1990s did not show its unique aesthetic hand in the emergence of any identifiable period style in the visual arts; rather, it did so with a building boom in stylish museum buildings and a concomitant proliferation of international biennial exhibitions.”
- To get some historical grounding on globalisation it isn’t a new phenomenon: Two historical examples might be globalisations impact on the world’s religions for instance Christianity as a belief system which has been globalised since it was adopted by the Roman Empire which then disseminated it around Europe and then following the rise of European nationalism and colonisation it spread worldwide. A second example is Communism which became a global phenomenon in the 20 th century. These are just two instances but it illustrates the point that there are clearly a myriad of examples of globalisation that can be found in the past. Globalisation isn’t developing in an even-handed way. To many living outside Europe and North America it is deemed as Westernisation or Americanisation since most of the visible cultural expressions of globalisation are American e.g. Coca-cola, McDonalds. It can be viewed as something that the developing countries play little or no part in. It can be considered as destroying local cultures, widening world inequalities.
- Looking at the historical precedents for the relation of western art to the rest of the world. In terms of the origins of globalisation and the impact on artists… There is a long history of artists ‘borrowing’, appropriating and stealing inspiration, source material and imagery from other cultures. This tended to be a one-way street (i.e. Europe ‘borrowed’ from ‘exotic’ cultures) rather than true cross-cultural fertilisation. These developments accelerated in the 19 th century with Industrialisation – expanded trade networks, faster transportation, the rise of printed mass media and art magazines, mechanical reproduction of images, the growth of museums and large-scale exhibitions and World Fairs and so on all worked to ‘shrink’ the world and spread ideas and images world-wide.
- Tracing the roots of cultural appropriation Picasso’s appropriation of the African mask is one example of hybrid forms of expression that beg, borrow and steal from elsewhere. In doing so they raise the question about the significance of power relations in doing so.
- In 1978 Edward Said’s published his book Orientalism. Here he identifies that Orientalism in one form or another dates from at least the eighteenth century, and then resurfaced prominently in early modern art with the efforts of Gauguin, Picasso, and Expressionists everywhere who endeavoured to enact forms of exoticism and primitivism as routes to a more authentic Western consciousness – a search that provided only further stereotypes of the white mind’s desire to escape itself in fantasies of the oriental, the native, and the n atural. The notion of u n iversality is a European invention. As asserted by Edward Said, Europe had only considered its own culture and its peculiar expressions as universal in contrast with the so-called indigenous cultures, considered as regional phenomena. Since the 19 th century, art and culture were comprehended through a euro-centric point of view, while the claim for universality made this eurocentricity unconscious for most people.
- Globalisation and new technologies such as the internet are challenging the geographical basis of global politics. Instantaneous communication is not just a way to convey news or information quicker it changes the very texture of our lives. The role of communication in the formation and development of society has been addressed by many social theorists such as Giddens and Agger.
- Martin Kippenberger’s ‘Metronet’ , joke project, he suggested that these different stations are connected to each other to allow for a global movement of human traffic and ideas. All he produced was a series of subway entrances which lead nowhere and produced this map which constitutes the kind of space that we now occupy much of our time is spent in virtual spaces that can only exist in this abstract spaces like a map.
- Art related to the communication system and power structures in society problematising both the system and its message. Artists using familiar codes from the media. Often subverting the original message or context
- The internet, according to Agger can of course bring people of different gender, age and culture together to communicate, however he makes it clear that it may not create the utopian idea of global understanding. He argues that the self becomes the ‘virtual self’ which is connected to the world and others through electronic means, which potentially entraps or liberates.
- This includes other virtual space that we inhabit in our every day lives, in the internet it could be My space, Bebo or Face book but also things like bank machines, email, interface in the work place.
- Anyone who wants to analyse the rise of a new spacial formation over the last 15 years or so could extend their study to include Sims, Sim City and Second Life which are of particular interest to postmodern geographers but they also imply a kind of political geography. Games like these project the economy as a manageable system, increasing peoples health, wealth and happiness, this idea is macro economic and the kind of factors that need to be taken into consideration by the player involve making macro political decisions which is something that happens in the real world too but what the game implies is that somehow it has some tangible effects in that you can play the game well and achieve some targets and goals. Now according to postmodern geographers the economy just simply doesn’t function in this way due to unavoidable catastrophes and our lack of being able to truly understand the way in which the economy is going to fluctuate as our current financial situation can testify. In Sims the macro is taken and localised, domesticised, and people are individualised with their own tastes and foibles, so we are moving to a micro realm It has been rightly pointed out that this micro realm is Americanised so there might be a political geography being expressed here or an ideological system that is being promoted. So this is obviously of interest to anyone who is trying to study these new kinds of spaces
- In Speed and Politics(1986), Paul Virilio further elaborates on the influence of acceleration, mobility, and technologies of motion on modern culture. Subtitled "Essay on Dromology," Virilio proposes what he calls a "dromomatics" which interrogates the role of speed in history and its important functions in urban and social life, warfare, the economy, transportation and communication, and other aspects of everyday life. Virilio maintains that space and time have disappeared as meaningful co-ordinates
- Speed and disposability are key factors in his theory of how we live now. Some of these values expressed in relation to speeding up in the economy can be seen as values in the art of the last 20 years. For instance the instant pleasure principle Not only in the rapid accumulation of commodities but in its offshoot in at of one-liner art or nostalgia culture This was clearly evident in much work in the 90s which created an instantaneous, spectacular form of pleasure, and here I am thinking of Maurizio Cattelan or certain young British artists.