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The major interest that the centers experience toward the art of the periphery
is a result of the globalization processes, demographics, and decolonization.
The global world is also, paradoxically, the world of differences. This
has become more internationally visible thanks to communication-media
and has simultaneously expanded within the centers themselves. In addition,
decolonization has allowed a larger and more active intervention of previously
totally marginalized voices. The Third World's new beginning since the
end of the 1950's failed in almost every sphere: economic, political,
social. But an all around cultural "third-worldization" has
occurred in stride with the global "westernization". The degree
of this westernization's expansion bears its own weakening together with
the readaptation that it suffers from other perspectives. Today the strategy
of power does not consist of repressing or homogenizing diversity, but
controlling it.
Culture constitutes a field of tensions post- cold war where there occurs
a pulse between social, hegemonic, and subordinate forces. The ethnocultural
debate has become a political space of power struggles as much in the
symbolic as in the social. These are revealed by assimilation, tokenism,
rearticulation of hegemonies, the affirmation of difference, and the critique
of power, among other tensions. When the incentive to pluralism is a basic
feature of postmodernity, the implicit decentralizations remain under
the control of centers that "self-decenter" in a lampedussian
strategy of change in order for everything to remain the same. But simultaneously,
they offer a crucial flank that is taken advantage of by the peripheries.
There is that aspect of the peripheries exercising pressure and another
that has to do with the new economic expansion of the centers.
The progressive globalization of European industrial capitalism since
the end of the eighteenth century, with its colonial and neocolonial action,
universalized until today western culture as the metaculture of modernity
and furthermore as the cultural model for the institutions and general
functions of contemporary life. But every homogenization process of grand
scale, even when it attains leveling differences, generates other new
differences from within itself, like Latin that shatters into the romance
languages. This is often seen in the readaptation of the dominant culture
by the peripheries such as by the heterogeneity that immigrants are producing
in contemporary megalopolises. There are many and diverse people making
Western culture "incorrect" and in there own way freely de-eurocentralizing
it into a plural form. What we call post-modern is a result of the overlapping
of all these contradictory processes.
Yet we cannot simply think of globalization in the sense of a transterritorial
orbit with contacts in all directions. It does not consist of an effective
interconnection of the entire planet mediated by a webbed link of communications
and exchanges. Rather, it deals with a radial system spread from more
diversified and differently sized centers of power toward their multiple
and highly diversified economic zones. This fabric is laid out on the
North-South axis. Globalization has advanced little in the periphery,
because it has globalized from and for the centers. Such a structure implies
the existence of large zones of silences disconnected to one another or
only connected indirectly by way of the neometropolises. This world map
of radial nuclei and unplugged areas causes intense currents in search
of connection. The global orbit structurally generates the diaspora. The
inherent contradiction is reproduced in the centers' control toward immigrants:
they fear them as much as they need them.
In the middle of these complex confrontations is defined the use of the
concept "art of the South". For example, it has more to do with
geography of power than with a physical geography. The concept itself
is the axis of the debates and negotiations to which I have referred.
It can act as a ghetto, a check for the multicultural quota system and
cultural correctness, or even as the space for a new exoticism. Nevertheless,
it can additionally function as a notion of solidarity between the excluded
in their critique and action in the face of power.
It is obvious that it does not signify a general cultural identity and
even less a specific manner of creating art, but it does encompass similarities
closely bound with the post-colonial situation, the subordinate condition,
certain values, and, above all, the community of strategic interests in
the face of the "North". It does not constitute a synthesis,
but a mosaic. The lamentable result is that the countries and cultures
of the Third World have only barely been able to articulate these unions
in mosaic founded upon what could agglutinate them above their many differences--
even though it may only be poverty.
The "cultured" art of the Third World is not a result of the
evolution of precolonial cultures whose trajectories were dramatically
modified by colonialism. As contemporary art, it forms part of the universalization
of the western concept and practice of art as a self-sufficient activity
based on "disinterested" contemplation and driven to the production
of very specialized aesthetic-symbolic messages. It is, therefore, a colonial
product. However, as I recently heard Jimmy Durham say: Does any contemporary
experience exist that isn't? Western art is also a colonial product, only
from the other side. The historical process that I refer to envelop us
all.
I do not think it is plausible to look for a difference per se in Third
World art opposite other contemporary practices. The differences will
originate from the use that each author, movement or culture makes of
art which may be conditioned by Weltanschauung, values, strategies, interests,
cultural patrons, themes, and particular techniques.
In the centers exists a certain tendency to look at this art with suspicions
of illegitimacy. With frequency the art is not looked at: passports are
asked for, and these are usually not in regulation, because they correspond
to processes of hybridization, appropriation, resignifications, neologisms
and inventions in response to today's situation. It demands of this art
an originality related to traditional cultures (that carry this name precisely
on account of the imposed marginalization by colonial modernization),
that is to say, oriented towards the past, or as a totally new invention,
ad ovo, towards the present. In both cases it is demanded to declare the
context and to not participate in a general art practice that on occasions
could only refer to art itself. In this sense, the term "authenticity"
has been employed from the tale of purity of origins in order to disqualify
post-colonial culture by accusing it as derivative of the West. This results
even more problematic in an epoch in which complex readaptations of identities
occur: multiple identities in the form of Chinese boxes or matiushkas,
neo-identities, mixing of identities, displacement within identities,
"ethnic games"...
The syndrome remains so deep-seated that it possesses postmodern manifestations.
The new attraction of the centers towards alterity has allowed greater
circulation and legitimization of the peripheries' art. However, with
excessive frequency the art that explicitly manifests difference has been
valued, or rather it satisfies the expectations of the "other"
in postmodern neo-exoticism. The "Frida Mania" in the U.S. is
an evident example. This attitude has encouraged the "self-ostracization"
of the peripheries whereby some artists, consciously or unconsciously,
have leaned toward a paradoxical self-exoticism.
The peripheries took European modernism but almost always used it as
a means rather than an end. Modernism was put to function for a particular
agenda concentrated on the construction of identities and social and cultural
criticism. In Latin America modernism's role results notable in this sense
and in the negotiation of the heterogeneity of its societies. Latin American
modernism adopted popular culture and the contradictions of a fragmented
modernity. Wilfredo Lam, for example, was the first visual artist that
intended to take advantage of modernism as a space to affirm and communicate
Afro-American meanings.
The peripheries appropriation of modernism, more than completing its
particular agenda, signified a pluralization and complexization of Modernism
itself. The saxophone can be a metaphor for this. It is the modern prototypical
instrument designed in a laboratory for the symphonic orchestra and presented
in the large industrial fairs of triumphant modernity. However, it only
found its destiny in jazz as an unexpected vehicle paradigmatic of the
Afro-North-American sensibility.
The expansion of Third Word artistic practice, in addition to breaking
the western monism, can yield structural changes. A notable case is the
so called new Cuban art. Indebted to the widely available free artistic
teaching and the social dynamic of the country, young people of all social
groups were trained as "cultured" artists and simultaneously
continued linked with their ways of origin. In their work is produced
a construction of the avant-garde from the popular. It is not the vernacular
participating in the "cultured", rather it is making it in a
manner qualitatively different. It is evident by artists who structure
their work based on the Afro-Cuban cosmology of their family context,
a cosmology which they actively embody. This entire phenomenon encompasses
a change of meaning. Jose Bedia, for example, would be doing post-modern
Congo art.
The situation outlined in these notes makes evident the necessity of
a readjustment in the circulation of art exhibitions which also implies
the active intervention of the peripheries in the communication of their
own art against the dominant centralism. This would include as much North-South
as South-South movements, thereby establishing circuits of interchange
and legitimization in the peripheries. This pluralization would not only
benefit the South: it would be enrichment for everyone. But furthermore,
what we call the international art circuit only reaches a reduced part
of the world's population. It is necessary to pay attention to the problem
of abandoned publics that constitute the majority of humanity. The difficult
steps in this direction will bring transformations in the present format
of art circulation, and even of the art itself by aspiring to a larger
and active participation of communities, linked with education, interaction
with vernacular culture, the use of mass-media, etc. Perhaps it seems
a bit utopic to attempt to take on the correction of this problem. But
it is at a minimum important to know where the problem is.
Translation from Spanish: Kaira Cabañas
Print version
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Gerardo Mosquera
* 1945 Havana, Cuba; lives there. Critic, curator, author. Adjunct Curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; advisor at the Rijksakademie van Beeldenden Kunsten, Amsterdam.
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