Übersetzung – what's next?

“School”

admin — Mon, 05 Jan 2015 13:16:15 +0000

Wie lassen sich Lehr- und Lernprozesse erforschen? Angesichts der neoliberalen Funktion von Evaluierungen für die Ökonomisierung und Modularisierung von Bildung und der notwendigen Intimität pädagogischer Verhältnisse ist dies keine leichte Frage. Sie wurde in den letzten Jahren zunehmend gestellt und hat in diesem Zusammenhang mehr Folgefragen aufgeworfen denn emanzipative Antworten für eine nächste Gesellschaft generiert. Nun scheint ein künstlerisches Projekt in diesem Zusammenhang Überzeugenderes zu leisten als so manche didaktische Untersuchung: Smadar Dreyfus hat über einen Zeitraum von zwei Jahren Tonaufnahmen in Tel Aviver Schulen gemacht, diese penibel transkribiert, übersetzt und dabei sehr genau gearbeitet, um so viel wie möglich von dem, was im Klassenzimmer gesagt wurde, zugänglich zu machen. Dabei fällt auch gleich auf, dass dies viel mehr ist als die Lehrenden selbst hören und aufgreifen konnten. Aus dem Prozess der Investigation – der Kooperation mit den Schule, der Aufnahme, Transkription, Übersetzung und Redaktion – entwickelte Dreyfus eine raumgreifende Installation bestehend aus dem Sound und der visuellen englischen Übersetzung von 7 Schulstunden und einer Pause in israelischen Schulen, deren Intensität es sich schwer entziehen lässt. Die minutiöse Arbeit hat sich gelohnt, denn durch die künstlerische Forschung tritt am empirischen Material das gemeinhin nicht Gehörte in der „Black Box“ Klassenzimmer zutage. So zeigt „School“, dass in jedem Klassenzimmer Hegemonie nicht nur eingeübt wird, sondern immer auch umstritten ist. Denn die Lehr- und Lernsituationen, deren ZeugInnen wir in der Installation werden, sind nicht nur stets von machtvollen Erzählungen, disziplinierenden Organisationsstrukturen und nationalen Deutungsmustern durchzogen, sie sind auch Schauplätze von Ungehorsam und Desinteresse und sie sind durchdrungen von der Lust am Wissen und dem Wunsch nach Veränderung. So verdanken wir dem Projekt endlich konkrete Einblicke in die Widersprüche, die Bildungsräume durchziehen. Denn die Stimmen, die wir hören, erzählen von viel mehr als jeder Fragebogen ermitteln könnte: Sie ordnen sich unter und fügen sich ein, sie versuchen zu folgen und spielen sich aus, aber sie flüstern auch dazwischen und quatschen hinweg, sie langweilen sich sichtlich, weigern sich trotzig und helfen zusammen, sie sprechen zurück und lehnen sich auf.

Nora Sternfeld

EB: I’d like to start by asking what led you to begin researching Tel Aviv schools?
SD: School began as an autobiographical research, emerging from my own background. I was born and grew up in Tel Aviv, and since moving to London in 1990, my relationship to where I come from has increasingly become the source of a sense of urgency in my work. For me, the research and the work are forms of returning.
Until recently, when going to vote in Israel, I used to go to a polling station located in my old school, which was a rather strange and somewhat melancholic experience. Wandering through the school corridors, I was reminded of the voices that I experienced in my own education and the impressions they left. I have a very strong memory of how teachers spoke and how they used their voices: they had a particular vocal inflection. To me, voices enact spatial and social relations and what has emerged in my research over the years is in part the implicit social and cultural conditioning that is embedded in the voice.
School started as an open-ended idea: there is a shared intimacy between teacher and pupils, but also there is a kind of performance that goes on in the classroom. I wanted to see if I could get an insight into these spaces, which are part of a public institution but are actually closed to most of the public: even parents don’t get to see what’s going on in there. It was also a matter of curiosity to see if and how it has changed since I was a pupil in the 1970s.

Can you describe the process of research and -recording?
Initially I got permission to sit in on a couple of lessons, to listen to the teacher. Then I realized how fascinating it was to listen to the pupils as well, to their responses and interactions with the teacher, how they behave. They form different groups, like microcosms; each classroom a kind of mini-society. This made me think about just how we are marked by these relationships. Who is your friend? Who is not your friend? Who’s smarter than whom? How do you converse with the teacher? All these little preoccupations are a part of becoming, part of a process.
I discussed the classroom setting with the sound recordist who was working with me, and we began experimenting with ways to record the field of voices in the classroom spatially. I wanted to dislocate this field of voices and sounds, and then to reconstruct them spatially for the visitor in the installation. How the viewer-listener is positioned in relation to voices and sounds is always a central consideration in my work, so the recordings needed to reflect the directionality of the multiple voices and to register where they were situated in the classroom space. This process led us to develop a multidirectional web of microphones attached to the classroom ceiling.
At the same time, it was necessary to convince the institutions to let me in, to get used to my presence, and to have some understanding of my project. I applied to the Israeli Ministry of Education for permission to record in the schools, and they agreed but posed a set of conditions and constraints: I was not allowed to film or photograph the lessons, identify anybody by their full name or identify any of the schools. For each school there was a long process of achieving consent: when the headmaster was open to cooperation, I also explained the project to the teachers, pupils, and parents to get their consent. I was instructed not to interfere with or interrupt the school’s timetables or its daily operations, so I had no control over the content of the lessons that were taught or any other aspect of the way the lessons were run.
Finally, the sound recordist and I were not allowed to be present in the classroom during the lessons: we installed the microphones in advance and then had to wait in the corridor during the recording. In fact, I only listened properly to the lessons when I was back in my studio in London – that was the moment when I was confronted with the material as decontextualized, pure sound. I then engaged in a kind of forensics, a close analysis of recordings of what at first sound like banal exchanges between teacher and pupils. I became obsessed with picking out every utterance and placing it as text on the screen. I also found that the microphones picked up speech and sounds that the teacher hadn’t heard and these revealed a great deal about the class dynamics and its undercurrents.

How did you go about selecting the particular recordings to use?
It was important to me to have a multiplicity of voices and a range of subjects in School and to see how different modes of delivery by different teachers affect their interaction with the pupils. I recorded 68 lessons over a period of two years. Given the conditions that had been set for me, the lessons were necessarily randomly recorded. After the intensive and extended periods of time spent listening and editing, I finally selected seven of the 68 lessons for the installation. This was a hard but significant part of the process. Each lesson was carefully edited down to about 23 minutes: it was a fine line, as I had to bear in mind the danger of distorting the meaning of what the teacher and the pupils were saying by taking their words out of context. The variety of subjects, the quality of the teacher’s voice, the pupils’ voices, their language, their interactions with the teacher and amongst themselves, and how they relate to the subject taught – these all became considerations that contributed to my selection. So School is born of subjective research; it is not an attempt to give a documentary report or to do statistical research on the conditions of education in Israel.

What kind of schools are these and what kinds of pupils attend them?
The Israeli education system is wide and varied, and it’s sectarian: there are ultra-orthodox schools, Arab schools, Kibbutz schools, etc. I wanted, however, to revisit the kind of education that I had, schools that I went to, or similar. The pupils whose voices are in the work come from a range of socio-economic backgrounds, but overall it’s secular state education. You could call it middle Israel.

And how old are the pupils? It strikes me that a work such as this could be made in relation to university students or younger children, but you have very specifically chosen to work with pupils of a particular age.
The children are between 11 and 15 years old. I focused on this age group because I specifically wanted to capture the performance of the voice in a particular time of transition, both physically and mentally. It’s during this period of early adolescence that one starts forming an adult identity. It’s a complex process, but at this stage children establish a more conscious relationship to the world outside the family.

School is very immersive, but it’s notable that this immersion is achieved in a dark space with no concrete reference to a classroom setting, such as the presence of chairs or desks.
You have a point here, but I would add that the architectural structure of School does retain a crucial spatial principle from school settings: it has a set of rooms that are connected by a corridor. No other feature of a school en-vironment as we know it is represented. This is quite -intentional, because not only do I not want anything to distract from the sound, but I would also like to avoid any visual references to particular locations and cultures. I dislocate the sounds into this dark, visually blank space but I keep the spatial arrangement of the rooms and the corridor to create a directional sound environment and form a specific experience for the viewer-listener.

This space of experience will be different for each viewer-listener depending on the particular trajectory he or she takes through the installation.
Yes, from the outset it made sense to me to have a multiplicity of lessons – one in each room – and for the visitor to experience this multiplicity, at times simultaneously, in the corridor. This space is where the visitor wanders between the classrooms, where her route forms an unpredictable narrative that she accumulates from one lesson to the next. The seven lessons play at the same time, and the visitor juxtaposes the lessons in her trajectory and in her experience; she stumbles, say, upon history, then maybe into biology, or suddenly encounters Arabic, at times even coming across the same lesson twice rather than going through all the complete lessons in a prescribed order. When the cycle of lessons ends, the sounds of a school break fill the corridor: kids running and shouting, doors slamming. It is a kind of release. Then the lessons start again in all the rooms.
What is created is an affective space, which I believe is also a productive one. The sound touches you in an unpredictable way and produces something within you. I find it fascinating that something in these sounds can move from one culture into another culture through this experience.

In your earlier installations Lifeguards (2002–05) and Mother’s Day (2006–08), you use the same technique of visualizing voices through projections that transcribe and translate what is being said, but in those installations you retain the use of representational images. Here, you dispense with the representational image entirely, which strikes me as significant. What is at stake in the absence of the image in School?
I find sound more visceral, more intimate than an image, and in my work I focus on very specific sounds that encompass the voice, which is a highly loaded and emotive element. In Lifeguards and Mother’s Day, I separated sound from image and placed the viewer-listener inside the “cut” between the two; for School I was thinking differently about the position of the visitor. Without the apparent certainty of an image you are stepping into something else, something ambiguous that is outside what is knowable. It activates a subjective experience and opens up this experience to a range of potential meanings.
In darkness one listens differently as well as directionally, and School makes use of that experience and gives it weight. The voice field and soundscape are concrete in the sense that they conjure up an image in the mind’s eye. Without a representational image to guide you, you are cast into the amplitude of your own memory of voices in education. Paradoxically, the loss of a sense of embodiment when in darkness is important in enabling this to happen: it facilitates your immersion in the soundscape. Not only are you addressed by the teacher’s voice, but you also find yourself among teenagers who are often distracted, bored, and opinionated. You get drawn into that scene, you start taking sides, deciding you like certain people and not others. You inevitably feel as if you are addressed by these voices; you become situated as another subject and implicated in the scene in which you are moving.

It strikes me that the thematics of translation form a red thread throughout School. We move from the space of the school to the space of the installation, from spoken language to text, and from Hebrew to English. What is the significance of translation in your work?
I often work with materials from Israel and in my primary language, Hebrew, which compels me to consider what it means for a visitor to encounter these materials in another culture: how the work embodies an act of translation, how to characterize the position and experience of being a viewer/listener/reader, and how to make it a productive position.
And yes, you are right, School is in many ways a work of and about translation. The teacher interprets “knowledge” that comes from prescribed texts to the pupils (each teacher of course has a different approach); the pupils discuss their understanding of the lesson (it is not only the text); the discussion and any audible utterance in the classroom is translated from Hebrew to English, edited and merged together as visual text on the screen – disciplinary events and outbreaks of hilarity included.
And of course, there is the spatial translation of School and how the visitor is positioned in a place of translation. As a visitor you have work to do: you are always grappling to understand what’s going on. In my work this goes back to Lifeguards, in which I used the translation of speech to present contradictions and misunderstandings between the gesture of the voice and the meaning of what is being said. In School, the visitor is listening and reading, coping with interruptions and distractions, interpreting and contextualizing; she is constantly in translation and translating.

A major aspect of the affective dimension of the work is the experience of reading the projected titles, synchronized with the rhythm of the voices. Sometimes they are too fast and numerous to fully comprehend. Can we perhaps understand the viewer’s inability to keep up with the speed of the titles as an allegory of the failure of translation to ever truly give a complete rendering of the original?
Yes, there is a certain inability to read absolutely everything, even for native English speakers. To me, this is part of what it means to be in translation: it is never complete, it is always partial, and you have to make do with partial knowledge. I deliberately construct the situation so that the visitor is left to fill the gaps, to actively reconstruct what is being said, and in the process she gradually becomes more implicated.

It’s a matter of knowing that one doesn’t know everything and can’t understand everything. Instead, we recognize that partiality and acknowledge it. This seems to me to be at the heart of what it is to have an ethical relation to another culture.
It’s an essential layer within the whole experience, yes. Perhaps it comes from the fact that I inhabit this on-going condition of translation, oscillating between two cultures and languages. In a sense, I try to reproduce that for the visitor. For example, when you read the synchronized titles, the rhythm in which the words are uttered and the breathing of the speaking voice become the rhythm of the flashing titles. I think this is particularly relevant to the experience of the non-Hebrew speaking visitor: she is listening to a language that is foreign to her, and she can see and feel its rhythm as well as its sounds through her body while trying to keep up with its translation.

The whiteness of the titles creates a pulsation of light in the dark room.
Again, it’s another example of the affective dimension of the installation. The rhythm of the work choreographs sounds, light, and darkness in relation to the architecture of the space. School could be considered as the dark interior of a time capsule, an all-encompassing, polyphonic, orchestrated environment that affects the visitor with its own rules and principles.

Throughout your work, we see a distinct interest in historiography. However, it is what we might call a “minor history,” not in the sense that it is insignificant but in that it leaves behind the big events and the major players. Instead, you focus on small, quotidian moments. Is it fair to say that you approach geopolitical issues through the documentation of everyday lived experience?
As I mentioned earlier, I come to subjects in my work through my personal experience and from my relation to the voice. I am interested in how these are affected by and implicated in social and political conditions, but I am also grappling with my personal relation to these conditions, my mixed relationship with the place I come from. I think this reveals something about how geopolitical issues reverberate in everyday life and situations, and this is how the work has much wider implications than its content might otherwise imply: it oscillates between a specific locality with its cultural narratives, and wider concerns about the relations between the individual and the collective.

So how important is the political dimension in School?
School is of course embedded in specific political realities but, it’s important to understand that it addresses these realities in an oblique way. Significantly, some of the strategies we discussed earlier amount to a political positioning in themselves, although in a different register than geopolitics: there is considerable value here to a multiplicity – of voices, for example, or of modes of disputation. There is also the way in which visitors are affected and implicated in the installation, the heightened condition of translation, and the absence of representational images. All these things are political in a sense.
I have an interest in how visitors to School might begin to think differently about how education functions within their own society and culture, and how it relates to subjectivity. In fact, during its first presentation at the Folkestone Triennial in 2011, I spent many days observing the audience inside the installation and had conversations with them about their experience of the work. It was striking how many wanted to discuss their own education in comparison with elements in the work.

Everybody is touched by education, of course, which is part of why it’s such a politically hot issue around the world.
Yes, it is always intertwined. For example, in the context of Israel there’s recently been a stormy internal debate that most non-Israeli audiences would not be aware of, regarding how politically charged issues and political views should be discussed by teachers in secondary education. Some teachers have been accused by politicians from the right of bringing politics and personal political views into the classroom.

As if there could be an education without politics.
Exactly. These teachers pointed out that it would be impossible to cover the curriculum without discussing politically charged issues at all, especially in the teaching of citizenship. And Israel is not alone in having disputes over the place of politics in education: for example, in the United Kingdom right now there is a debate raging about changes to the history curriculum that the current Minister for Education is trying to push through, and which many regard as highly ideological.

This brings us to the politics of subject formation. The school is a key example of what Louis Althusser calls an “ideological state apparatus.” It’s not a repressive apparatus like the police or the prison, but it is nonetheless an apparatus for producing and reproducing subjects, for interpellating subjects to the ideology of the state. I think we can definitely see this understanding of the educational institution at play in School. But unlike Althusser, who has a rather totalizing view of ideology, you offer something a little more open and conflicted. We feel that force of interpellation, but we also see counterforces that are actively trying to negotiate it.
I was surprised at how willing and eager the pupils are to assert their own views, sometimes really contradicting what the teacher is saying.
It is interesting to see that place where these discursive negotiations happen and how they happen, but as an artist, I am not out to illustrate a particular theoretical position. I think it’s clear in School that the reproduction of ideology is not seamless and it’s not total. As far as I’m concerned, education is a process of hit and miss from which subjectivity emerges. The commotion and social dynamics of the classroom enable the visitor to feel the insecurity of being a teenager. School shows that being a teenager is fraught, partly because there is resistance to conforming to the expectations of the institution, and partly because as teenagers they are in a state of being “in-between”. At the same time, we hear the pupils in class being repeatedly told, “Think for yourselves!” These contradictory demands confuse what is resistance, what is conformity, and what is interpellation. There’s a tension between resistance and conformity here, and I think this tension is telling, because it is something that is not entirely controllable or predictable by the institution. Also, for me, this has a relation to the importance of ambiguity: if, in School, visitors are positioned in a place of contradictions and uncertainties, it does not mean that they are left without meaning – on the contrary.

Wiederabdruck
Dieser Text ist eine gekürzte Fassung des im Februar 2014 geführten Interviews, zuerst erschienen in: Hila Peleg, Erika Balsom (Hg.), Berlin Documentary Forum 3. Berlin 2014, S. 164–169.

1.) ‚School‘ (2009-11) Seven channels of HD Video / 42 channels of Sound / specially constructed Architecture.
Duration: Seven synchronised lessons of 24 minutes each and a 3 minutes school break, on a loop. Excerpt of Lesson 1 of 7: History (12‘30“ from 25‘17“) are linked via QR code.

next toolbox

admin — Thu, 12 Sep 2013 12:42:42 +0000

Mit einer rot glänzenden Horn-Konstruktion, die einem Weltraum- oder eher einem Traum-Landegerät gleicht, versuche ich, in Neuchâtel vor dem Centre d’Art zu landen. In mehreren Versuchen hängt das Flugobjekt an den Fassaden der sich allmählich verengenden Rue des Moulins. Kein Wunder, ist die Landung problematisch, sind die Berührungspunkte prekär: Das Gefährt ist lediglich eine rohe Skizze ihrer selbst, sozusagen ein Prototyp, der nie zum Typ werden wird. Zudem besteht der Antrieb aus nichts als Wortfetzen, die ich in die Hörner spreche und die aus den zwei Düsen entströmen. (Performance, Centre d’Art Neuchâtel CAN, September 2005)
Was soll morgen gelernt werden? Eine Frage, die wir uns an der Zürcher Hochschule der Künste im Master Art Education stellen, stellen müssen.¹ Es genügt nicht mehr, die Vergangenheit in die Zukunft zu kopieren. Es genügte noch nie, die Vergangenheit in die Zukunft zu kopieren. Die hier festgehaltenen Gedanken versuchen, sich dieser Frage aus einer bestimmten Perspektive anzunähern.
Aber Vorsicht: Der Titel dieses Beitrags ist eine Finte. Es geht hier gerade nicht um ein neues Set von Schraubenschlüsseln.
Welche Handlungsräume werden wir vorfinden, wenn Begriffe wie Kunst, Bild, Werk und überhaupt Kultur derart in Bewegung geraten sind? „Gut“ und „schlecht“ sind offensichtlich artikulierbare Größen. Es eröffnen sich aber nicht mehr nur immer neue Spielräume in bereits bestehenden Strukturen, vielmehr ist die Dimensionalität selbst plötzlich mit im Spiel.
Zwei Sichtweisen möchte ich in der Folge anhand der Begriffe „Performativität“ und „Permaterialität“ kurz skizzieren. Die beiden Begriffe fußen in Frage- und Problemstellungen meiner eigenen künstlerischen Praxis und sind in dieser Kombination inspiriert durch einen Satz aus einem Vortrag von Karl-Josef Pazzini aus dem Jahr 2009: „Bildung geschieht in Performanz und Permaterianz“.

Performativität
Den Begriff Performance verbinden viele immer noch mit blutigen, schockierenden oder zumindest irritierenden Ereignissen, die sich in Galerieräumen oder auch im öffentlichen Raum in den 1970er und 80er Jahren ereigneten. Als Performance lassen sich aus kulturanthropologischer Sicht (Victor Turner u. a.) aber genauso gut jene Rituale beschreiben, die Teil unserer kulturellen Gewohnheit sind oder (mit Judith Butler²) diese erst produzieren. Gemeinsam ist beiden Prozessen, dass sie einen Übergang beschreiben und eine Gegebenheit (neu) installieren. Auch der Kunstpädagoge Gunter Otto hat in einem seiner späten Texte 1998 performative Prozesse als „Kern des Lernens überhaupt“³ beschrieben. Wir lernen alle und immer wieder. Idealerweise geschieht dies in einem gegenseitigen Aussetzungsverhältnis zwischen Lernenden und Lehrenden.
In der Linguistik hat Noam Chomsky die Unterscheidung zwischen Kompetenz und Performanz eingeführt. Jacques Derrida hat den Begriff Performativität insofern differenziert, als performative (Sprech-)Akte nur funktionieren, weil sie sich zu einem (Darstellungs-)Code in Bezug setzen oder setzen lassen – also erst im Spiel zwischen Wiederholung und Differenz überhaupt wirksam werden.
Performativität möchte also in dieser hier gemeinten „Leserichtung“ keineswegs Kultur-Codes pauschal ignorieren, sondern sich zu bestehenden in ein spezifisches, kritisches Verhältnis setzen und erst dadurch eine neue Realität mit neuen Codes herstellen – mitunter eben auch genau durch deren wiederholtes Einschreiben in die Gegebenheiten – oder durch Verschiebungen dieser Gegebenheiten im Sinne eines Kontingenz-Entfaltungsspiels.⁴ Beide Vorgehen sind mit einer prinzipiellen, aber produktiven und leidenschaftlichen Hinterfragung des je Gegebenen verbunden – arbeiten sich durch die aktuellen Regelwerke und Bedingungsgefüge hindurch zu neuen Setzungen und Aussetzungen
Keine performative Setzung lässt sich, so verstanden, ohne Verweise (Übersetzung) und die entsprechenden aktuellen Referenzgrößen (In-Bezug-Setzung) denken. Die drei Facetten bedingen sich gegenseitig. Idealerweise geht es um eine stetige Steigerung der Differenzierung dieser Verhältnisse. Das erfordert ein profundes Wissen um diese Verhältnisse und ihre Bewegungen.

Permaterialität
Dieser hier vorgeschlagene Begriff versteht Material in den Begriffen einer relationalen Körperlichkeit im Sinne von Judith Butler, nicht als absolute Größe. (Wie viel Holz soll denn im Holz sein, damit Sie Holz Holz nennen? Wann wird etwas zu künstlerischem Material?) Darüber hinaus sind hier nicht nur die „möglichen Interaktions-, Transfer- und Interferenzmodi verschiedener Materialien bzw. Materialitäten“ gemeint⁵, es geht mir vielmehr um das Durchdringen von „Materialsprachen“ hin zu neuem „Sprachmaterial“ im Sprachspiel „Kunst/Kultur“.
Allein durch Spielen lässt sich aber möglicherweise kein Haus aufrichten. Dazu sind auch Hilfskonstruktionen, Gerüste erforderlich. Diese werden auf die jeweiligen Bedingungen und Anforderungen hin realisiert und existieren in der Regel nur so lange, aber genau so lange, wie für diesen Prozess nötig. Die Gerüste selber existieren außerhalb des Spiels: „Essentialität“ „Identität“ oder „Performativität“. Es sind Artikulationen ohne eigenen Inhalt, Bedeutung oder Sinn. Es sind Artikulationen die ganz darin aufgehen, einen „Vollzugsort“ zu metrisieren, zu rastern. Sie spannen einen projektiven Ort für Berechenbares auf, um zu ermöglichen, wie ein Ding realisiert werden kann (Form annehmen kann, konkret werden kann).
Permaterialität ignoriert also nicht die je aktuellen Bedingungen der Materialien im Spiel, dieser Ansatz versucht vielmehr genau diese aktuellen Verhältnisse im Auge zu haben. Ein solches Tun aktualisiert Konsistenz.
Um nochmals auf die eingangs formulierte Frage zurückzukommen: Mir ist natürlich bewusst, dass die hier skizzierten Perspektiven die Sache nicht einfacher machen. Diese Perspektiven sind aus Erfahrungen an der Schnittstelle Kunst/Lehre heraus formuliert worden, ihre Implikationen im Bildungsalltag sind noch zu diskutieren.

1.) Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, Master Art Education, Vertiefung „bilden und vermitteln“: mae.zhdk.ch
2.) Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter, on the discursive limits of „sex“, Routledge 1993.
3.) Gunter Otto, „Ästhetik als Performance – Unterricht als Performance?“ Auszüge aus einem Vortrag den Gunter Otto 1998, in Seitz Hanne (Hg.), Schreiben auf Wasser, Bonn: Klartext 1999.
4.) Bormann, Brandstetter, Matzke: Improvisieren, Paradoxien des Unvorhersehbaren, Bielefeld: transcript 2012, S. 8.
5.) wie sie im SNF-Projekt „Intermaterialität“ der Kunsthochschule Bern beschrieben werden, http://www.hkb.bfh.ch/?id=2457 [28.04.2013].

1. Mose – Kapitel 41. Die Träume des Pharao

admin — Thu, 12 Sep 2013 12:42:37 +0000

¹ Es begab sich aber nach zwei Jahren, da hatte der Pharao einen Traum, und siehe, er stand am Nil. ² Und siehe, aus dem Nil stiegen sieben schöne und wohlgenährte Kühe herauf, die im Nilgras weideten. ³ Nach diesen aber stiegen sieben andere Kühe aus dem Nil herauf, von häßlicher Gestalt und magerem Leib; die traten neben die Kühe am Ufer des Nils. ⁴ Und die sieben häßlichen, mageren Kühe fraßen die sieben schönen, wohlgenährten Kühe. Da erwachte der Pharao. ⁵ Er schlief aber wieder ein und träumte zum zweitenmal, und siehe, da wuchsen sieben Ähren auf einem einzigen Halm, die waren voll und gut ⁶ nach denselben aber siehe, da sproßten sieben dünne und vom Ostwind versengte Ähren. ⁷ Und die sieben dünnen Ähren verschlangen die sieben schweren und vollen Ähren. Da erwachte der Pharao und siehe, es war ein Traum! ⁸ Da sich aber sein Geist beunruhigte, ließ er am Morgen alle ägyptischen Wahrsager und Weisen rufen und erzählte ihnen seinen Traum; aber da war keiner, der ihn dem Pharao auslegen konnte. (Daniel 2.2) ⁹ Da sprach der oberste Mundschenk zum Pharao: Ich gedenke heute meiner Sünde! ¹⁰ Als der Pharao über seine Knechte zornig war und mich im Hause des Obersten der Leibwache in Gewahrsam legte, mitsamt dem obersten Bäcker, ¹¹ da träumte uns in der gleichen Nacht, mir und ihm, einem jeden ein Traum von besonderer Bedeutung. ¹² Und daselbst war ein hebräischer Jüngling bei uns, ein Knecht des Obersten der Leibwache; dem erzählten wir es, und er legte uns unsre Träume aus, einem jeden ganz genau. ¹³ Und so wie er es uns auslegte, so ist es gekommen; mich hat man wieder in mein Amt eingesetzt, und ihn hat man gehängt. ¹⁴ Da sandte der Pharao hin und ließ Joseph rufen. Und sie entließen ihn eilends aus dem Loch. Er aber ließ sich scheren und wechselte seine Kleider und ging zum Pharao hinein.

Joseph deutet die Träume des Pharao
¹⁵ Und der Pharao sprach zu Joseph: Ich habe einen Traum gehabt, aber es kann ihn niemand auslegen; nun vernahm ich von dir, wenn du einen Traum hörest, so legest du ihn auch aus. ¹⁶ Joseph antwortete dem Pharao und sprach: Nicht mir steht dies zu. Möge Gott antworten, was dem Pharao Heil bringt! (1. Mose 40.8) ¹⁷ Da sprach der Pharao zu Joseph: Siehe, in meinem Traum stand ich am Ufer des Nils; ¹⁸ und siehe, da stiegen aus dem Nil sieben wohlgenährte Kühe von schöner Gestalt herauf, die im Nilgras weideten. ¹⁹ Und siehe, nach ihnen stiegen sieben andere Kühe herauf, geringe Ware, und von sehr häßlicher Gestalt und magerem Leib, wie ich in ganz Ägyptenland keine so häßlichen gesehen habe. ²⁰ Und diese mageren, häßlichen Kühe fraßen die sieben ersten wohlgenährten Kühe. ²¹ Als sie aber die verschlungen hatten, merkte man nichts davon; denn sie waren so häßlich wie zuvor. Da erwachte ich. ²² Und ich sah weiter in meinem Traum, und siehe, sieben volle und gute Ähren wuchsen an einem einzigen Halme auf. ²³ Und siehe, nach denselben sproßten sieben dürre, magere und vom Ostwind versengte Ähren hervor; ²⁴ und die sieben mageren Ähren verschlangen die sieben guten. Solches habe ich den Schriftkundigen erzählt, aber keiner kann es mir erklären. ²⁵ Da sprach Joseph zum Pharao: Was dem Pharao geträumt hat, ist eins: Gott hat dem Pharao angezeigt, was er tun will. ²⁶ Die sieben guten Kühe sind sieben Jahre, und die sieben guten Ähren sind auch sieben Jahre; es ist einerlei Traum. ²⁷ Die sieben mageren und häßlichen Kühe, die nach jenen heraufkamen, sind sieben Jahre; desgleichen die sieben leeren, vom Ostwind versengten Ähren; es werden sieben Hungerjahre sein. ²⁸ Darum sagte ich zu dem Pharao, Gott habe dem Pharao gezeigt, was er tun will. ²⁹ Siehe, es kommen sieben Jahre, da wird großer Überfluß in ganz Ägyptenland herrschen; ³⁰ aber nach denselben werden sieben Hungerjahre eintreten, da man all diesen Überfluß im Lande Ägypten vergessen wird; ³¹ und die Hungersnot wird das Land aufzehren, daß man nichts mehr merken wird von dem Überfluß, infolge der Hungersnot, die hernach kommt; denn sie wird sehr drückend sein. ³² Daß es aber dem Pharao zum zweitenmal geträumt hat, das bedeutet, daß das Wort gewiß von Gott kommt, und daß Gott es eilends ausführen wird. ³³ Und nun sehe der Pharao nach einem verständigen und weisen Mann und setze ihn über Ägyptenland; ³⁴ der Pharao verschaffe und setze Aufseher über das Land und lasse in den sieben Jahren des Überflusses den fünften Teil der Ernte vom Lande Ägypten erheben. ³⁵ Also soll man alle Nahrung dieser sieben künftigen guten Jahre sammeln und Getreide aufspeichern zur Verfügung des Pharaos, und solche Nahrung in den Städten verwahren. ³⁶ Und diese Nahrung soll dem Land als Vorrat dienen für die sieben Hungerjahre, welche in Ägyptenland eintreten werden, daß das Land durch die Hungersnot nicht entvölkert werde.

Josephs Erhöhung zum Regenten über Ägypten
³⁷ Diese Rede gefiel dem Pharao und allen seinen Knechten wohl. ³⁸ Und der Pharao sprach zu seinen Knechten: Können wir einen Mann finden wie diesen, in welchem der Geist Gottes ist? (Sprüche 14.35) ³⁹ Der Pharao sprach zu Joseph: Nachdem Gott dir solches alles kundgetan hat, ist keiner so verständig und weise wie du! ⁴⁰ Du sollst über mein Haus sein, und deinem Befehl soll mein ganzes Volk gehorchen; nur um den Thron will ich höher sein als du. (Psalm 37.37) (Psalm 113.7) (Prediger 4.14) ⁴¹ Weiter sprach der Pharao zu Joseph: Siehe, ich habe dich über ganz Ägyptenland gesetzt! (Apostelgeschichte 7.10) ⁴² Und der Pharao nahm den Siegelring von seiner Hand und steckte ihn an Josephs Hand und bekleidete ihn mit weißer Leinwand und legte eine goldene Kette um seinen Hals (Ester 3.10) (Ester 8.2) (Daniel 5.29) ⁴³ und ließ ihn auf seinem zweiten Wagen fahren; und man rief vor ihm aus: «Beugt eure Knie!» Und also wurde er über ganz Ägyptenland gesetzt. ⁴⁴ Und der Pharao sprach zu Joseph: Ich bin der Pharao, und ohne dich soll niemand in ganz Ägyptenland die Hand oder den Fuß erheben! ⁴⁵ Und der Pharao nannte den Joseph Zaphenat-Paneach und gab ihm Asnath, die Tochter Potipheras, des Priesters zu On, zum Weibe. ⁴⁶ Und Joseph zog aus durch ganz Ägyptenland. Er war aber dreißig Jahre alt, da er vor dem Pharao stand. Und er ging vom Pharao aus und bereiste ganz Ägyptenland. ⁴⁷ Und das Land trug in den sieben Jahren des Überflusses haufenweise. ⁴⁸ Und er sammelte allen Ertrag der sieben Jahre, in denen in Ägyptenland Überfluß herrschte, und tat die Nahrungsmittel in die Städte; nämlich den Ertrag der Felder rings um die Städte brachte er in diese. ⁴⁹ Und Joseph speicherte Getreide auf wie Sand am Meer, bis er es nicht mehr messen konnte; denn es war unermeßlich viel. ⁵⁰ Ehe aber die teure Zeitkam, wurden Joseph zwei Söhne geboren; die gebar ihm Asnath, die Tochter Potipheras, des Priesters zu On. ⁵¹ Und Joseph nannte den Erstgebornen Manasse; denn er sprach: Gott hat mich vergessen lassen alle meine Mühsal und das ganze Haus meines Vaters. ⁵² Den zweiten aber nannte er Ephraim; denn er sprach: Gott hat mich fruchtbar gemacht im Lande meines Elends. ⁵³ Als nun die sieben Jahre des Überflusses im Lande Ägypten verflossen waren, ⁵⁴ da brachen die sieben Hungerjahre an, wie Joseph vorausgesagt hatte. Und es entstand eine Hungersnot in allen Ländern; aber in ganz Ägyptenland war Brot. ⁵⁵ Und als Ägypten Hunger litt und das Volk zum Pharao um Brot schrie, da sprach der Pharao zu allen Ägyptern: Geht hin zu Joseph; was er euch sagen wird, das tut! ⁵⁶ Und da die Hungersnot im ganzen Lande herrschte, tat Joseph alle Kornspeicher auf und verkaufte den Ägyptern Getreide; denn die Hungersnot nahm überhand in Ägyptenland. ⁵⁷ Und alle Welt kam nach Ägypten, um bei Joseph Korn zu kaufen; denn es herrschte allenthalben große Hungersnot. (1. Mose 12.10)

Wiederabdruck
Dieser Text stammt aus dem Alten Testament, Genesis / 1. Buch Moses,
Kapitel 41, Luther 1912, online unter: http://www.bibel-online.net/buch/schlachter_1951/1_mose/41/ [06.06.2013].

ALTERMODERN

admin — Thu, 12 Sep 2013 12:42:37 +0000

Travel, cultural exchanges and examination of history are not merely fashionable themes, but markers of a profound evolution in our vision of the world and our way of inhabiting it.
More generally, our globalised perception calls for new types of representation: our daily lives are played out against a more enormous backdrop than ever before, and depend now on trans-national entities, short or long-distance journeys in a chaotic and teeming universe.
Many signs suggest that the historical period defined by postmodernism is coming to an end: multiculturalism and the discourse of identity is being overtaken by a planetary movement of creolisation; cultural relativism and deconstruction, substituted for modernist universalism, give us no weapons against the twofold threat of uniformity and mass culture and traditionalist, far-right, withdrawal.
The times seem propitious for the recomposition of a modernity in the present, reconfigured according to the specific context within which we live – crucially in the age of globalisation – understood in its economic, political and cultural aspects: an altermodernity.
If twentieth-century modernism was above all a western cultural phenomenon, altermodernity arises out of planetary negotiations, discussions between agents from different cultures. Stripped of a centre, it can only be polyglot. Altermodernity is characterised by translation, unlike the modernism of the twentieth century which spoke the abstract language of the colonial west, and postmodernism, which encloses artistic phenomena in origins and identities.
We are entering the era of universal subtitling, of generalised dubbing. Today’s art explores the bonds that text and image weave between themselves. Artists traverse a cultural landscape saturated with signs, creating new pathways between multiple formats of expression and communication.
The artist becomes ‘homo viator‘, the prototype of the contemporary traveller whose passage through signs and formats refers to a contemporary experience of mobility, travel and transpassing. This evolution can be seen in the way works are made: a new type of form is appearing, the journey-form, made of lines drawn both in space and time, materialising trajectories rather than destinations. The form of the work expresses a course, a wandering, rather than a fixed space-time.
Altermodern art is thus read as a hypertext; artists translate and transcode information from one format to another, and wander in geography as well as in history. This gives rise to practices which might be referred to as ‘time-specific’, in response to the ‘site-specific’ work of the 1960s. Flight-lines, translation programmes and chains of heterogeneous elements articulate each other. Our universe becomes a territory all dimensions of which may be travelled both in time and space.

Wiederabdruck
Serpentine Gallery Manifesto Marathon, 2008

From World Art to Global Art. View on a New Panorama

admin — Thu, 12 Sep 2013 12:42:36 +0000

Recent books with titles such as World Art History and Global Art History seem to suggest that the two terms can be used as synonyms. But, in fact, world art and global art today have very different meanings, ever since the notion global art came up around twenty years ago. World art is an old idea complementary to modernism, designating the art of the others because or although it was mostly to be found in Western museums. It continues to signify art from all ages, the heritage of mankind. In fact, world art included art of every possible provenance while at the same time excluding it from Western mainstream art – a colonial distinction between art museums and ethnographic museums. World art is officially codified in international laws for the protection of cultural heritage and monuments. Global art, on the other hand, is recognized as the sudden and worldwide production of art that did not exist or did not garner attention until the late 1980s. By its own definition global art is contemporary and in spirit postcolonial; thus it is guided by the intention to replace the center and periphery scheme of a hegemonic modernity, and also claims freedom from the privilege of history (for an overview of publications see: this volume*, pp. 60–73).
This essay was written to prove how the notion of world art and its new companion term global art came into use, how the meaning of the terms changed, and what they reveal about the history of ideas and the inherent notions of art. I hope to make it clear how terminology provides a key to understanding the underlying intentions. However, one and the same notion, namely world art, also changed what it referenced, especially when the term global art came into use. This essay is divided into four parts, and begins with the concept of world art before turning to global art. A Paris exhibition in 1989 serves as a missing link, as it marked the time when world art split from global art. A fourth and final section deals with art history and its new challenges.

1.
World art was initially coined as a colonial notion that was in use for collecting the art of “the others” as a different kind of art, an art that was also found in different museums where anthropologists and not art critics had the say-so. The so-called Atlas of World Art, which John Onians edited in 2004, admittedly corrected this bias by including Western art in such an overview, the only remaining distinction being geographical difference. But up to this date the colonial connotation had been inherent in the conception of world art. It was central to the separation of world art from Western art by the abyss created by art history’s narratives. The Vienna school of art history, a hundred years ago, favored the term Weltkunst in order to expand the discipline’s field of competence. In this sense, Heinrich Glück, in the Festschrift for Josef Strzygowski, in 1934, wrote a study with the title Hauptwerke der Weltkunst. In Germany,
the magazine Die Kunstauktion, founded in 1927, was -relabeled Weltkunst in 1930 since world art had become -attractive for collectors. For some people, world art nourished a feeling of nostalgia whenever they felt dis-illusioned with modern art and longed for a lost past. This is not to say that a general study of art production across the world makes no sense; it depends on which purpose its description serves and whether it includes or excludes the one who is speaking. “World History,” as initiated by William H. McNeill and others in the postwar period, proved to be a successful approach; however, it left no doubt that it included the West and that there was no longer a Eurocentric view of the “other”
as a subject for writing history.¹ Ultimately, historians have the same problem with a terminology that distinguishes between world history and global history – despite the obvious need for such a distinction in the global age. History has less of a problem in the case of “world literature” as a comparative field of studies and in the sense that Goethe used the term when he recomposed the German translation of Arab poems in his West-Eastern Divan. After all, translation as a burden and challenge distinguishes literature from the field of art. Colonial trading and collecting of art and artifacts was always directed toward single objects or artifacts, which more often than not were deprived of their history and previous use when they arrived in Western collections. When we look back on colonialism the reader and the collector are two different roles.
The history of the world art discourse also distinguishes the background of two schools which have introduced education in world art into the academic curriculum. There is, on the one hand, the new School of World Art Studies at Leiden University, which was initiated as an interdisciplinary project by the art historian Kitty -Zijlmans and the ethnographer Winfred van Damme.
At Leiden, the global production of today’s art is seen against the presence of the colonial history of the Netherlands.² And, on the other hand, there is the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia in Norwich whose Department of Art History was renamed in “Departmentof World Art Studies” in 1992. In this case, the Sainsbury Collection of art from Africa and Oceania was presented to the university as a gift, and John Onians, in his Atlas of World Art, paid tribute to the legacy of the Sainsbury collection in his own way.³ The magazine World Art, which was launched by the Sainsbury Centre in March 2011, in its editorial pointed to
“a major change in attitudes concerning what art is.” “World art,” the text continued, “has widely differing resonances,” and is “centered on human creativity […]. The consideration of ancient cultures around the globe must inform a broader rethinking of world art.”
The Sainsbury collection was, however, guided by a Kantian value judgment as an aesthetic postulate. This justified art by what seemed to be its universal and timeless form, purified from whatever content and cultural context. Thus, so-called world art was regarded as evidence that art had always been modern and had always been nothing but form, whatever its cultural conditions may have been. This view served both ends and justified modern art as well as world art. The Sainsbury family enjoyed “primitive” art for the same reasons as modern art, collecting the one and the other side by side. The collector Sir Robert Sainsbury found general consent when he confessed, to quote from the mission statement of the museum, that he had brought together “work spanning 5000 years of human creativity.” This confidence, however, only worked when the two parties were neatly separated: on the one hand the anonymous object, and on the other modern artists who by definition had to be Western and, preferably, British, like Francis Bacon whose work was collected in the 1950s by the Sainsbury family.
The Sainsbury Centre in the meantime acknowledges the fact that a watershed separates the traditional artisan, as he appeared in a colonial gaze, from a postcolonial artist who was born into the diversity and coevalness of “contemporary worlds,” to borrow Marc Augé’s felicitous term, and can no longer be represented by an ethnographic object.⁴ He or she may work next door as an artist-in-residence. At the British Museum, the Department of Ethnography, with its rich collections also from the Sainsbury family, started an initiative to actively collect contemporary art and to collaborate with artists, mostly of African origin, as a wall text informed visitors to the collection in 2007.⁵ But artists from the former colonies turned against such Western collections with their postcolonial critique, since these did not allow for the self-representation of their ancestors. Also Western curators of ethnographic museums face a crisis which makes the collection principles and exhibition practices a difficult problem. Sally Price points up the problem trenchantly in her book Primitive Art in Civilized Places, an acerbic account of the appropriation politics of foreign artifacts and religious art in Euramerica.⁶
World art – a kind of aesthetic appropriation of objects as pure “form” or as proof of individual creativity on a universal scale – was best described in André Malraux’s book Le musée imaginaire⁷, first published in 1947, a book based on a universal aesthetics despite cultural and historical differences.⁸ The author, a writer with personal experience of the French colonies in Asia, claimed to have overcome the traditional dualism between (Western) art and (ethnic) world art, which he identified as an outdated colonial attitude. Malraux also applied a Western art concept, the formalism of those days, without regard to the chronology and geography of art history, and compared medieval Western art and Buddhist sculpture or the art of Gandha-ra. Paradoxically, he still worshipped the museum, even if he dreamed of an ideal museum without walls, a museum in the brain or, for that matter, in a book.
World art, in the meantime, matters for identity politics in cultures that had no previous share in colonial selecting and collecting. Their history, whether precolonial or colonial, was embedded in and embodied by objects as items of cultural practice, but usually this was lost with their entry into a Western museum. Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum, therefore turned the tables when he published his BBC series A History of the World in 100 Objects in 1996. He gave their history back to the objects and also included modern Western examples or objects with a colonial use among them. The change from the exhibition hall to the text of a book also made it possible for him to include specimens of mass culture from the modern age.
But world art nowadays also receives unwelcome attention due to the growing pressure of repatriation claims from the former colonies. Metropolitan museums of the West, often accused of being outposts of empire and colonialism, today have to rethink their arguments in order to defend their collections. The British Museum is among them, and Neil MacGregor, claimed his museum to be “not only a museum of the world but also a museum for the world.”⁹ Along these lines he opened a blockbuster show with the Chinese Terracotta Army that attracted large crowds in 2007,¹⁰ thus ascertaining his claim not only to own, but also to promote world art. A bookshop on Great Russell Street I came across at the time, unintentionally offered a telling -example for the need of our distinction. The owner of the shop presented two books on world art and one on global art, although all three books were about art from China, side by side in the same window display.¹¹ The catalog of the show at the British Museum across the street shared the window with a book that was dedicated to visits to the studios of living Artists in China, as the title stated, and therefore would not have been possible as recently as twenty years ago.
The relation of world art to modern art, as the very canon of Western art, was linked to the notion of so-called Primitivism, as Robert Goldwater called a certain current of modern avant-garde in his book Primitivism in Modern Painting of 1938, published a few years after the MOMA had launched the exhibition African Negro Art in 1935. Primitivism, one of the basic creeds of modernism, was represented, and representable, for the last time ever in William Rubin’s Museum of Modern Art show of 1984 when its time already was over and the -reviews concentrated almost unanimously on the ethnocentric bias of the concept. The show’s subtitle “The Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern” was an attempt to explain, and to exculpate, the hegemonic appropriation of tribal artifacts by modern artists who borrowed “primitive” forms for their own work, thus translating them into an idiom of modern art. After the fact, the -so-called affinity was celebrated as a proof of the universality and timeless formal value of the modernist canon. But James Clifford, in a review of the show, -objected that one should “question the boundaries of art and the art world,”¹² and also opposed the distinction between modernist art and traditional craftsmanship in a colonial discourse.
A few years later, in 1988, Susan Vogel launched the exhibition Art/Artifact in the Center for African Art in New York as an attempt to reconsider the issues of the MOMA show. The debate about art and artifact had been lingering on for quite some time and had divided the exhibition practice of ethnographic museums. However, now the debate took a new turn. The shift happened at a moment when the Western concept of art had lost its clear profile in contemporary practice and had left the definition of art up in the air. A symposium linked to the 1988 show addressed the question “What makes something art?”. Thomas McEvilley, one of the participants, stated that “the boundaries of what had been called art had been stretched to the point where it seemed silly even to bring it up,” and he added that -so-called primitive art “is the only context left, which brings up the question of what is art.” As a result he -proposed “anthropology as a cultural critique, not forcing objects from other cultures into our categories, but rather allowing those objects to raise questions about ours.” The author concluded: “The fact that we designate something as art means that it is art for us, but says nothing about what it is in itself or for other people.”¹³ In the catalog of Susan Vogel’s show, Arthur C. Danto not only challenged the modernist creed of universal art. He even turned the debate about the so-called primitives on its head and maintained “there is no art more advanced than theirs.”¹⁴ In other words, the notion of “art” had lost its clear agenda in late modernism and could no longer be applied to or turned against the ethnographic object. Rather, the debate centered after 1989 on the question of how to deal with the fact that modern international art had lost its geographical frontiers, or home base, and had now ended up in global art, as the new distinction from world art was called. The former dualism of art and artifact was put aside when contemporary art production in a professional sense had become general practice and was no longer the West’s prerogative.

2.
A first step along this road was taken by the Havana Biennial, founded in 1984, at its two venues in 1986 and 1989. With 690 artists from 57 countries, the 1986 Biennial “created a new space, acting as a gigantic ‘Salon des Refusés’,” to quote Gerardo Mosquera.¹⁵ The focus on Latin America was a critical response to mainstream art, although the notion of “Third World Art” was only included in the official title for the 1989 venue. The two Havana Biennials still insisted on otherness and proclaimed an alternative internationalism without the dictate of Eurocentrism. Already in 1987, Rasheed Araeen had founded the periodical Third Text as a critical forum “for Third World Perspectives on the visual arts.” The concept of “Third World” went out of use with the end of the Cold War but it served as an interlude -before global art emerged (see: this volume*, pp. 41–48). The third Havana Biennial, in 1989, mixed high art with popular art in order to undermine the Western art system and to insist on local traditions other than art history’s narratives.¹⁶
The MOMA exhibition of 1984 had still been a colonial project, although it took place in the postcolonial era. Jean-Hubert Martin was ready to go beyond this divided world by proclaiming division as a practice had to be abolished. Magiciens de la terre, as the participants were called to avoid any protests by Western art critics, was hailed as “the first really global exhibition of contemporary art” (La première exposition reellement mondiale d’art contemporain), to quote the Gazette des Arts (see: this volume*, pp. 66–67 and pp. 212–220). The huge discussion and dissent which his show provoked, was not only due to its location in a former center of colonial politics and modernist Western art. Of equal importance was the unprecedented confrontation of a number of renowned Western artists with an equal number of formerly excluded artists from what had been the colonies. Each artist was given equal treatment, two pages in the catalog, giving only his or her name, work title, and place of birth.
It was a bold step to leave the opposing worlds of modern art and world art behind and to arrive in a shared world of global art. But Martin was accused of continuing the colonial game of the authentic because of selecting so-called “native” artists as the counterparts of their Western colleagues, especially since postcolonial artists working with video and installation already -replaced the former artisans. Martin also invited professional artist, for example, Chéri Samba, who presented his artistic self in the show with a self-portrait and a biography: the anonymous artisan from Africa had become a face with a name and a professional career. In the end the show succeeded in that both parties, even against their will, emerged as contemporaries with a name and a passport. The one no longer looked modern, and the other no longer ethnic in the old colonial sense. A few years later, in 1995, Jean-Hubert Martin became the director of André Malraux’s Musée des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie (founded 1962) in Paris. As par-ticipating curator of the first Johannesburg Biennale, -Africus, in the same year, Martin analyzed what he hoped would be a new future for world art, as a contemporary practice, in the museum.¹⁷ He distinguished between the ethnographic museum, where everything is explained, and the art museum where living artists, as representatives of human creativity, would honor “art’s heroes and ancestors.” But the boundaries, as he argued, were to become “increasingly unclear, and we have yet to create an art museum […] where artists of all the world can meet […] and compare themselves with historical works.” His own museum in Paris, Martin hoped, would “become such a place” and also artists would be able to take over the former role of anthropologists. At that time Martin did not know that his museum would soon be incorporated in the newly created Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, which opened its doors in 2006 and initially excluded professional contemporary artists from Africa and Oceania in order to celebrate once again the old myth of the arts premiers, a myth from colonial times. André Malraux had founded his museum as a place where ethnic art would be staged as an aesthetic experience, as was the creed of modernist times. In the meantime, however, such a colonial attitude was pass., and it was generally agreed that Malraux’s project no longer represented the global age.¹⁸

3.
In 1990, Thomas McEvilley, who had previously contributed to the catalog, reviewed the Magiciens show under the heading “The Global Issue.”¹⁹ Despite all criticism, whether from the right or the left, he acknowledged that the show was a first attempt to curate art in a truly postcolonial way. This was also the general response in the July 1989 edition of the magazine Art in America where a review of the Magiciens exhibition appeared titled “The Whole Earth Show.” The front cover of the same magazine featured a NASA shot of the Earth together with the title “The Global Issue” (see: this volume, pp. 64–65). For the first time the planetary view had been taken from an extraterrestrial position in space.
In order to justify what was a neologism in the art scene, the magazine presented six statements on the global world, including a text by the artist Martha Rosler and one by the anthropologist James Clifford. There was a general feeling about the danger of an unwelcome homogenization and consumer culture, caused by the -euphoria of Theodore Levitt’s view of “the marketing -imagination.”²⁰ Nevertheless, Craig Owens concluded: “Perhaps it is in this project of learning how to represent ourselves – how to speak to, rather than for or about, others – that the possibility of a ‘global’ culture resides.”²¹ Further, the interviews with fourteen “peripatetic artists,” as they were labeled in the same edition, confirmed that a global space for art was in the making.
History writing changed as well with the arrival of globalization. A “New Global History,” as Bruce Mazlish called it, “focuses on the history of globalization” and views “processes that are best studied on a global rather than a local, national, or regional level.”²² After all, he continued, “globalization is a process now going on around us, while world history stretches in all directions. One speaks of globalization; one can hardly speak of worldlization as a movement operating today.” It was a paradox to write a history not of the past, but of living together on the planet.
Globalization, indeed a road of no return, provided a place for artists who for a long time had been excluded with the label world art. Thus we can call the Magiciens show an intermezzo in which the cards were shuffled again. One could also call it a rite de passage, which marked a one-off transitory event that passed. The project would have been impossible before, and was no longer possible afterwards when globalization had opened up a new territory of art. Both terms, modern art and world art, suddenly looked old. The Magiciens project led into no man’s land where we still are and where we navigate with the help of provisional terminology. The show happened at the same time the posthistory debate reached its climax and the Cold War, with its confrontation of two systems, collapsed. It now seemed that inter-national art, an art between nations, though to be sure Western nations, had been an affair of the modern age and that the term no longer covered a polycentric map where cultures took over the former distinctions of nations.
With the Paris Magiciens show, global art made its entry into the art world. While world art remained synonymous with the art heritage of the “others,” global art by contrast crossed the boundaries and demanded acceptance as a contemporary practice on an equal footing with Western art. As the term global art was not yet acceptable to everybody, in January 1992 the journal Kunstforum International returned to the term “Weltkunst,” but linked it to an explanatory definition of “Globalkultur.” The editor, Paolo Bianchi, reminded his readers that a new kind of ethnicity was transforming the visual arts.²³ Ethnicity had been a concern in the debate on world art, but never in modern art. Now it became an issue in aspirations to identity and difference even for those who presented themselves as postethnic (for example, as “artists from Africa” instead “African artists”).²⁴ As a result, curators of biennials take over the former “fieldwork” of ethnographers to promote local artists and to create new “art regions” with a common transnational profile.
There was another notable episode in the terminology of the 1980s. Shortly before the term global art became firmly established, the old term world art was given a new significance as a label for the emerging new geography of art production. Thus, Jean-Louis Pradel’s book chose the title World Art Trends. 1983–84 in order to include a few newcomers from non-Western countries among the international artists. This kind of confusion also reached the seventh Sydney Biennale of 1988 which was proclaimed as A View of World Art 1940–1988 (see: this volume*, pp. 60–73). It should be noted that a show in Cologne, seven years earlier, in 1981, with the same time period (1939 to 1981) marked the -inclusion of American artists in what the curators called postwar “Western art” (Westkunst). However, this postwar position no longer represented the new frontiers. It was even attacked in retrospect when in 1989 Rasheed Araeen curated the exhibition The Other Story in London, emphasizing the other, neglected story of modern art.²⁵ The Sydney catalog explains the 1988 Biennale’s purpose as “an exhibition in Australia of contemporary art both from here and overseas”²⁶ and as an “attempt to view key developments in world art since 1940 from an Australian perspective,”²⁷ as against the old center and periphery view from Paris or New York.
The year 1988 also marked the bicentennial of white settlement of Australia, a commemoration that caused a hot debate among the Aboriginal Australians about their participation at the Sydney Biennale. In order to cope with the controversy, the curatorial board commissioned 200 hollow log bone coffins to be created by twelve Aboriginal artists from the Ramingining Artists Community symbolizing 200 years of oppression (see: this volume*, p. 127 and p. 167). But it could not be overlooked that the Biennale was otherwise restricted, as far as Australia’s part was concerned, to twenty-six “European Australians,” among them several pioneers of the modernist movement. Five years later, indigenous Australians entered the official ranks of the contemporary art scene. Three Aboriginal women artists were included among the nine participants from Australia. The Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, launched in 1993 by the Queensland Gallery, Brisbane, was an ambitious attempt at remapping the former art world (see: this volume*, pp. 112–113). Australia in the meantime opted for the Asia-Pacific region as its cultural background. The official acceptance of Aboriginal art as -contemporary art had been heralded by the exhibition Dreamings in 1988, which left behind the ethnocentrism at the Sydney Biennale of the same year. Thus, -Aboriginal art, as a branch of what had formerly been called world art, entered the territory of contemporary art under the auspices of what was now called global art.

4.
The global conditions of today’s art production, to come to my final section, leaves art history with unexpected questions. Can art history become global at all? Who writes art history in the future, and does it need to be art history in the common sense and with a common concept not only of art but also of history? It was not a coincidence that the 2008 Congress of the International Committee of the History of Art (CIHA), which took place in Melbourne, Australia, did not by chance address these questions with such vigor. And because this was so, it changed the history of art history forever. Its title Crossing Cultures, understood as a move in every direction, indicated a shift of perspective that gave up the idea of a privileged viewing point and also the notion of cultures not already penetrated by other cultures. Understandably enough, though, there was still ambiguities in terminology as there were many participants. Conference sections with titles such as “Perspectives on Global Art History” and “The Idea of World Art History” raised the question whether the two notions mean the same at all.²⁸ If we are willing to use definition as distinction, rather than as affirmation, then the different history of the two terms cannot be overlooked. After the arrival of global art, also world art must be newly defined and, ultimately liberated from its colonial baggage.
The same CIHA congress had a section on global art, but labeled the latter as contemporary art in a new sense. “Writing the history of contemporary art,”²⁹ to quote the title of Terry Smith’s essay, is a paradox for an art which, in many ways, comes after history and even turns against history. Alexander Alberro, in the same section, concluded that periodizing contemporary art is “subject to a battlefield of narratives and stories.”³⁰ This conclusion is almost inevitable, since contemporary art is site specific and looks very different when we pass from one local perspective to another. The only consensus was that the term contemporary art no longer merely designates the most recent art, but distinguishes this art from modern art. The term postmodern, however, is not available, as it stood for something inside modernism. Terms like “multiple” or “alternative modernities” are only serviceable to those who want to reclaim a neglected or forgotten modernity of their own.³¹ Global art is not only polycentric as a practice, but also demands a polyphonic discourse. Art history has divided the world, whereas the global age tends to restore its unity on another level. Not only is the game different: it is also open to new participants who speak in many tongues and who differ in how they conceive of art in a local perspective. We are watching a new mapping of art worlds in the plural (see: this volume*, pp. 246–254), which claim geographic and cultural difference.
Art history, as I have insisted myself on various occasions, suddenly appears to have been a rather local game that worked best for art from the Renaissance onwards. I have called it a post-Vasarian narrative that does not even adequately describe medieval art and its religious images.³² To speak of Art History after Modern-ism, as I did in the title of a book³³ which continues the arguments of The End of Art History with reference to the exodus of contemporary art from art history, means art history faces a new challenge after the end of modern-ism. Global art not only accelerates contemporary art’s departure from the guidelines of a linear art history, it also flourishes in parts of the world where art history has never been practiced or where it only followed colonial models. The loss of a central place of art history in art theory and art display may also explain the new role of curatorial studies or visual studies that have replaced art history in the curriculum of art academies such as the Goldsmith College in London. The majority of today’s art curators is trained in political, social, or cultural sciences rather than in art history, and thus tend to emphasize art’s political or cultural agenda as against aesthetics.
However, we need not speak of art history’s crisis unless we are thinking of a necessary crisis. The time has come to rewrite art history in the West as well in order to respond to a new audience that looks at Western art with other premises. I therefore do not share a current trend in US American art history that excludes the rest of the world either by writing “World Art History” on a universal scale and thus restoring an old privilege of the West³⁴ or by denying that art history can ever work outside the West.³⁵ Rather, I feel the need to encourage other, new narratives with a local perspective of art history that abandons obedience to the colonial gaze of former world art studies. World art, in the old sense, tended to support the mainstream art discourse via exclusion. Today, we need a new paradigm and a postcolonial discourse for world art studies that are based on comparative studies which are on equal footing. For example, we take for granted the study of Chinese language and history at Western institutions but shut our eyes to the news that the National University of Beijing has opened a Department of Western Classics (Greco-Roman) and supports a bilateral conference with Durham University. In short, world art history is only justified as a cross-cultural project that also admits looking at Western -culture and art history from the outside. This is the challenge of the global age, in which we have to recover our narratives with new eyes.
Yet Western art history also faces a problem on its own territory. This is the noncontinuity of the story that connects premodern, modern, and current art. The linear story in the genealogy of modern art which Alfred H. Barr, Jr. devised for the MOMA in the 1930s, no longer continues to represent art since the 1960s even in the West, as an unsuccessful attempt to prolong this genealogy demonstrated at the Tate Modern in London.³⁶ And the methods of art history fail to explain the transition from the artwork, with its given place in history and its survival in a collection, to art projects that are ephemeral and badly documented, to give just one example from changing art practice. I am not complain-ing about this turn of events, but I do wonder whether art history needs to look back and discover its own past with fresh eyes. It appears that we have reached a watershed where the West is encountering the same situation as other cultures. Entry into the global age where art production has become general not only marks a beginning but also an end, the end of the old world map of art with its center and periphery scheme.
At the same time, when art production becomes a global condition, the diversity of visual cultures or art histories that appear behind today’s art practice and art theories is something we all have in common. In other words, what at first sight looks like the new homogeneity of a “flat” world, a second glance reveals as a diversity of traditions that demand a similar diversity of local narratives, including that of Western art history. I ventured forth in this direction when, in a recent book, I tried to show that the invention of perspective in Florence in the end turns out to have been a local game and, furthermore, that it responded to an Arab theory of optical perception (called “perspective” in the Latin translation), that, however, represented a different visual culture. It needs a cross-cultural investigation to look at Western art in the new expanded space from the outside.³⁷
Today art history faces a challenge of a different kind. The rise of new art worlds in many parts of the world demand a narrative that also takes into account the growing role of economics and the politics of art in describing art. The documentary part of the exhibition The Global Contemporary in 2011/2012, therefore, turned to descriptions that, in contradistinction to the paradigm of self-referential art history (art as a system apart), emphasized the need for geopolitical and institutional aspects beyond issues of style, innovation, and progress (see: this volume*, pp. 50–59). It was the documentation’s aim to create a space for different and even competing histories instead of a single art history. Art’s complicity with contemporaneous social, religious, and cultural worlds was surely always given, but its complicity goes further since art today “has more to do with clarifying cultural identity than with aesthetic feeling,” as Thomas McEvilley wrote in 1995.³⁸ Art is not only produced “in an atmosphere of global dialog,” as he added, but serves the competition of conflicting politics of representation. The emergence of art spaces, which share the name but not the function of what we called a museum, is part of the game, as also is the spread of art markets to Asia. This new state of things, in retrospect, sharpens the view of what art has been in the past and demands the interaction of different art histories. In other words, the present world leaves most of us in a similar situation in the face of an unwritten history of world art as a joint enterprise.

Translated from the German by Elizabeth Volk.

Wiederabdruck
Dieser Text erschien zuerst in: Hans Belting, Andrea Buddensieg, and Peter Weibel (eds.), The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds, exhib. The Global Contemporary, Art Worlds after 1989, ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Sept. 17, 2011 – Feb. 5, 2012, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2013, pp. 178–185.

* “this volume“ refers to: Hans Belting, Andrea Buddensieg, and Peter Weibel (eds.), The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds, exhib. The Global Contemporary, Art Worlds after 1989, ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Sept. 17, 2011 – Feb. 5, 2012, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2013.

1.) Bruce Mazlish, “Comparing Global History to World History,“ in: Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 28, no. 3, 1998, pp. 385–395.
2.) Kitty Zijlmans and Wilfred van Damme (eds.), World Art Studies: Exploring Concepts and Approaches, Valiz, Amsterdam, 2008.
3.) John Onians, “A New Geography of Art Museums,“ in: Peter Weibel and Andrea Buddensieg (eds.), Contemporary Art and the Museum. A Global Perspec-tive, Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern, 2007, pp. 124–138; John Onians (ed.), Atlas of World Art, Laurence King, London, 2004. The latter is a book with 68 contributors that intends to cover the whole history of human picture production.
4.) Marc Aug., An Anthropology for Contemporaneous Worlds, Stanford University Press, Palo Alto (CA), 1999, pp. 89ff.
5.) See: Hans Belting, “Contemporary Art as Global Art,“ in: Hans Belting and Andrea Buddensieg (eds.), The Global Art World – Audiences, Markets, and Museums, Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern, 2009, pp. 38–73, p. 56, fig. 8.
6.) Sally Price, Primitive Art in Civilized Places, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago (IL), 1985.
7.) Hans Belting, Art History after Modernism, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago (IL), 2003, pp. 153ff.
8.) Ibid.
9.) See: Belting 2007, p. 33.
10.) The First Emperor: China’s Terracotta Army, The British Museum, September 13, 2007 – April 6, 2008.
11.) See: Belting 2009, p. 43, fig. 3.
12.) James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-century Ethnography, Literature, and Art, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (MA), 2002, p. 213.
13.) Thomas McEvilley, Art and Otherness: Crisis in Cultural Identity, McPherson, Kingston (NY), 1992, pp. 164–165.
14.) Arthur C. Danto, “Artifact and Art,“ in: Art/Artifact: African Art in Anthropology Collections, exhib. cat., Center for African Art, New York, et al., The Center for African Art, New York (NY) and Prestel Verlag, Munich, 1988, pp. 18ff.
15.) Gerardo Mosquera, “The Third Bienal de la Habana in its Global and Local Contexts,“ in: Rachel Weiss et al., Making Art Global (Part 1): The Third Havana Biennial 1989, Exhibition Histories, vol. 2, Afterall, London, 2011, pp. 70–79, p. 74.
16.) See: Luis Camnitzer, “The Third Biennial of Havana,“ in: Rachel Weiss et al., Making Art Global (Part 1): The Third Havana Biennial 1989, Exhibition Histories, vol. 2, Afterall, London, 2011, pp. 206–214, p. 207.
17.) Jean-Hubert Martin, “Art in a multi-ethnic society,“ in: Africus: Johannesburg Biennale, exhib. cat., Transnational Metropolitan Council, 1995, p. 49.
18.) Bernard Dupaigne, Le scandale des arts premiers: La véritable histoire du musée du quai Branly, Mille et une nuit, Paris, 2006.
19.) McEvilley 1992, p. 153.
20.) Theodore Levitt, The Marketing Imagination, Free Press, New York (NY), 1983.
21.) “The Global Issue: A Symposium. James Clifford, Boris Groys, Craig Owens, Martha Rosler, Robert Storr, Michele Wallace,“ in: Art in America, vol. 77, no. 7, July 1989, p. 89.
22.) Bruce Mazlish, “The New Global History,“ available online at: www.newglobalhistory.com/docs/mazlich-the-new-global-history.pdf, see: p. 5, accessed 09/04/2012. See also: Bruce Mazlish, “On History Becoming History: World History and New Global History,“ available online at: www.newglobalhistory.com/docs/mazlish-on-history-becoming-history.pdf, accessed 09/04/2012. I thank Sara Giannini for this link.
23.) Paolo Bianchi, “Vorwort,“ in: Bianchi (ed.), “Weltkunst – Globalkultur,“ in: Kunstforum International, vol. 118, 1992, pp. 72–291, p. 73
24.) See: Hans Belting, “Contemporary Art and the Museum in the Global Age,“ in: Peter Weibel and Andrea Buddensieg (eds.), Contemporary Art and the Museum. A Global Perspective, Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern, 2007, pp. 16–38, p. 34.
25.) Rasheed Araeen (ed.), The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-war Britain, exhib. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 1989.
26.) Franco Belgiorno-Nettis, “Chairman’s Preface,“ in: From the Southern Cross: A View of World Art c. 1940–1988,“ exhib. cat., 1988 Australian Biennale, Biennale of Sydney, 1988, p. 7.
27.) Nick Waterlow, “A View of World Art c. 1940–88,“ in: From the Southern Cross: A View of World Art c. 1940–1988,“ exhib. cat., 1988 Australian Biennale, Biennale of Sydney, 1988, p. 9, italics added.
28.) See: Jaynie Anderson (ed.), Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration and Convergence. The Proceedings of the 32nd International Congress in the History of Art, The Miegunyah Press, Carlton (Victoria), 2009.
29.) Alexander Alberro, “Periodising Contemporary Art,“ in: ibid., p. 938.
30.) Terry Smith, “Writing the History of Contemporary Art,“ in: ibid., p. 918.
31.) See: Araeen’s Magazine Third Text; and books like Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar (ed.), Alternative Modernities, Duke University Press, Durham (NC), 2001.
32.) Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image Before the Era of Art, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago (IL), 1994.
33.) Hans Belting, Art History after Modernism, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago (IL), 2002.
34.) For critical reflections on the problems implicated see: David Carrier, A World Art History and its Objects, Penn State University Press, University Park (PA), 2008.
35.) James Elkins (ed.), Is Art History Global?, Routledge, London et al., 2007.
36.) Belting, 2009, p. 46.
37.) Hans Belting, Florence and Bagdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (MA), 2011.
38.) Thomas McEvilley, “Here comes everybody,“ in: Africus: Johannesburg Biennale, exhib. cat., Transnational Metropolitan Council, 1995, p. 57.