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Global Visior1s
Towards a New I IlltTILII i<ln;tlisin
in the Visual :\rts

Edited by
Jean Fisher

i
l KALA PRESS
,; ln association with
The Institute of International Visual Arts
LONDON

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 mn ,.J • IUWUWMS 'S :S:M'S 7'2

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New In ternationalism
Or the Multiculturalism
of Global Bantustans

Rasheed Araeen

Introduction
It is perhaps not right, from the outset, to express my apprehensions and
anxieties concerning the INIV A project, but I feel it is necessary to
highlight the basic issues and problems we may encounter in realising
the objectives of the proposed 'new internationalism'. These apprehen-
sions and anxieties are not imaginary. Having lived and struggled as an
artist in Britain for the last thirty years, and often finding myself at logger-
heads with the art establishment, l'm too well aware of the difficulties
one faces when trying to change the system.
There is also another difficulty relating to the them e of this session.
If 'recoding' only means changing the codes but not transforming the
'object' itself, would it not make nonsense of the whole idea of a new
internationalism? Would it not imply the construction of a new facade
or outer wall, in the manner of postmodern spectacle or decoration? I'm
not playing with words: the meaning of what one intends is coded in
the language. My fear is that this may in fact turn out to be the reality.
There is an urgent need to shift the concept of internationalism;
but is a radica! shift possible without questioning the prevailing inter-
nationalism and the ideas, attitudes and values which form and code its
structure? Arc we seeking to dismantle this structure? Is this possible
within the existing Eurocentric framework?
Indeed, there has recently been a substantial critique of Euro-
ccntricity, but it is often part of a search for alternative centricities. Given
the continuing historical dominance of western civilisation, and without
a profound shift in political and economic power from the West to other
cultures, wouldn't an escape from Eurocentricity bc an illusion? It is not
so much the centrality of European civilisation and its ideas of progress
which should necessarily be a problem, but how this centrality is
ideologically constructed. What concerns me here are those components

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4 Global Visions
which construct the world in which the white race is seen to be the only
civilising agency. These components, as I will show later, play a central
role in the construction of western nation-states and their alliances on
which the prevailing notion of internationalism is based.
Before we look at the key issues that underlie the proposed 'new
internationalism', I would like to say something about what has lead to
its initiative. I don't want to give you the impression that Britain is central
to this debate about internationalism; I recognise that the struggle against
the dominant forces has been waged globally, and I welcome this gather-
ing in a spirit of solidarity. But it is also important to recognise that a
struggle for true internationalism has been waged within British culture
by Afro-Asian peoples for the last forty or so years, and that this struggle
has been constantly undermined by the very same forces which now claim
to have initiated this debate. Does this represent a genuine change on
the part of our art institutions or a smokescreen?
It is in this context that I hope to examine not so much the various
aims and objectives of the proposed 'new internationalism', but, more
importantly, the problem s and difficulties which may obstruct its realisa-
tion. It would be naive to think that there would be no attempt to obstruct
or sabotage the development of a new internationalism if it is realised
that this might challenge the existing system and its privileges. The
obstruction may, as has often happened in the past, be in the form of
an institutional intervention which appears to be in support of cultural
egalitarianism but in reality only reflects an ongoing paternalism. A case
in point is the prevailing idea of cultural diversity or multiculturalism,
but I shall come to this later.
My main argument is that without critically examining the situa-
tion within Britain we cannot conceptualise our relationship with the
world at large. If there really is a process taking place in Britain which
reflects our desire for a new internationalism, what is the evidence for
this process? Is it part of a debate within the mainstream art community;
does it reflect changes that are taking place within art institutions? The
answers to these questions are, I 'm afraid, not positive. The prevailing
situation in the British art community is very different from the impression
the initiative of this symposium may convey.
If the objective of the IN IVA project is to eliminate the differen-
tiation of different peoples, or, to put it more bluntly, making distinctions
between white people and peoples of other race s or cultures, why is this
objective still wrapped up in the institutional rhetoric of cultural diversity
and pluralism? If 'new internationalism' means a global projection of
the idea of cultural pluralism, or multiculturalism, as it has been formed
in the West, then I'm afraid we are on shaky ground. If the underlying
concern here is only about accepting artists of other cultures, particularly
those who are not part of our own society, who we think have been
excluded from the discourses of art of our time, we do not need a change
New lnternationalism 5
in the system. The exhibition 'Magiciens de la terre' is a recent example
of a new development in terms of showing together works of art from
both the western and non-western worlds. Not only were there all sorts
of objects gathered from all over the world and put together without any
regard for a common artistic criterion or framework, but also these objects
were legitimised differently as art in terms of preconceived distinctions
between the West and non-West. This exhibition is now seen by many,
particularly in the West, as the model for a new internationalism. But
if we examine its under 1ying paradigm it becomes clear that the function
of such a model is no more than the West' s search for redemption in
return for the favours it lavishes on others in its desire to maintain its
hegemony of the world.
The Prevailing lnternationalism and its Dominant
Model
We know that independence from colonialism did not end the hegemony
of the West. If anything, the West's hegemonic position and its institu-
tions were reinforced through its increased economic, political and cultural
domination of the postcolonial world. The postwar internationalism of
art was, and is, a reflection of this shift, particularly with the move of
the West's artistic centre from Europe to the US with its Cold War
manipulation of the world. However, this shift did not diminish Europe' s
importance as it entered into a new alliance with the US. Although, as
I will discuss later, there was a desire in Britain to identify itself with
its former colonies on the basis of some human equality, this desire faded
as Britain became increasingly entangled with the US's postwar imperial
ambitions. This had tremendous repercussions on the art that British
institutions showed and legitimated.
It is important to remember that the West's postwar pro-
nouncements on internationalism, particularly in art, were part of its
cultural propaganda to lure the newly independent countries into its
sphere of influence. The geopolitical reality of this internationalism is
the alliance between European and North American nation states, based
on shared economic, political and military interests; ideologically this
alliance extends into the production and promotion of art. What is most
remarkable is the way art scholarship became complicit with art institu-
tions, relinquishing its claims of objective empiricism to repress facts
which would otherwise expose the fiction of the historical supremacy of
Euro-American artists. This fiction became particularly useful in the face
of the postwar migration to and settlement of Afro-Asian peoples in the
northern metropolises.
The exclusion of non-white peoples as historical subjects from the
grand narratives of modernism is understandable within the context of
colonialism, but how do we justify this exclusion in the context of
postcolonial freedom and the presence of others as historical subjects
 Global Visions
6
within the modern metropolis? Why has the history of art of the 20th
century remained a white monopoly? The reasons, I would argue, are
to do with the way national cultures within the West are conceived. The
notion of the mainstream as representative of indigenous values, con-
tinually reconstructed by indigenous artists, has not changed; and this
indigenousness remains trapped within the notion of western culture as
racially homogeneous. It does not, of course, deny the presence of others
amongst its ranks. Nor are others denied their demand for equality, but
this equality is offered in such a way that it does not impinge upon or
question the dominant paradigm and its genealogy: different roles are
provided for different artists based on racial or cultural differences.
lnternationalism of Afro-Asian Artists in Britain
The notion of western national cultures as constituted only by their white
citizens, which formed the basis of international cultural alliances, was
challenged by the postwar arrival in Europe of artists from its former
colonies. This gave rise to a new social and intellectual space within which
Afro-Asian artists were able to function; a few were even somewhat
welcomed and celebrated by the British intelligentsia in the '50s and early
'60s. It was in this context that artists like Francis Souza and Avinash
Chandra, both originally from India, achieved a tremendous success.
Moreover they were not the only non-white artists who were accepted
and recognised and who contributed to the British art scene. ln some
respects, the distinction between white and non-white artists at the time
seemed to disappear. Despite this, there was something disturbing in the
way Afro-Asian artists were located and framed. They were seen as
representatives only of their own cultures, creating otherness from which
the artists were trying to escape. This problem of otherness could have
been resolved had British society been allowed to develop into a truly
multiracial society and its art institutions correspondingly transformed.
But this was not to happen due to contradictions both inherent in British
culture and in its relationships with other nations.
However, the presence of Afro-Asian people in Britain gave rise
to a historical process that transformed its capital, London, into an inter-
national cultural centre. Although this change was seen by some as a
"breath of fresh air", to quote Denis Bowen who ran the New Vision
Centre and whose policy was to show artists from all over the world,
the position and status of Afro-Asian artists remained vulnerable to the
conflicting forces within British society. While there was a genuine desire
for a new society, this also po sed a threat to the values and institutional
structures of Britain as a nation-state traditionally seen as a monolithic
and homogeneous entity.
During this time something else happened which sharpened this
conflict, exacerbating the contradictions surrounding the presence of Afro-
Asian artists within a white society, and ultimately led to their exclusion
,,,,
New lnternationalism 7
from its patronage. This was the increasing dominance of US culture
in Europe, particularly in Britain. In the mid-1960s the cultural exchanges
between London and New York intensified and were promoted by a new
generation of dealers, curators, critics and art historians for whom,
however the internationalism of the British Commonwealth was an
anathem,a. This new development was also a victory for conservative
forces, who saw the presence in Britain of Afro-Asian people as a threat
to their established values. It seemed, therefore, that the London-New
York link was unable to tolerate any alien presence within its ranks and
was, I think, responsible for the 'ethnic cleansing' of the postwar history
of British art.
The mid -1960s was a crucial period in terms of geopolitical changes
and a historical watershed in art which questioned the facile formalism
of high modernism, offering a radica! shift in the investigation and percep-
tion of sculptural form. In Britain, the Signals Gallery, which showed
international avant-garde art, particularly that being produced outside
the Euro-American network, played a crucial role in challenging Euro-
American hegemony. It was in this intellectual milieu that some non-white
artists in Britain achieved what Hal Foster calls "historical ruptures and
epistemolo gicaJ breaks''. 1 •
The story of Minimalism, Conceptualism, Arte Povera, etc, IS
known as one in which all the heroes are white Europeans and North
Americans. But is this story acceptable? It can be accepted, for instance,
only if we can prave that the conditions, both historical and
epistemological, which produced Minimalism were exclusive to New York
and that similar developments did not take place elsewhere. I' m not ques-
tioning the postwar centrality of the New York art world or the self-inter~st
of New York artists; but to believe that new ideas can develop only m
one centre, New York in this case, particularly at the time when the
discourse of modernism had been globalised, is a kind of chauvinistic
assumption which is historically and intellectually unacceptable.
When American Minimalism arrived in Britain in the early '70s
and was promoted by the British institutions, the facts about British
Minimalism were known. But facts in themselves have no value: they
must enter a legitimising process before they have any significance or
status. As Charles Harrison, an eminent British art historian, puts it:
"I'm aware of the 'actual facts' as you recount them. We may differ
in the status to be accorded to them - but that tends to be the way with
'facts'. " 2
Let us look at the facts. In the mid-1960s there emerged an opposi-
tion, in historical terms, to the dominant mode of sculpture, represented
in Britain by Anthony Caro et al, in the form of what later became known
as Minimalism, Conceptualism, Arte Povera, etc. This should not have
surprised anyone, given the material conditions of the time, both in terms
of the multifaceted nature of British culture and of the need to break
 8 Global Visions
with what had become the stifling dominance of 'New Generation'
sculpture. We know well enough which white artists were part of this
historical opposition, but the real surprise is that this task was also per-
formed by those from whom it was least expected.
It can be argued that the avant-garde achievement I have alluded
to has remained unrecognised because it failed to assert its presence in
the market-place. But this raises an important ethical question: should
we leave the recognition and legitimation of "historical ruptures and
epistemological breaks'' only to the whims and interests of market forces?
The problem is not so much that the American story was accepted
here, but that the institutions, knowing the facts, continued to promote
Minimalism as an exclusively American phenomenon. Thus, a
historically important British contribution was erased from official history,
not so much by misrepresentation as by a falsification of history, not just
in terms of the suppression of an Afro-Asian achievement but of the very
core of internationalism which had developed within Britain.
The Black Struggle in Art
I now want to say something about the struggle which Afro-Asian artists
waged in trying to recover their history in Britain and its repercussions
in general, as well as institutional responses to it. It is important to stress
that this struggle has been for an internationalism in which no artist is
differentiated and discriminated on the basis of the country of origin.
It is not so much a question of eliminating differences as recognising their
historical role s in the critical deconstruction of the dominant discourse.
From the very beginning we knew that we couldn't expect much
from the establishment. So we set up and organised our own programmes
and agendas in the form of research projects, archives, conferences and
publications, which would help Britain recognise its true postwar history.
One of the main outcomes of this research was 'The Other Story' exhibi-
tion at the Hayward Gallery in 1989-90, which showed that at stake was
not so-called Ethnic Minority Art or Black Art or an expression of cultural
difference or identity, but the ga ps in the official history of art. Although
this exhibition was well received by the general public, with 25,000
visitors, it has so far made little difference to the institutional view of
things, as was demonstrated recently by the 'Gravity & Grace' (1993)
and 'The Sixties Art Scene in London' (1993) exhibitions. Both shows
conform ed to the genealogy of official history from which non-white artists
continue to be excluded.
It was in the '70s that we realised that there was something fun-
damentally wrong with the British art world, and that we had to do
something about it. lt was also the time when the establishment realised
that it couldn 't carry on ignoring the cultural aspirations of Afro- Asian
peoples, whom it began to call 'ethnic minorities'. But, instead of
changing its old views and developing new policies that would unite and
'l
New Internationalism 9
inte grate the different peoples of British society, the creation of a separate
'ethnic minority arts' category created further divisions and separations,
very much in the pattern of cultural bantustans. This cultural apartheid,
which received official blessing with the publication of Naseem Khan's
report in the mid-1970s, 3 continues today. Its harmful effects are
disguised by institutional separate funding for multicultural or cultural
diversity programmes.
There is nothing wrong with multiculturalism per se, so long as
the concept applies to all. But in the West, it has been used as a cultural
tool to ethnicise its non-white population in order to administer and con-
trol its aspirations for equality. It also serves as a smokescreen to hide
the contradictions of a white society unable or unwilling to relinquish
its imperiallegacies. It is in this context that we should understand the
fascination and celebration of cultural difference.
The multiculturalism of the visual arts is also rationalised by
postmodernism's 'anything goes', often in complicity with what is called
'postcolonial discourse'. The problem here cannot be located only within
postmodernism; it extends back in time to colonialism, and how native
artists responded to what was imposed upon them as a modern civilising
discourse. Did they succumb to its domination, producing pastiches of
western art, or was it a starting point for a painful journey which even-
tually took them to the modern metropolis? What exactly did they do
in the metropolis? Did they only produce second or third rate derivative
works, as we are told by art institutions and their spokespersons who
call themselves art' critics and historians? The problem here is not only
of recognising the claims of 'other' artists to modern achievements, but
how and where to locate these claims historically. As for the dominant
discourse, it is so obsessed with cultural difference and identity, to the
extent of suffering from an intellectual blockage, that it is unable to main-
tain its focus on the works of art themselves. Here is an example:
It is probably salutatory for someone like me, who is British, white and
the inheritor of a whole apparatus which is undeniably privileged, and which
descends on me from the imperial structure, to say that however well I
can intellectually understand the problcms like Rashced here confronts,
coming over to this country, and trying to rcconcile his inheritance with
the established inheritance which he sees here - however much I can
sympathise with his problems and feel that I ought to countcract it at the
same time I think wc who are western and white ought to be honest about
this and admi t that we do find it difficult to engage with the kind of cultures
that we say should have their right to exist. 4
This statement by Richard Cork, an English art historian, is self-revealing
and it is not necessary for me to comment upon its full implication. What
is worth noticing is the way the dominant gaze shifts the problem from
itself to other cultures, which are thereby seen to be in need of sympathy,
or perhaps help.
 r ..... ..",*n' n
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lO Global Visions
The obsession with cultural difference is now being institutionally
legitimised through the construction of the 'postcolonial other', who is
allowed to express itself only so long as it speaks of its own otherness.
This has produced a problem for the critical assessment of works of art,
as was recently noted by October magazine in its round-table discussion
on the last Whitney BienniaP I sympathise with Rosalind Krauss's
concern about the shift of frame from the signifier to the signified. But
I think we ought, at the same time, to pay serious critical attention to
the nature and limitations of the prevailing dominant signifier. However,
the October discussion rightly pointed out the dangers of pro vidin g institu-
tionally predetermined spaces for other artists; these may provide an
opportunity for them to assert their presence, but they would also frame
them on the basis of their difference.
The prevailing western notion of multiculturalism is the main
hurdle we now face in our attempt to change the system and create an
international paradigm in which what takes precedence is art work, with
its own set of rules for production and legitimation in terms of aesthetics,
historical formation, location and significance, rules not necessarily
derived from any one or originary culture.
Before concluding, I must acknowledge the institutional support
we have received in our struggle. 6 Without the support of the Arts
Council we would have no Third Text, no 'The Other Story', and we
wouldn't be here together today. But at the same time, it is necessary
to point out that the prevailing dominant perception of things and its
relationship with the rest of the world is fundamentally flawed. It is based
on old imperial structures, and is in conflict with the aspirations of the
postcolonial world, giving rise to a crisis which cannot be resolved without
an open and informed debate. It is not enough to set up a separate
organisation to deal with the question of internationalism or discuss the
issues in an international symposium comprising an exclusive audience.
There should also be a debate within the mainstream as part of its overall
development. But such a debate cannot take place unless there is a
recognition by the art world as a whole that the issues we are talking
about here concern us all. These issues are not necessarily only about
the predicament of 'other' artists within a globalised western culture,
or non-white artists in western societies, but they are much to do with
the nature of the dominant discourse and its institutional structures. These
recognise and privilege certain artists and ignore others on the basis of
a perception which is predetermined by the legacies of the colonial past,
and although benevolent, they are unable to examine their own premises
and limitations. The complacency of the privileged is understandable but
let us not deceive ourselves that we can change the world without
questioning this complacency. We should, of course, think beyond our
own problems in this country. We need an international alliance, a net-
work of artistic exchange, which goes beyond the Euro-American alliance
mz rez t
New lnternationalism ll
and hegemony. I would like to quote here something I wrote about 20
years ago:
The development of a true international platform/movement, from/t~ which
all cultures could make their unique contributions, is not only posstb!e but
desirable in the long run. But if this is to serve the true interests of all
peoples rather than become another instrument of selfish western mterests,
it must bc based on the clear rejection of western culture as the
mainstream. 7
Perhaps the time has now come for its realisation. But can we develop
a new internationalism, a network ofinterrelations and exchanges across
the globe in terms of artistic discourse, without first putting our own house
in order?
Notes
1. Ha! Foster, 'Introduction', Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics, Bay Press, Seattle,
Washington, 1985.
2. Letter to the author, 16 June 1986.
3. Naseern Khan, The Arts Britain lgnores: The Arts of Ethnic Minorities in Britain, published
jointly by the Arts Council of Great Britain, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundatton and
Community Relations Commission, London, 1976. . .
4. 'The Multinational Style, The State of British Art: A Debate', Studw lnternatwnal,
Vol 194, No 989, London. December 1978.
5. 'The Poli ties of the Signifier: A Convcrsation on the Whitney Biennial', October 66, MIT
Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Fall 1993. .
6. This institutional support was received after a long struggle. It was m 1978 that we
put forward a proposal to the Arts Council of Great Britain (which was turned down)
to research into the history of Afro-Asian contribution to art m Bntam; follow.cdby
the setting up ofProject MRE in 1982 to carry out this work with t~e idea of estabhshmg
an archive and publishing the research material. However, havmg earned out some
preliminary work with funding solely from the GLC and GLA~, a proposal for Black
Umbrella (with its publishing section Kala Press) was launched m 1984. The 1dea was
to set up a centre/organisation with a comprehensive programmc for research, se~Ina~s,
publications, exhibition projccts, education and training in the vis~al arts, pnmanly
in relation to the work of Afro-Asian artists in Britain but also cxtendmg th1s work mter-
nationally. .
In 1987 now with financial support from the Arts Counol, Kala Press began to
publish Third Text, which has now established itself as a major international art journal
with a unique theoretical perspective, providing a critical forum. for the d1scusswn and
appraisal of the work of artists hitherto margi nali sed through rao al, sexual and cultural
differences.
7. Rasheed Araeen, 'Prcliminary Notes hJr a Black Manifl:sto', first published in Black
Phoenix, London, Winter 1978.

The Artist as Ethnographer?
Hai Foster
My title is meant to evoke 'The Author as Producer', the text of Walter
Benjamin first presented at the Institute for the Study ofFascism in Paris
in April1934. There, under the influence of Berthold Brecht and Russian
revolutionary culture, Benjamin called on the artist on the left ''to side
with the proletariat" . 1 In vanguard Paris in April 1934 this call was not
radica!; the approach, however, was. For Benjamin urged the
"advanced" artist to intervene, like the revolutionary worker, in the
means of artistic production- to change the "techniques" of traditional
media, to transform the "apparatus" of bourgeois culture. A correct
"tendency" was not enough; that was to assume a place "beside the pro-
letariat". And "what kind of place is that?" Benjamin asked in lines
that still scathe. "That of a benefactor, of an ideological patron - an
impossible place."
Today there is a related paradigm in advanced art on the left: the
artist as ethnographer. The object of contestation remains, at least in
part, the bourgeois institution of autonomous art, its exclusionary defini-
tions of art, audience, identity. But the subject of association has changed:
it is now the cultural and/or ethnic other in whose name the committed
artist most often struggles. Nevertheless, a few basic assumptions of the
old productivist model persist in the new quasi-anthropological one. First,
there is the assumption that the site of artistic transformation is the site
of political transformation, and, more, that this site is always located
elsewhere, in the field of the other: in the productivist model, with the social
other, the exploited proletariat; in the quasi-anthropological model, with
the cultural other, the oppressed postcolonial, subaltern, or subcultural.
Second, there is the assumption that this other is always outside, and, more,
that this alterity is the primary point of subversion of dominant culture.
Third, there is the assumption that if the invoked artist is not perceived
as socially and/or culturally other, he or she has but limited access to this
transformative alterity, and, more, that if he or she is perceived as other,
he or she has automatic access to it. Taken together, these three assump-
tions lead to a further point of connection with the Benjaminian account
.___e
1 'LI'
The Artist as Ethnographer.? 13
of the author as producer: the danger, for the artist as ethnographer,
of '' ideological patronage''. 2
A strict Marxist would question this quasi-anthropological
paradigm in art because it tends to displace the problematic of class and
capitalist exploitation with that of race and colonialist oppression. A strict
poststructuralist would question it for the opposite reason: because it does
not displace this productivist problematic enough, i.e., because it tends
to p reserve its structure of the political - to retain the notion of a subject
ofhistory, to define this position in terms of truth, and to locate this truth
in terms of alterity. From this perspective the quasi-anthropological
paradigm, like the productivist one, fails to reflect on its realist assumption:
that the other, here postcolonial, there proletarian, is in the real, not in
the ideological, because he or she is socially oppressed, politically trans-
formative, and/or materially productive. 3 Often this realist assumption
is compounded by a primitivist Jantasy: that the other has access to prima!
psychic and social processes from which the white (petit)bourgeois subject
is blocked. 4 Now, in certain conjunctures, the realist assumption is
simply right, just as, in certain conjunctures, the primitivist fantasy is
very subversive - that I do not dispute at all. But I do dispute the
automatic coding of apparent difference as manifest identity and of
otherness as outsideness. This coding has long enabled a cultural politics
of marginality. Today, however, it may disable a cultural politics of
immanence, and this politics might well be more pertinent to a postcolonial
situation of multinational capitalism in which geopolitical mappings of
centre and periphery no longer hold. 5
The primiti vist fantasy was active in two precedents of the quasi-
anthropological paradigm in contemporary art: the dissident surrealism
associated with Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris in the late 1920s and
early '30s, and the negritude movement associated with Leopold Senghor
and Aime Cesaire in the late 1940s and early '50s. ln different ways,
both movements connected the transgressive potentiality of the
unconscious with the radica! alterity of the other- the first to a subversive
end, the second to a liberatory one. And yet both movements came to
be limited by this very primitivism. Just as dissident surrealism explored
cultural alterity only in part to indulge in a ritual of self othering, so
the negritude movement essentialised cultural alterity only in part to be
constrained by this second nature. ln quasi-anthropological art today this
primitivist fantasy is only residual. However, the realist assumption-
that the other is dans le vrai- remains strong, and its effect, now as then,
is often to detour the artist. J u st as the productivist sought to stand in
the reality of the proletariat, only in part to sit in the place of the patron,
so the quasi-anthropological artist today may seek to work with sited com-
munities with the best moti ves of political engagement and institutional
transgression, only in part to have this work recoded by its sponsors as
social outreach, pu blic relations, economic development. .. or art.
 14 Global Visions
This is not the facile complaint of personal cooption or institutional
recuperation- that the artist is only tactical in a careerist sense, or that
the museum and the media can absorb anything and everything (indeed
we know they cannot). Rather I am concerned with the structural effects
of the realist assumption in poli tica!, here quasi-anthropological, art, in
particular with its si ting of poli tica! truth in a projected alterity. I men-
tioned the automatic coding of artists vis-a-vis alterity, but there are addi-
tional problems here as well. This projection of politics as other and
outside may detract from a politics of here and now. More fundamentally,
since it is in part a projection, this outside is not other in any simple sense.
Let me take these two problems one at a time. First, the assumption
of outsideness. If it is true that we live today in a near-global economy,
then a pure outside can no longer be automatically supposed. This
recognition does not totalise this world-system; rather it specifies resistance
to this world-system as an immanent relation rather than a transcendental
one. And, again, a strategic sense of imbrication is more pertinent to
our postcolonial situation than a romantic proposal of opposition. 6
Second, the projection of alterity. As this alterity is never fully outside
the structure of our identity, as it is always already imbricated with our
unconscious, its effect may be to 'other' the self more than to 'selve' the
other, which seems the opposite of an anthropology or a politics based
on recognition. Now it may be, as many claim today, that this self-
othering is crucial to revised practices of anthropology and politics alike;
or, more circumspectly, that in conjunctures such as the surrealist one
the troping of anthropology as auto-analysis (as in Leiris) or social critique
(as in Bataille) is culturally transgressive, even politically significant. But
there are obvious dangers here as well. Then as now such self-othering
can flip into self-absorption, in which the project of an "ethnographic
self-fashioning" becomes the practice of a philosophical narcissism. 7 To
be sure, such reflexivity has done much to disturb automatic assumptions
about subject-positions, but it has also done much to promote a mas-
querade of such disturbance: a vogue for confessional testimony in theory
l have long sought to make their own. Third, ethnography is considered
l
that is sometimes merely sensibility criticism come again, and a vogue
for pseudo-ethnographic reports in art that are sometimes merely
disguised travelogues from the world art market. Who in the academy
or the art world has not witnessed these new forms of flanerie?
What has happened here? What misrecognitions have passed
between anthropology and art and other discourses? One can point to
a whole circuit of projections and reflections over the last decade at least.
First some critics of anthropology developed a kind of artist-envy (the
enthusiasm ofJames Clifford for the juxtapositions of "ethnographic sur-
realism" is an influential instance). 8 In this envy the artist became a
paragon of formal reflexivity, sensitive to difference and open to chance,
a self-aware reader of culture understood as text. But is the artist the
exemplar here, or is this figure not a projection of a particular ideal ego
The Artist as Ethnographer? 15
of the anthropologist: the anthropologist as collagist, semiologist, avant-
gardist?~ In other words, might this artist-envy be a form of self-
idealisation? Rarely does this projection stop there, in anthropology and
art, or, for that matter, in cultural studies and new historicism. Often
it extends to the object of these investigations, the cultural other, who is
also reconfigured so as to reflect an ideal image of the anthropologist,
artist, critic or historian. To be sure, this projection is not new to
anthropology: some classics of the discipline (eg Patterns of Culture by Ruth
Benedict) present whole cultures as collective artists or read them as
aesthetic ''patterns'' of symbolic practices. But at least they did so openly
(if not reflexivcly); current critics of anthropology persist in this projection
- but they call it critique or demystification or, indeed, reflexivity. 10
Today this envy has begun to run the other way: a kind of
ethnographer-envy consumes many contemporary artists. Here too they
share this envy with critics, especially in cultural studies and new
historicism, who assume the role of ethnographer, usually in disguised
form: the cultural-studies ethnographer dressed down as a fellow fan (for
reasons of poli tica! solidarity - but with great social anxieties ); the new-
historicist ethnographer dressed up as a master archivist (for reasons of
scholarly respectability- to outhistorian the historians). 11 But why the
particular prestige of anthropology in contemporary art? Again, there
are precedents of this engagement: in surrealism, where the other was
figured in terms of the unconscious; in art brut, where the other represented
the anticivilisational; in abstract expressionism, where the other stood
for the prima! artist; and variously in the art of the 1960s and '70s (the
primitivism of earthworks, the art world as anthropological site, and so
on). But what is specific about the present turn? First, anthropology is
prized as the science of alterity; in this regard it is second only to
psychoanalysis as a lingua franca in artistic practice and critical discourse
alike. 12 Second, it is the discipline that takes culture as its object, and it
is this expanded field of reference that postmodernist art and criticism
contextual, the rote demand for which contemporary artists share with
many cultural practitioners today, some of whom aspire to fieldwork in
the everyday. Fourth, anthropology is thought to arbitrate the inter-
disciplinary, another rote value in contemporary art and theory. 13
Finally, fifth, it is the se/j-critique of anthropology that renders it so attrac-
tive, for this critical anthropology invites a reflexivity at the centre even
as it preserves a romanticism of the margins. For all these reasons rogue
investigations of anthropology, like queer critiques of psychoanalysis, are
granted vanguard status today: it is along these lines that the critical edge
is felt to cut most incisively.
This turn to the ethnographic, it is important to see, is not only
an external seduction; it is also driven by forces immanent to advanced
art, at least in Anglo-American metropoles, forces I can only sketch here.
 16 Global Visions
Pluralists notwithstanding, this art has a trajectory over the last 35 years,
which consists of a sequence of investigations: from the objective consti-
tuents of the art work first to its spatial conditions of perception, then
to the corpo real bases of this perception - shift s remarked in minimalist
work in the early 1960s through conceptual art, performance, body art
and site-specific work in the early '70s. Along the way the institution
of art could no longer be described simply in terms of physical space
(studio, gallery, museum and so on); it was also a discursive network
of other practices and institutions, other subjectivities and communities.
Nor could the observer of art be delimited only phenomenologically; he
or she was also a social subject defined in various languages and marked
by multiple differences (sexual, ethnic and so on). Of course these recogni-
tions were not strictly internal to art. Also crucial were different social
movements (feminism above all) as well as diverse theoretical
developments (the convergence of feminism, psychoanalysis and film;
the recovery of Gramsci; the application of Althusser; the influence of
Foucault; and so on). The important point is that art thus passed into
the expanded field of culture that anthropology is thought to survey.
And what are the results? One is that the ethnographic mapping
of a given institution or a related community is a primary form that site-
specific art now assumes. This is all to the good, it seems to me, but
it is important to remember that these pseudo-ethnographic critiques are
often commissioned, indeed franchised. Just as appropriation art became
an aesthetic genre, new site-specific work threatens to become a museum
category, one in which the institution imports critique, whether as a show
of tolerance or for the purpose ofinoculation (against an immanent criti-
que, one undertaken by the institution, within the institution). This is
an irony of site-specific work inside the institution; other ironies arise when
this work is sponsored outside the institution, often in collaboration with
local groups. Here values like authenticity, originality and singularity,
banished under critical taboo from postmodernist art, return as properties
of the site, neighbourhood or community engaged by the artist. There
is nothing intrinsically wrong with this displacement, but here too it is
important to remember that the sponsor may regard these 'properties'
as just that - as si ted values to develop. 14 Of course the institution may
also exploit such site-specific work in order to expand its operations for
reasons noted above (social outreach, public relations, economic develop-
ment, art tourism). 15 ln this case the institution may displace the work
that it seems to advance: the show becomes the spectacle where cultural
capital collects.
I am not as cynical as I sound about these developments. Some
artists have used these opportunities to collaborate with communities
innovatively: for instance, to recover suppressed histories that are sited
in particular ways, that are accessed by specific means. But I am sceptical
about the effects of the pseudo-ethnographic role set up for the artist or
li
The Artist as Ethnographer? 17
assumed by him or her. For this set-up can promote a presuming of
ethnographic authority as much as a questioning of it, an evasion of
institutional critique as often as an extension of it.
Consider this scenario. An artist is contacted by a curator about
a site-specific work. He or she is flown into town in order to engage the
community targeted for collaboration by the institution. However, there
is little time or money for much interaction with the group (which tends
to be constructed as readymade for representation). Nevertheless, a pro-
ject is designed, and an installation in the museum and/or a work in the
community follows. Few of the principles of the ethnographic participant-
observer are observed, let alone critiqued. And despite the best intentions
of the artist only limited engagement of the si ted other is effected. Almost
naturally the focus wanders from collaborative investigation to
ethnographic self-fashioning, in which the artist is not decentered so much
as the other is refashioned in artistic guise. 16
Again, this projection is at work in other practices that often
assume, covertly or otherwise, an ethnographic model. The other is
admired as one who plays with representation, subverts gender, and so
on. ln these ways the artist, critic, or historian projects a potentially
foreign practice onto the field of the other, where it is read not only as
authentically indigenous but as innovatively political! Of course this is
an exaggeration, and the application of critical methods from post-
structuralism to psychoanalysis has illuminated much. But it has also
obliterated much in the field of the other, and in its very name. This
is the opposite of a critique of ethnographic authority, indeed the opposite
of ethnographic method, at least as I understand them. And this 'impossi-
ble place' has become a common occupation of artists, critics and
historians alike.
Notes
l. Walter Benjamin, Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Harcourt
Bracejovanovich, New York, 1978, pp 220-238. The fact that Stalin had condemned
this culture by 1934 is only one of the ironies that twist any reading of 'The Author
as Producer' today (to say nothing of 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction' (1936]). My title may also evoke 'The Artist as Anthropologist' by Joseph
Kosuth Fox 1, 1975), but our concerns are quite different.
2. This danger may deepen rather than diminish for the artist perceived to be other, for
hc or she may be asked to assume the role of native informant as well. lncidentally,
the charge of "idcological patronage" should not be conflated with "the indignity of
speaking for others". Pronounced by Gilles Deleuze in a 1972 conversation with Michel
Foucault, this taboo circulated widely in American art criticism on the left in the 1980s,
where it produced a censorious guilty silence as much as it did an empowered-:.Itcr0
native speech. See Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, Cornell University P~~;s,
Ithaca, 1977, p 209. · •.
3. This position is advanced in an early text by the figure who later epitomisĆd the contrary
position. ln the conclusion of Mythologies (1957) Roland Barthes writes: "There. is
therefore one language which is not mythical, it is the language of man as· a producer:
wherever man speaks in order to transform reality and no longer to prcser~e~t as an
18 Global Visions The Artist as Ethnographer.:> 19

image, wherever hc links his language to the making of things, metalanguage is referred but improve the image of Times Square for its future rcdevelopment; and recent pro-
to a language-object, and myth is impossible. This is why revolutionary language proper jects in several European cities (eg Antwerp) in which site-specific works were deployed
cannot be mythical." (trans. Annette Lavers, Hill and Wang, New York, 1972, p 146).
4. This fantasy also operated in the productivist model to the extent that the proletariat
l in part for touristic interest and political promotion.
16. This is a carica ture, to be sure, but as such it clarifies aspects of the problem. Con-
was often seen as 'prirnitive' in this sense too. sider 'Projcct Unitć', a show of site-specific works within the Le Corbusier Unite
5. For a related discussion of these problems, see 'The Poli ties of the Signifier: A Con- d'Habitation in Firminy, France in Summer 1993; or rather consider one project among
versation on the Whitney Biennial', October 66, Fall, 1993. the many designed by the nearly 40 invited artists or artist groups. ln this project a
6. It is in this sense that critics like Homi Bhabha have developed such nations as "third familiar American ncoconceptual duo asked the U nite inhabitants to contribute favourite
spaces" and deferred times. cassettes toward the production of a discothcque. The tapes were then edited, com-
7. James Clifford develops the notion of"ethnographic self-fashioning" in The Predicament l pilcd and displayed according to apartment and floor. Whatever its irony, the project
of Culture (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1988), in part from Stephen
Greenblatt in Renaissance Selj-Fashioning (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1980).
l· seems to possess the bad assumptions of such anthropological or sociological surveys
without the good intentions.
This source points to a commonality between the critique of ethnography in new
anthropology and the critique of history in new historicism (more on which below).
8. Clifford also develops this notion in The Predicament of Culture: "Is not every ethnographer
something of a surrealist, a reinventor and reshuffler of rcalities?" (p 147). Some have
questioned how reciprocal art and anthropology were in the surrealist milieu. See, for
example, Jean Jamin, 'L'ethnographie mode d'inemploi. De quelques rapports de
!'ethnologie avec lc malaise dans la civilisation', in Le mal et la douleur, J Hai nard and
R Kaehr, eds, Musee d'ethnographie, Neuchiitel, 1986); and Denis Hollier, 'The Use-
Value of the Impossible', October 60, Spring 1992.
9. Is there not, in other words, a post structural ist projection akin to the structuralist pro-
jection critiqued long ago by Pierre Bourdieu in Esquisse d'une theorie de la pratique, Paris,
1972?
10. Incidentally, this artist-envy is not unique to new anthropology. It was at work, for
example, in the rhetorical analysis of historical discourse initiated in the 1960s. "There
have been no significant attempts," Hayden White wrote in 'The Burden of History'
( 1966), ''at surrealistic, expressionistic, or existentialist historiography in this century
(except by novelists and poets themselves), for all of the vaunted 'artistry' of the historians
of modern times". (Tropics of Discourse, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore,
1978, p 43.)
11. Obviously there are other dimensions of these crossings-over, such as the curricular
wars ofthe last decade. First some anthropologists adapted tcxtual methods from literary
criticism. Now some literary critics respond with pseudo-ethnographies of literary
cultures. In the process some historians feel squeezed on both sides. This is not a petty
skirmish at a time when university administrators study enrollments closely - and
when some advocate a return to the old disciplines, while others seek to recoup inter-
disciplinary ventures as cost-effective moves.
12. In a sense the critique of these two human sciences is as fundamental to postmodcrn
discourse as the elaboration of them was to modern discourse.
13. ln 'Philosophy and the Spontaneous Ideology of the Scientists' (1967) Louis Althusser
writes of interdisciplinarity as "the common theoretical ideology that silently inhabits the
'consciousness' of all these specialists ... oscillating between a vague spiritualism and
a tcchnocratic positivism". See Philosophy and the Spontaneous Ideology of the Scientists &
Other Essays, Verso, London, 1990, p 97.
14. I am indebtcd in these remarks to my fellow participants in 'Roundtable on Site-
Specificity', Documents 4, 1994: Renee Green, Mitchell Kane, Mi won Kwon, John
Linde]] and Helen Molesworth. There Kwon suggests that such neighbourhood place
is posed against urban space as difference against sameness. She also suggcsts that artists
arc associated with places in a way that connects identity poli ties and site-specific practiccs
- the authenticity of the one invoked to bolster the authenticity of the other.
15. Some recent examples of cach: social outreach in 'Culture in Action', a pu blic art pro-
gramme of Sculpture Chicago in which selected artists collaborated with community
groups; economic development in '42nd Street Art Project', a show that could not

The Silent Message of the Museum
Fred Wilson
The best way for me to approach the topic of curatorship is to discuss
a few of my own projects involving the practice of exhibition making.
ln order to support myself as a young artist living and working in New
York, I worked in museums and galleries- the Metropolitan Museum
of Art, The American Crafts Museum and the American Museum of
Natural History - in various capacities as an administrator, museum
guard, freelance educator, preparator and curator. ln 1986, after ten years
of working with museums or with alternative spaces, I was offered the
directorship of a new gallery in the South Bronx called the Longwood
Arts Project sponsored by The Bronx Council on the Arts.
Having worked in various types of museums simultaneously made
me acutely aware of how the environment in which cultural production
is displayed affects the way the viewer feels about the artwork and the
artist who made the work. Being an artist and person of colour - an
outsider to the museum establishment but also a museum employee -
afforded me a position to notice the incongruities in these spaces. These
conflicting and ironic experiences led me to organise in 1987 the exhibition
'Rooms With a View: The Struggle Between Culture, Content and the
Context of Art'.
'Rooms With a View ... ' was an exhibition of the work of emerging
American artists of various back grounds. I placed the work of these artists
in three different settings. One room looked like a contemporary gallery,
the white cube; one I redesigned to look like a small ethnographic
museum, not very well appointed; the third I made to look like a turn-
of-the-century salon space. I asked thirty artists to be part of my experi-
ment. All thirty had work in the white cube, half had work in the turn-
of-the-century space. I chose the work according to how it might look
in the~e ~pace~. Many artists at that time were making work that seemed
to fit in an ethnographic museum, because they were working in Third
World cultural idioms. There were other artists who were working more
with the history of western art. When I placed the work in the
ethnographic space, a visiting curator said with surprise, "Oh, you have
The Silent Message 153
a collection (of primitive art)". And I had to tell another curator, "No,
Valerie, that work you're staring at is by an artist who had a one-person
exhibition in your gallery a month ago''. The environment really changed
the work; the labels simply identified the materials not the names; in
most ethnographic museums the labels don't have names because the
objects were collected at a time when the names of the people who made
them were not important to the westerner. My labels just gave the
materials and things like 'Found, Williamsburg section, Brooklyn, late
20th century'. Students would walk up to the barrier around the installa-
tion by Linda Peer- and the barrier of course is mine, it' s the museum's
presence on the artwork - read the label, look at the object and think
they knew what they were looking at, when actually they knew very little.
I didn't say anything false, but they really had a totally different view
of what the object was about. The works became exotic, they looked like
something made by someone you would never know; the works in many
instances were dehumanised because of the way they were installed. In
the turn-of-the-century space, they appeared to have a certain authority
that they didn't have in the white cube. The white cube also had a way
of affecting you: it looked cold, it looked sort of scientific. In this modernist
space works which had an emotional intensity were somewhat diminished
by all that whiteness.
For me, this was a watershed event. If the work was being
manipulated that much, that was the area I wanted to work in.
I was asked by the The Museum for Contemporary Art, Baltimore,
Maryland, to organise an exhibition anywhere in Baltimore, and I chose
the Maryland Historical Society, which has to be one of the most con-
servative environments in the city. Going through the museum, I saw
it as a very alien environment. Prior to this project I would never even
go into a place like this, let alone look at anything for very long. I had
to ask myself, "Where am I in this space, what is this space about and
why am I having this reaction to it?" After spending some time there,
I realised it wasn't so much the objects as the way the things were placed
that really offended me. I needed a studio so I was graciously given
residence in the president' s office. I was there for a concentrated period
of six weeks, though I kept on coming and going for a year. That alone
opened up the staff of the Historical Society, who had worked with art
but had never had a living artist in their midst and really did not know
what to expect. The executive director would often stop by my
office/studio as if to ask, "Is it art yet?" I didn't curate the show, this
was my artwork. I make that distinction. Although people looked at the
exhibition and saw it as a curated exhibition, which is fine, for me it's
something else entirely, it's my work.
The process that I go through in creating my installation is to speak
with everybody in the museum, from the maintenance people to the
executive director, and to find out what they feel about the institution,

154 Global Visions
what they feel about the city they're in, and what the relationship is
between the two. I looked at every object from the Historical Society
collection, which is a vast one. They've been collecting since 1840, and
it was a men's club in the early days, so they really have some odd objects
in the collection. But those things aren't on view. Often what museums
put on view says a lot about the museum, but what they don't says even
more. l didn't know what I was going to do, but I really wanted objects
to speak to me. I called the installation 'Mining the Museum' because
it could mean 'mining' as in gold mine - digging up something rich
with meaning- or as in land mine - exploding myths and perceptions
-or it could mean making it mine. I looked at every image and object,
l the statue- her physique, her stance and her face have no connection
and tried to culi from them what their individual significance and story
was, what they told me about the institution as well as the history of
Maryland. The museum gave me the entire third floor to do this. It was
discussed beforehand between the Museum for Contemporary Art and
the Maryland Historical Society that I had to have complete autonomy
to do whatever I wanted, or else I could not do the project. They agreed,
and I'm still amazed that they allowed me so much latitude. In actual
fact, the staff of the Historical Society and I developed a health y respect
for one another' s professions and we grew to become friends in most cases.
The first thing you saw when you walked on to the third floor was
a repousse silver globe that I found in the silver storage, emblazoned
with the word TRUTH. Although it was made in the 1870s it seemed
very contemporary; Barbara Kruger could have made it if she wanted
to work in silver. It was actually a truth in advertising trophy; they stop-
ped making them in 1938, which I guess is when people stopped believing
there was any truth in advertising! With the truth trophy, I placed empty
plastic mounts. The label described the truth trophy, when it was made
and by whom, followed by 'Plastic mounts, made ea. 1960's, maker
unknown', because for a historical society, every object would have
historical significance. I wanted to point out that everything in our
environment has meaning, although it may be so much a part of our
environment that we are not really aware of it. The intention in having
the word 'truth' as the first thing you saw, was that the work should speak
to the notion of truth, to ask if there is truth and whose truth. On either
side of this vitrine were two sets of pedestals, one set with busts which
l found in the Historical Society and another set without. The three busts
are of people who apparently had a great impact on Maryland - none
of them from Maryland, by the way - Napoleon, Henry Clay and
Andrew Jackson. The pedestals without busts were labelled Harriet Tub-
man, Benjamin Banneker and Frederick Douglass - three important
African-Americans from the 19th century, all from Maryland although
there was nothing on view in the Maryland, Historical Society and almost
nothing in their collection about them.
The whole exhibition was about looking at objects found in
_l
155
The Silent Message
museums, just taking them out and pu ttin g them on view. The so-cal~ ed
cigar-store lndians in the museum collection were really compellmg
objects, really beautiful, but I couldn't face them facing me, because my
mother is Anglo-Amerindian, and they don't look like any lndians l ever
knew. In actuality, these Indian s represent the society' s idea of what an
Indian is. In many cases, the models were other Americans. One
seul p ture is actually the daughter of the German immigrant who m~de
to a Native American physiognomy. So what I did was to turn their backs
to the viewer so one couldn't look in their faces and accept the stereotype.
What they w~re facing was a wall of photographs of contemp~rary Native
Americans in Maryland, one of the few items I included which were not
from the institution' s collection. I brought them in because when l asked
the Historical Society, I was told, "There are no lndians in Maryland".
I chose several pain tin gs for the third floor, most of which were
portraits. In all the paintings chosen the African-Ameri_ca~ children are
clearly there for the sake of the composition. In one pamtmg, there are
five children in the centre of the canvas, and two children - two black
children - in the shadows. Given the time frame, these children must
have been slaves, and with the minimum of research I actually found
out their names and who they were. The black children were part of the
household and not completely anonymous. In this installation, on
approaching the paintings, the children in the shado~s w~uld _be
specifically illuminated and speak to the viewer. They smd thmgs like
"Who calms me when I'm afraid? Who washes my back?" Another one
said, ''Am I your friend? Am I your brother? Am I you: pet?'' ~y look~ng
close to this painting you could see that one black chil'd holdmg ~ bir~
wears a metal collar around his neck; he was actually the golden retnever
for the white boy holding the bow and arrow.
Sometimes I exhibited paintings and just renamed them. In the
last century paintings were not titled by the artist. The titles you see in
museums were assigned by the curators, the collectors, or the art ~e~ler
at a later date. I figured if they can do it, I can do it too, so for a pamtmg
of a wealthy plantation picnic, one label gave the title the museu~ ~ad
assigned it: Country Life. The other side of the pai~ting ha~ a labe~ gJVJng
it my own title: Frederick Serving Fruit; it is amazmg how JUSt a title can
easily shift meaning and significance. . .
There is a lot of silver in this museum. I created one VItnne of
elegant repousse silver vessels with the label, 'Met~l~~rk 1793-1880' ·
But also made of metal, hidden deep in the old acqmsition books of the
Historical Society, was the entry 'cuffs'. I placed slave shackles together
with the silver vessels. Normally there is one museum for the beautiful
things of one' s culture and perhaps a separate room or~ separate muse~m
for the horrific things. Life, however, does not occur m neat categones.
Actually, in this instance the objects had a lot to do with one another;
 156
Global Visions
~he ~roduction o~ the one was made possible by the subjugation enforced
y t e other. Qui te possibly' both of these could have been made by th
sam e hand . To m y mm · d ' h ow t h mgs
. .
are d isplayed in galleries ande
museums makes a huge difference to how one sees the world.
l also covere~ ma ny li~hographs with glassine paper, exposing only
the black person m the picture . Usually the black individual
~ony.mous, alo~e and. inconsequential . The viewer became acutely aw::;
, Afncan-Amencans m the landscape or city scene . I had a section called
Modes ?f !ransport', with the sedan chair of the last royal governor
and a pamtmg of who was carrying it, and a model ship of the kind con-
verted for use as. a sl aver after the war of 1812 , with account logs of various
slave holders w1th the names a nd dollar value of the enslaved Af ·
d th T , ncans
a n o. er 1vestock . l placed two old baby carriages in the space· one
had,h mstead of the ba by ' s bedd in g ' A Ku Klux Kl an h oo d . N ext ' to 1t·
on t ~ wall l hung a n early photograph of black nannies with a white
b aby m a baby carriage.
Fred Wilson, Mining the Museum, In stall ation View , Baltimore 1992.
MI-:TAJ . WOHK
1793 1880
157
The Silent Message
Under the heading ' Cabinet Making' I placed period chairs facing
a public whipping post which was still used by the city jail in the 1950s
and had been hidden in the basement of the Historical Society since 1963.
I used a doll's house to depict a slave revolt ; beside it was a manuscript
by a young woman who was writing of her fear at the time of the slave
upnsmgs.
The final section was about dreams and aspirations. ln the crevices
of the museum, totally unnoticed, I found things made by Africans and
African-Am ericans, including American-made pottery and basketry and
personal adorn m ents that came from Liberia, ea. 1867 . Benjamin
Banneker, a mathematician and freeman who surveyed Washington, DC,
for Thomas J efferson , a nd who was also an amateur astronomer, made
a book of all his astronomy charts which he had figured out
mathematicall y. I made slides of these ch arts and projected them on the
wall; in addition to his charts, he wrote about his dreams and mentioned
in diary fashion those who wanted to kill him.
By bringing things out of storage a nd shifting things already on
view, I believe I created a new pu blic persona for the Historical Society,
one that they were not likely to forget in a hurry - nor will the Baltimore
community allow them to forget. To my mind , for this to happen in
Ame rica, where local community residents are not empowered to chart
the course of their local museum , it was a huge success.
I was also asked by the Seattle Art Museum to create an installation
using their collections. The Seattle Art Museum is a general art museum
with collections from Asia, Africa, Native America, Europe and Euro-
America. It is a relatively new museum: its new Venturi and Rausch
edifice was less than a year old when I started this project. There was
none of the viscera! imagery hidden in the storerooms, no ghosts of this
particular museum' s history to exorcise. After getting to know the staff,
the board of trustees, and the city of Seattle, its a rtists and communities,
I decided to make a work about general art museums. I called it 'The
Museum: Mixed M etaphors'. While general art museums house and
inte rp ret collections of work from around the globe, I find the interpreta-
tion rather narrowly focused on meanings that support a western view
of relation ships between cultures. I view museums as mixed m etaphors
and my installation another way to mix them up . I was not given one
particular space - rather, I was given the whole museum as a site for
my installation . My work was interspersed throughout and injuxta posi-
tion with the museum's perman ent collections. Visitors cam e upon them
suddenly or missed them completely. It was often heard remarked in the
galleries "What ' s that doin g there?" right out loud . Other visitors, aware
of my interventions, looked for them like a child in an Easter egg hun t.
Many general art museum collections and floor plans are organised
in a narrative fashion . The first galleries you visit are the so-called Ancient
World collections - Egypt, Greece and R om e. Then one proceeds
fP' tr t ttt ' i T t MH W
t
srtts mr n crq· a n s mna , i n mr d o 6
158 Global Visions
through Mediaeval art, Renaissance and other European art, 19th cen-
tury European and American art, to 20th century European/American
Art. This create s a linear history connecting the glories of ancient Greece
and Egypt with 20th century European/American art to the point where
it seem s to be saying 20th century westerners are the descendants of the
great Egyptians and Greeks: And not just any Egyptians and Greeks-
certainly not contemporary Egyptians and Greeks; no, somehow the
Egyptians and Greeks are the forebears of Europeans in ancient times
and the swarthy 'other' in more recent times. In my installation I placed
contemporary Masai and Samburu wigs and necklaces with the ancient
Egyptian sculptures of men and women with wigs and necklaces, and
contemporary Masai and Samburu headrests with ancient Egyptian
headrests. I did this not to replace 19th century European bias with 20th
century theory, but to place the discussion that is raging behind the closed
doors of the museum world out in the open for the pu blic to grapple with.
Museums are not static institutions, they only seem to be. Their display
techniques and vague labelling deliberately mask the changes that repre-
sent a society in flux and inter-museum debate:
In the adjacent Mediaeval gallery, I placed Egyptian objects: I
juxtaposed a stone Egyptian bird next to a painting of the Christ child
holding a bird. It is no surprise to mediaevalists that the bird represents
the soul in both cultures and that the Mediaeval notion was inspired by
the Egyptians. This wasn't the only gallery in which I placed Egyptian
artefacts. In the African galleries amongst the African masks, I placed
an Egyptian sarcophagus lid. Nestled with seated Sub-Saharan African
figures was a seated ancient Egyptian figure: These were not placed in
any scholarly fashion - that was for the scholars to figure ouL I placed
them there just so they would be there. No matter what the race of the
ancient Egyptians, Egypt is now and always was on the continent of
Africa. Museums have a hard time placing it in Africa when organising
permanent exhibitions or arranging floor plans: For museums, Egypt
in ancient times was afloat somewhere in the Mediterranean until it
attached itself to North Africa, some time in the 19th century.
In the African Galleries juxtaposed with the African clothing -
a Cameroonian tunic, and Nigerian ogbada - I placed a grey business
man's suiL This stopped visitors 'dead in their tracks' i A museum guard
overhead a woman explaining to her child that the sui t was ''what the
Africans wo re when they had dinner with Americans''. Due to the fact
that the typical museum display, despite its good intentions, freezes
African and other Third World cultures in a distant past, devoid of the
complexity which comes with contact with outsiders, some museum
visitors are unable to make the leap when presented with a more complex
picture. Somehow, through the magic of museums, what museum pro-
fessionals think is an educational or at least enlightening experience turns
out to be a confirmation of stereotypes. A small exhibition of photographs
i l a ts"i'rm
i st trs nrs::m ar rt:nnn
159
The Silent Message
of contemporary African architecture surprised most and confounded
some viewers who thought it had to be photography of downtown Los
Angeles no matter what the label said about it ~e~~g downtown Lagos.
The fact that this modest effort was the first exh1b1t1on of contemporary
African architecture - including both architecture inspired by local
architectural idioms and buildings inspired by western 'international style'
_ in any major museum was remarkab~e. It says t~at the .in~e~est of th~
western museums in Africa and the Th1rd World 1s only m d1fference
(the exotic) and what it can offer as a way of seeing in stark relief th;e
western self. To understand oneself by what you're noL Museums, 1t
seems, are highly narcissistic institutions. They either feel m~st comfor-
table when mirroring their own values, ideas and aesth:t1c throug~
western art, or when casting other cultures as dramatically d1fferent. Th1s
difference becomes a useful tool to be appropriated and consumed, rather
than as an approach to a real understanding of the complexity of another' s
society for mutual benefit:
In the display case which could be titled 'The Gold of Africa' (a~!
African art exhibitions include a display of African gold these days, 1t
seems) I included a gold Rolex watch. One museum visi tor was overhear;d
saying to his friend, "Is that an ancient sun-dial that they wear on t~e1r
wnsi t s.?" ~·· Somehow the museum transforms even the most pedestnan
of objects into something exotic.
In the 19th century American art gallery I placed ~9th centu:y
Native American art, and objects such as a model of a Ha1da canoe. m
the gallery of paintings of boats. By not separating cultural product1?n
by race one can see some connections and contrasts not otherw1se
apparent:
The early 20th century gallery installation was perhaps the most
disturbing to visitors, or the most engaging~ Basically, I pus~ed all the
modernist art into one corner. On one large platform, set agamst a dark
green wall and dramatically lit, were placed a Matisse .bronze ini front
of a marble Arp, a tall Giacometti in front of a de Ko~~mg portra1t an.d
so on. i. While the clustering created a visually exe1tmg and frenet1c
arrangement, no one work could be seen clearly by. itself. The individual
works seem ed to be struggling to breathe. When v1ewers asked what. t~e
reason for this was, it had to be explained by museum staff. that th1s lS
the way the African and Native American collections were d1splayed on
the floor below i . ,
In the Jate 20th century galleries I simply 'moved the furmture ·
The gallery furniture that is: I placed the Mies van der Rohe table and
chairs right in front of a Morris Louis painting, added some coffee ta~le
books and presta! - a diorama of 'the collector' s home' i ~urround.mg
the display was a museum barrier and on either side was a v1deo m;omtor
with a tape I made of various collector' s ho m es in Seattle, W ash1~gton
and Portland, Oregon. Often in museums you will find a re-creatwn of
ut ;:u .t t;; s uaa a e a: a.ua;ac;z ;u ZJ ..JJ !th t%4U$.$J Xi$!$ K $1&434#
n nin rt:;;;t r
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160
Global Visions
l
the Native American Ionghouse ' th e Ch"mese seh I ' d" h
J apanese tea house ' th Af .
e ncan compound h"
o ar s stu 10, t e
· .
are re-created but so h h ' even !Stone penod rooms
' me ow t e space h h
resides is absent even thou h s w ere -~ue 20th century art
experience of thes . g most museum VIsitors have little or no
e environments (except of course
never quite sure what the benefit wa f d" ' museums). I was
or what was their real meaning. Cre~t7n :~amas and room recreations,
an attemp~ to illuminate the subject. g ontemporary room was also
l Curator' s Work
The Pragmatics
Dunng the process of gain tbr
that the staff h h g
h II .
oug a the collections, I requested
i of lnternationalism
. p _otograp er photograph some of the objects I encountered
m a k mg portraits 'head h t ' f h fi . '
cultures I ch 'b. ~ o s ' o t e Igurative objects from different
th . ose o ~ects t at were created at a time when contact between j Elisabeth Sussman
e race s was new' or at least limited. There were fo
photographs under the headings 'Africans' 'Asians' 'N t. urAgro~ps of
and 'Eur
objects:
' Th '
A~~:::: ~s de;i~~~t~~r~~;~pce:t::~~ Ath~
' a Ive mencans'
figur~tive
faceAs o_f the
l
b E . Sians, sians as dep1cted
y uropeans and Afncans, Native Americans as depicted b E I offer here my experiences of nearly a decade of practice in curating
and Euro-A · Y uropeans
and Native :enc_ans, and Europeans as depicted by Asians, Africans international contemporary art in the United States. As a US curator,
mencans. These photographs speak volumes Althou h I I was working in the centre, in mainstream institutions with an interest
otbhse:vefid tht e syncreti~ nature of the objects, and the subtle. bien dingg of in contemporary art; but over the course of my experience, I saw that
e
M mc h ea ,ures was. m k eepmg · · h the exhibition's title 'Mixed
wit centre destabilise, open, and re-form; canons were questioned. My major
an::~~ ors ' ~o m~ It was more visibly apparent that when o~e depicts p roj ects began in 1987, when I was working in a non-collecting institution,
perfec/;;~t~pi~:;r;:bl'ythend up de~i~ting yourself. This, I feel, is the the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. I am going to divide my
r e museum Itself. paper into three periods in relation to exhibitions and to shifts and
transformations in perception and practice. Authorship and audience,
the often disregarded factors that are crucial to all exhibitions, also shift
throughout this period. I identify audience as the public for the exhibition.
Authorship is the word I would use for the role of curating. Half of the
exhibitions I shall discuss were organised as surveys around the idea of
representing the nation/a nation. The other exhibitions were more inter-
national, that is, either the survey was larger than one nation or the con-
cept of borders was looser.
Looking back on this experience, I realise that the notion of
nationalism has been evolving and transforming in my work. Initially
I assumed that the nation I was presenting was monolithic and stable,
restricted within boundaries; that the audience, usually a small art world
audience, presented with that nation's art, was similarly monolithic or
one-dimensional in its reception and responses. Gradually I !earned that
as a category 'nation' was highly nuanced; different peoples and images
travelled into and through the nation depositing and leaving their own
traces and histories. The nation was an unstable and partial form of con-
tainment and identification for any contextual history of form and image;
and there were many rather than sin gular communities of reception con-
tained within the narrow definition of the public.
In the first period, 1987-1988, I worked on two exhibitions, one