ONE of the art world’s main events last year was the Havana Biennial. The festival, now in its eighth edition, is deliberately conceived as an alternative, “Third World” biennial, and last fall it featured powerful art from countries including Puerto Rico, Uruguay, South Africa, and, of course, Cuba. A local artist called Wilfredo Prieto had made a lovely outdoor installation in which he flew flags from around the world, official in every way except that their original bright colours had been replaced entirely with blacks and whites and greys. Another Cuban artist, Liset Castillo, showed aerial photographs of pristine highway projects – of on-ramps and cloverleafs and overpasses – except the turnpikes she’d photographed were really only miniatures modelled in sand.
Classic markers of national identity bleached of their identifying marks; dreams of a grand future sourced in a crumbling present: these were subtle works that would stand up in any exhibition of contemporary art, anywhere. And few would have seen them if it weren’t for a new development in the art world.
The past ten years or so have seen an explosion in the number of international art events. Buenos Aires, Cairo, Dakar, Havana, Istanbul, Johannesburg, Kwangju, São Paulo, Shanghai, Taipei, Tirana, Vilnius, Yokohama: that’s just a partial A-to-Z of the cities that have recently hosted major festivals of international contemporary art.
Closer to the art world’s traditional centres, prestigious events such as the Venice Biennale and Germany’s Documenta have begun to overflow with artists from countries that barely used to figure on the international art map. Artists from China, Malaysia, Brazil, Congo, Albania, and dozens of other developing countries now make regular appearances in the First World; any Western curator who wants to make a splash has to do some globe-trotting.
This all marks a crucial change. For years, a few countries in the North and West determined the kind of art that was shown in international exhibitions. Today’s art world is determined to do away with such navel-gazing Eurocentrism.
It’s an excellent ambition. It also has a crucial flaw: we may be opening our arms to artists from other countries, but we haven’t necessarily opened our eyes to truly foreign art. That may be because it can’t be done.
A work by the artist Alejandro Diaz, on view at the Havana Biennial, offers a hint of the problem at hand. Diaz had made clever work that applied U.S.-style merchandising to the Cuban experience: he manufactured vinyl beach bags with an “I LOVE CUBA” logo on them, and then passed them out at this Communist biennial. It was a powerful political statement about the interaction between the First and Third Worlds – just the kind of thing that the new, internationalized art scene is supposed to offer. It didn’t, however, need a Third-World artist as its maker: Diaz is, in fact, a New Yorker, and the piece is completely in line with mainstream art ideas born and fostered in Europe and the U.S. Indeed, in Havana last fall, it was impossible to tell which pieces were made by Third Worlders, and which were from the handful of artists invited from the First.
On the flip side, consider one of the most striking, original works on show at last year’s Venice Biennale, by the Malaysian artist Wong Hoy Cheong. Wong presented an installation in which the world economy was re-imagined with the Third World on top and the First World at its beck and call. He had constructed the living room of an imaginary Austrian “guest worker” who has migrated to do the dirty work in a wealthy, hegemonic Malaysia. Sitting in the Austro-Muslim living room – deer antlers mix with crescent moons; gemütlichkeit meets the Koran – we watch the worker’s television, and see a mockumentary about the plight of his fellow Western migrants, complete with commentary by a professor from an imaginary “Kuala Lumpur School of Occidental and European Studies.” Wong was riffing on a situation particular to his homeland and to his compatriots – but someone from the United States or Germany or Canada might equally well have made his piece.
That’s the catch. When Western curators find good work in far-flung places, it’s almost always close kin to the work we’ve all come to like at home. It’s art that answers to all the current Western notions of what makes good art good; it’s politically inspired installation art, or conceptual photography, or video. It may have some additional layers, addressing issues peculiar to its maker’s origins – a Cuban artist ponders globalization or fantasizes about development; a Malaysian artist touches on economic migration – but the terms in which it addresses them are essentially within the mainstream of current First World art.
That’s because what Western culturati count as “contemporary art” isn’t simply all and any art that’s made today, anywhere. Successful works of contemporary art are counters in a weird, esoteric, and very specific kind of Western game. The rules for playing it – the criteria for what counts as “significant” or “trivial,” even as “art” or “non-art” – depend on a peculiarly Western history of art and ideas, and on a peculiarly Western history of showing and selling. All the referees come from the West, or have been trained here: they have to be, to understand the game.
