Global tendencies: globalism and large-scale exhibition.(Panel Discussion)

When Francesco Bonami, director of last summer's Venice Biennale, famously wrote his exhibition catalogue that "The 'Grand Show' of the 21st century must allow multiplicity, diversity and contradiction to exist inside the structure of an exhibition ... a world where the conflicts of globalization are met by the romantic dreams of a new modernity," it was reasonable to imagine that he was responding to structural and thematic questions posed by Okwui Enwezor in his Documenta 11 of the preceding year. After all, the Nigerian-born curator, focusing on the issue of globalization, had in a sense defocused his event, dividing it into "platforms"--conferences and lecture series engaging figures from a wide range of disciplines--that took place at different locales around the world over the course of the year leading up to the installation in Kassel. Of course, this very commonality sets up a significant contrast. Enwezor's globalism resonated differently from Bonami's: The same word typically used--as at Venice--to describe an ever-expanding circulation of communications and commerce (with all the attendant conflicts that such connection entails) was in Kassel linked to the acute value of regionality and difference, where the emergence of the local and particular precluded the possibility of any unifying system or thematic but nevertheless comprised a field of what could be called "minor knowledges."

Indeed, few terms are so frequently bandied about in artistic dialogue today as "globalism," and yet few terms are so multifarious in their current usage, or unfold in so many dimensions. For example, the rhetoric of globalization allows for discussion of neocolonialism in an expanded art marketplace while at the same time entertaining the notion that New York has ceded its historical position as the city that "stole the idea of modern art" (perhaps becoming instead the capital of capital), and coinciding with these insights is a still developing sense that tiers of access to information exist within the worldwide artistic community, dividing those who can from those who cannot afford to crisscross the globe and so speak knowledgeably of a contemporary art-world suprastructure.

Nothing in contemporary art speaks so directly to all of these issues as the large scale exhibition--from Documenta to the Venice Biennale, as well as any number of other biennials that cropped up around the world during the past decade. This type of exhibition, endowed with a transnational circuitry, assumed the unique position of both reflecting globalism--since these shows happen in locations throughout the world, however remote--and taking up globalism itself as an idea. Establishing a new curatorial class able to bring artists together from wide-ranging geographic and cultural points, the large-scale exhibition alterd the kinds of visibility afforded artists and so fundamentally changed the conditions of artistic discussion, ultimately forwarding the position that no show could, or should, presume an all-encompassing thesis--at least not in conventional terms and form. Rather, the exhibition extends through time and across geography to include panels, lectures, publications, performances, and public works that fall welt beyond the parameters of the traditional show, and lies well beyond the grasp of any single viewer. In turn, these exhibitions have come to marshal the forces of any number of disciplines, including art history and theory, which leads one to the question of whether the critical function is in some sense migrating from critic to curator, or indeed whether such nominal distinctions are useful at all. (As Catherine David, curator of Documenta 10, says in these pages regarding related shifts in terminology, "The question for me is not about ... who is the artist but about how to produce, discuss, debate, and circulate to various audiences a certain number of ideas and formal articulations proposed by author(s). At this level, I think that many people ... with whom I am working no longer correspond to the economic, social, and cultural figure of the 'artist' as it has been constituted in the modern age.")

It is precisely in order to trace the contours of such shifts in thinking, and to offer a "postmortem" on the global exhibitions that have sought to articulate them, that Artforum invited a select group of curators and artists to participate in the roundtable that follows. These curators possess unsurpassed familiarity with the evolution of the large-scale, transnational exhibition, and they have already been, to an extent, in dialogue with one another through their work: Bonami; David, who organized "Contemporary Arab Representations" in Venice this past summer as well as Documenta 10; Enwezor, who, before directing Documenta 11, was curator of the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale; and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, who cocurated "Utopia Station" in Venice and whose other projects include this year's Tirana Biennale. Martha Rosier and Yinka Shonibare contribute here as two artists who have contemplated globalism in their work for some time and who appeared in Bonami's Biennale and Enwezor's Documenta,respectively. Finally, Artforum invited scholar and critic James Meyer to moderate. Meyer has written in these pages on Documenta 11 and composed key texts on nomadism in contemporary art and on the changing status of site-specificity.

The results of their dialogue--which was conducted online and assembled for the printed page--are hardly conclusive. But then, conclusiveness is not the intent here. Rather, this roundtable (followed by an essay penned by scholar and critic Pamela M. Lee on the construction of the art world in light of globalization) punctuates one moment in an ongoing discussion, providing an occasion for reflection before we encounter the generations of large scale exhibitions that undoubtedly lie ahead.

THE GLOBAL EXHIBITION

James Meyer Grand exhibitions used to simply show the "best" international work. This has changed: Beginning with the Pompidou's "Magiciens de la terre" in 1989, these shows began to stage "globalization" itself as their core theme. Documenta 10 addressed globalization directly in terms of urban questions; Documenta 11 was explicitly influenced by postcolonial theory and included five "platforms" staged around the world, culminating with the Kassel installation. The most recent Venice Biennale similarly underscored the importance of "global" themes. Now that these exhibitions have occurred, and a certain discourse has developed around them, it is well worth addressing the phenomenon of the "global exhibition" itself. Can we specify differences between Kassel and Venice, say, or between these "central" shows and the so-called peripheral biennials ? What transformations can we see in the organization and duration of such shows? How has the curatorial engagement with globalism impacted artmaking? What have curators and artists such as yourselves learned from your efforts to address the new global reality?

Francisco Bonami Well, I've learned that transforming the exhibition concept as you've described it isn't as difficult as transforming the habitual ways such exhibitions are seen. If true revolution changes the rules on how to change the rules, then we must arrive at terms that transform the very concept of the exhibition. The last Venice Biennale was judged on the antiquated model of the grand exhibition--as the grand exhibition gone too far. In fact, my idea was to see if pushing the old model's rules even further could bring about a transformation. I feel that, in some way, it did.

Marth Rosler As an artist, I have learned that while curatorial themes change, the process of inclusion for artists generally does not. Although a few more criteria for inclusion based on identity and geopolitics have developed, the art world is still heavily commodified, and an artist without a sales (and therefore publicity) base in the developed word--or a curatorial support network in the world's "periphery"--is not going to be included. Further, the new terms of engagement may be geopolitical, but work from the "First World" must have a powerful aesthetic surplus or an antically unrecognizable political dimension in order to gain access. So many artists are doing serious work with directly political themes but do not see themselves included in these shows--and would not expect themselves to be-since the public visiting such exhibitions is not their audience of interest. Granted, the flattened terrain of modern communications is bringing the interlocking worlds of art production and display into closer proximity, so it would not be correct to claim that work with direct political address will always be left out. But is it still necessary to point out that while "geopolitical" can have the cover of a prefix to cover its political nature, the politics in question bad better be far, far away?

The art world--a congeries of professional services along the lines of dentists, doctors, and professors on the one hand and high-end showrooms like ear dealerships on the other--consistently offers the modernizing elite a compass for understanding cultural and social "facts" as they impinge on their consciousness. The global exhibitions serve as grand collectors and translators of subjectivities under the latest phase of globalization. But as we move between disparate colonialist eras, what is plain about the present moment is that there is no dearth of images of the colonized Other in public view, despite only a little more insight--and that quite momentary--into the interior lives of others than in the previous colonial moment. The elite in question, especially in the North and in developed industrial and postindustrial nations (which includes, perhaps, the antipodean South), may have a taste for edification via these new Crystal Palace expositions. And why not?

Okwui Enwezor The significance of "Magiciens de la terre" is no doubt crucial paradigmarically for the expansion of so-called global exhibitions. However, I am a lot less sanguine about "Magiciens" as a model for the current globalist expansion in exhibitions such as Documenta 10, Documenta 11, and Venice. The discourse in "Magiciens" was still very much dependent on an opposition within the historical tendencies of modernism in Europe-namely, its antipathv to the "primitive" and his functional objects of ritual, and, along with this process of dissociation of the "primitive" from the modern, its attempt to construct exotic, non-Western aesthetic systems on the margins of modernism. To me, this was the flaw of "Magiciens": It took as part of its reality the fundamental existence of an opposition between the Western center and the non-Western periphery. Hayhag said that, I do recognize that its curator, Jean-Hubert Martin, was seeking a way to address this relationship to non-Western aesthetic and discursive systems institutionally. And looking back, I'm all the more impressed by what this exhibition tried to accomplish. But the value of "Magiciens" for me rests in the question of how to recast its discourse in today's "global" exhibitions, which move to temporary contexts of evaluation distinctly different from the stable site of the institution.

The value of the global paradigm for me--if it means serious interaction with artists and practices that are not similarly circumscribed--is in its allowance for greater methodological and discursive flexibility. I see the changing contexts of the temporary exhibition as one way to engage the limits and blind spots of the professional site of contemporary art. I believe that large-scale exhibitions are seriously addressing these issues, even if we may never be in complete agreement about what they add to the critical discourse of globalization.

Yinka Shonibare We should without question applaud recent attempts to challenge a very tired, Eurocentric view of art. Exhibitions like "Magiciens de la terre," Documenta 10, and Documenta 11 created a necessary forum for giving visibility to the non-Western artist. What began as a radical political shift now seems to have become a global curatorial tendency, much as the civil, women's, and gay rights movements were all necessary interventions that allowed a broader discourse to emerge in the work of the artists concerned.

As an artist of non-Western origin, I feel strongly that the time has come to resist the temptation of defining artists by the narrow confines of nationality. The question of globalization and its political significance of course remains relevant in an economically divided world. But we must return now to the work of the imagination and prioritize the aesthetic and political concerns of artists rather than their origins. Globalization has produced a fantastic opportunity for visibility; let's take the next step.

Catherine David Most of the comments by Okwui and others regarding "Magiciens de la terre" are quite surprising to me. The major criticism I had--and still have--in regard to this show is that, with surely many good intentions, it reinforced major misunderstandings and preconceived ideas about center and peripheral modernity, as well as some other ideas romantic at best (the notion that there is an "exteriority" to modernity, under the guise of the exotic, archaic, or even anti-modern, etc.) and neocolonial at worst (that the non-West could offer premodern rationalities). I am getting tired of arguing that modernity is …