3. The concept of globalisation is
one of the most discussed
subjects, not only in art but in
political, economical and
academic debates, and refers to
the worldwide diffusion of
practices, expansion of relations
across continents, organisation
of social life on a global scale,
and grown of a shared global
consciousness.
See Giddens, Anthony. The Third Way -
The Renewal of Social Democracy.
Cornwall: Polity Press, 1998
5. Views on modernism, postmodernism and globalization
Modernism is a way of thinking
in which society is based on
rational knowledge. Other
important issues of modernism
are aesthetic self-
consciousness, and the demise
of the centred subject.
Postmodernism is seen as way
of thinking contrasting
modernism. From that
perspective there is no
universal truth. Hence, the
world is socially constructed. YinkaShonibare
Fake Death Picture
(The Suicide - Manet) (2011)
6. Postmodernism accepts that reality is fragmented and that
personal identity is an unstable quantity transmitted by a variety
of cultural factors
Postmodern:
Parts comprise the
whole
Modernism:
The whole is more
important than the
parts
Douglas Gordon
Divided Self I and II
(1996)
9. Globalisation Insertions Into
Ideological Circuits
Some of the main by Brazilian artist
characteristics of CildoMeireles
globalisation include:
•New communication
technologies (higher speed of
information, greater
distribution of information)
In the 1970s, Meireles carried out
•Multinational corporations projects where he inscribed
(increased international subversive messages such as “Yankees
trade, increased flows of Go Home” onto Coca-Cola bottles,
money, commodities, and banknotes and subway tokens, and
people across national then re-introduced these into
borders) circulation
10. Globalisation
•A contradictory and uneven process
•Pulls away from local communities and nation-
states
•Pushes down on those same communities and
nation-states
•Local communities' beliefs and cultural values
may be globalised and universalised
•Individuals and groups may experience this
universalisation as a 'dilution' and 'corruption'
of their cultural beliefs
•Resistance to this process, sometimes with
violence, rise of fundamentalism, nationalism
and terrorism could be seen as a response to
this
11. “Exhibitions delimited by nationality,
continents and other geographical
demarcations have been subject to
vigorous critique over the last few years,
for many of the right reasons. In a
cosmopolitan art world, in which artists
travel to make work and take part in
exhibitions, the fact an artist is British,
Brazilian or Chinese is of diminishing
significance. To compare artists from the
perspective of their geographical origins
is often to emphasise the most
superficial aspects of their practice. The
approach is fraught with the perils of
reductiveness and stereotyping.”
Hew Locke
(FARQUHARSON, ALEX and Andreas Schlieker, Black Queen
British Art Show 6, 2005, P12)
(2004)
16. Artists concerned
variously with
visualising the
transnational
mobility of capital,
goods and people in
today’s global
networks
World-Airport, an installation by Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn. Exhibited
at the 1999 Venice Biennale, World-Airport which filled the entire gallery
space. It was a homemade, Fisher-Price like airport and lounge area, replete
with a runway come parade of nation-states as airplanes emblazoned with
logos in national colourssit prepared for take-off - The weather, the war-,
business, pleasure- first class, third world - flight patterns and the flow of
information have reduced the world to a ball of string with all its crises,
crosses and contradictions - a global Diaspora of businessmen, terrorists
and tourists.
17. Site
and
KadirAttia
Dream Machine space
(2002-2003)
Francis Alÿs
'Sometimes doing something poetic
can become political and sometimes
doing something political can become
poetic, The Green Line' 2004-05
18. The Return of the Grand Tour
YinkaShonibare
Gallantry and Criminal
Conversation
(2002)
References the ‘Grand tours’,
country outings of noblemen
in the 18th century
In many ways we are wadding into familiar territory with discussions
of biennales; these global mega-shows that attempt to gather all the
world’s art together in one place at one time
19. The role of biennials in the globalisation of the art market
“Visitors go to Venice, Kassel or
Sao Paulo expecting shows to
advance a considered and
progressive model of globalisation
in the cultural sphere, only to find
that biennials are manifestations of
a different kind of globalisation,
one that is driven not so much by
ecumenical curatorial designs as by
existing mechanisms of
centralisation and dissemination.”
Marcus Verhagen, Biennale Inc, Art
Monthly, June 05
20. Global/Intern
ational style?
“Biennials produce press releases and catalogues that constantly recycle the
same buzzwords, ‘exchange’, ‘dialogue’ and ‘hybridity’ among them. What
they don’t say is that in the profusion of the biennial these terms become
almost meaningless. In Venice, diversity comes across as dispersal, as
flattening out.”
Marcus Verhagen, Biennale Inc, Art Monthly, June 05
21. Art inc.
“Seen from the point of view
of the art-world as a system
[artworks] appear as the
component parts of a
uniform machine, which
produces a large range of
novel combinations that are
tested against various publics
for marketable meaning.”
(Stallabrass 2004, p.151)
22. So what is globalisation?
A process in which geographic distance becomes a factor
of diminishing importance in the establishment and
maintenance of cross border economic, political and
socio-cultural relations.
Rudd Lubbers
A decoupling of space and time, emphasising that with
instantaneous communications, knowledge and culture
can be shared around the world simultaneously.
Anthony Giddens
23. Globalization and Art
“The real story of the art world in the 1990s lies in how it
subtly embraced and then reversed this trend toward
hypercommodification by using the machinations of
‘marketing’ to shift the focus of art patronage away from the
artist and back toward the institution... [The] 1990s did not
show its unique aesthetic hand in the emergence of any
identifiable period style in the visual arts; rather, it did so
with a building boom in stylish museum buildings and a
concomitant proliferation of international biennial
exhibitions.”
(Van Proyen, Mark 2006)
24. Predatory Globalization?
Globalisation isn’t a new phenomenon:
• Christianity
• Communism
Vanessa Beecroft Alexander Rodchenko
VB SS South Sudan
(2006)
25. The Origins of Globalisation and the impact on artists
There is a long history of
artists ‘borrowing’,
appropriating and stealing
inspiration, source material
and imagery from other
cultures. This tended to be a
one-way street (i.e. Europe
‘borrowed’ from ‘exotic’
cultures) rather than true
cross-cultural fertilisation.
26. Curating the exotic
“All this may make global culture more readily available to the
embrace of multicultural aesthetics or a meticulous archival
study. But the angle of visibility will not change. What was
once exotic or archaic, tribal or folkloristic, inspired by strange
gods, is now given a secular national presence and a
international future. Sites of cultural difference too easily
become part of the globalising West’s thirst for its own
ethnicity; for citation and simulacral echoes from Elsewhere.”
Bhabha, H. 1997. Minority Culture and Creative Anxiety. From British
Council 2003 Reinventing Britain.
27. Oceanic Display Picasso in his studio, Detail: New Caledonial
(detail), Trocadero 1908. Note New roof fiial figure from
Museum, Paris, 1895 Caledonian Picasso’s collection and
(Melanesia) figures Picasso’s Portrait of
behind him Henry Kahnweiler
(detail), 1910
28. Picasso, Sitting Nude, 19 Picasso, Mask from Baule in Ivory Coast
Sitting Nude, 1908
Mask from Baule in Ivory Coast
29. Legacy of Eurocentric standards
There remains a legacy of European Imperialism - that has existed
since the Renaissance – that defined the west as ‘civilized’ and non-
western peoples as ‘primitive’
30. Legacy of Eurocentric standards
Cultural Borrowing in World of Legacy: The Origins of
Warcraft Civilization
The visual iconography of the horde
races suggests real-world cultures http://topdocumentaryfilms.co
(e.g. totems, tents, face paint), and m/legacy-the-origins-of-
the horde in general are portrayed as civilization/
"primitive."
33. Virtual selves, real persons
“The virtual self is connected to the
world by information technologies
that invade not only the home and
the office but the psyche. This can
either trap or liberate people…By
virtual self, I am referring to the
person connected to the world and
to others through electronic means
such as the internet, television and
cell phones…[These] technologies
get inside our heads, position our
bodies and dictate our everyday
lives.”
Agger2004
37. References
James Elkins (Author, Editor), ZhivkaValiavicharska (Editor), Alice
Kim (Editor) Art and Globalization (Stone Art Theory Institutes
Baudrillard, J. (1994), Simulacra and Simulation, trans. S, Glaser,
Michigan: The University of Michigan Press
Globalisation is Good - Johan Norberg on Globalization
http://youtu.be/12YDLZq8rT4
Best, S. (2005), ‘The Postmodern experience’. Website:
http://www.sociology.org.uk/atssspl2.htm
Fulcher, J (2004) A very short introduction: Capitalism. Oxford, Oxford
University Press.
38. References
Giddens, A (1999) Runaway World. London, Profile Books Ltd.
Stallabrass, J (2004) Art Incorporated. Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Steger, M (2003) A very short introduction: Globalization. Oxford, Oxford
University Press.
Scholte, Jan Aart (2005) Globalization: A Critical Introduction. Palgrave
MacMillan, Hampshire.
Van Proyen, Mark (2006) Contemporary Art and the Administrative
Sublime. In Art Criticism 21 no 2. pp. 25-56, 162-71.
Giddens, Anthony. The Third Way - The Renewal of Social Democracy.
Cornwall: Polity Press, 1998
Notes de l'éditeur
The purpose of this lecture is to offer a wider perspective upon significant changes taking place during the period we’ve studied
The meaning is not always clear it has something to do with the idea that we all live in one world, in what ways exactly?We generally accept that globalisation exists, since evidently the world has become financially and materially interdependent.Two major issues of globalisation are: communication as the driving force of social change, and an increasing dependence on mobility.The most important factors to affect contemporary art have been cultural and economic globalisation. Increasingly, international art exhibitions draw their contents from all over the world, and artists address a wide range of subjects relating to this developing situation. And this term Globalisation is the name given to the new integrated world economy, where money, products and people all move between countries faster than ever before. It is an economic system so complicated that it is almost unaccountable. So this lecture will evaluate some of the significant shifts that are taking place in, and as a result of, the growth in the contemporary globalised art economy.I will also deal with a few of the difficulties that appear in the course of the globalisation process and look at the accompanying discussions surrounding increasingly global cultural spaces as they concern artistic practice and by extension the cultural industries.I will consider the idea that the art world knows no synthetic boundaries; that it realises an actually existing globalisation and that art is the vehicle for the mixing of cultures that challenge the conventional in aesthetics and the hegemonic, or dominance in politics.
So what is globalisation?I thought it would be a good idea to begin with this description of the process of globalisation by Anthony Giddens, who is one of the main proponents of globalisation debates,This quote is taken from his 1998 book The Third Way. The concept of globalisation is one of the most discussed subjects, not only in art but in political, economical and academic debates, and refers to the worldwide diffusion of practices, expansion of relations across continents, organisation of social life on a global scale, and grown of a shared global consciousness. Globalisation is not just expansion of capitalism and opening of financial markets round the world. The economical part of globalisation is surely important and perhaps the easiest to notice, but according to Giddens globalisation is concerned with the organization and transformation of time and space in our lives.(See Giddens, Anthony. The Third Way - The Renewal of Social Democracy. Cornwall: Polity Press, 1998)Globalisation is a key theory that has emerged since the collapse of the Eastern Block. Most recently, the world wide growth in 'Biennials' has provided the most obvious evidence of the radical changes which have been taking place in the global economies of contemporary art practice. In the past 15 years or so we have seen biennales springing up in for example Istanbul and Johannesburg. So the “international” is no longer what the traditional art centres can aspire to, but equally available to every culture in the world.Alongside this imposing phenomenon of globalisation we have also saw the rise of nationalisms and claims to specific cultural identity. Questions of identity and identification have frequently been raised since the fall of the Berlin Wall, in reaction to the collapse of the old hierarchies and the ideologies of the past.
More generally, globalisation raises a number of pertinent questions tied up with financial economies and consumerism.Who makes the things we buy? Where do they do it? And who takes the financial decisions that affect our jobs, housing and public services? The media often struggles to explain relationships that are so removed from the consumer. How can we ensure that no child labour is used in the goods we buy, for instance, when our branded products pass through a whole series of outsourced companies? And why is it that war and natural disaster now offer yet more opportunities for hyper capitalism?
Views on modernism, postmodernism and globalization Modernism is a way of thinking in which society is based on rational knowledge. Other important issues of modernism are aesthetic self-consciousness, and the demise of the centred subject. Postmodernism is seen as way of thinking contrasting modernism. From that perspective there is no universal truth. Hence, the world is socially constructed. Modernism can be seen as a cultural movement regarding fields of art and architecture, music and literature emerging in the decades before 1914, as artists rebelled against late 19th century traditions. In relation to this, postmodernism can be seen as a wide set of developments in critical theory, philosophy, architecture, art, literature, and culture, which are generally characterized as either emerging from or in reaction to the cultural movement of modernism. Both of these terms are hard to define, because of their ambivalent history and plurality of related opinions.The modern movement emerged in the late 19th century, and was rooted in the ideathat ‘traditional’ forms of social organization, art, literature and daily life had become outdated, and that it was therefore essential to reinvent culture. It encouraged the idea of re- examination of every aspect of existence. The power of science, rationality and industry promised to transform the world for the better. Modernism can be seen as a way of ordering the social world and making decisions based on a rationale, a calculability and an adherence to the rules of expert knowledge1. It is an attempt to establish the scope and the limits of the faculties of reason, knowledge and judgement. The emancipatory project of enlightenment reasoning was to lead to certain and universal truths. A universal truth for all people at all times. This would lay the foundations for humanities progress2.
Postmodernism is a worldview that emphasizes the existence of different worldviews and concepts of reality, rather than one ‘correct’ or ‘true’ one. Whereas modernism emphasized a trust in the empirical scientific method,and a distrust and lack of faith in ideologies and religious beliefs that could not be tested using scientific methods, postmodernism emphasizes that a particular reality is a social construction by a specific group, community or class of persons. Postmodernism accepts that reality is fragmented and that personal identity is an unstable quantity transmitted by a variety of cultural factors.The main feature ascribed to postmodernism is the permanent and irreducible pluralism of cultures, communal traditions, ideologies, or awareness and recognition of this pluralism. Things which are plural in the postmodern world cannot be arranged in an evolutionary sequence, or be seen as each other's inferior or superior stages. Neither can they be classified as ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ solutions to common problems. No knowledge can be assessed outside the context of the culture, tradition, language, et cetera which makes it possible and endows it with meaning. Hence no criteria of validation are available which could be themselves justified ‘out of context’. Without universal standards, the problem of the postmodern world is not how to globalize superior culture, but how to secure communication and mutual understanding between cultures. Postmodernism claims that there are no universal philosophical foundations for human thought or action and all truth is culture bound. Truth can only be a degree of social agreement from within a particular tradition. There are no longer any universal terms of reference for people to make sense of their lives.Postmodernism, in rejecting grand narratives, favours ‘mini-narratives’, stories that explain small practices, local events, rather than large-scale universal or global concepts. Postmodern mini-narratives are always situational, provisional, contingent, and temporary, making no claim to universality, truth, reason, or stability
technological ageMany people find themselves confronted with captivating, seductive, and expansive options that allow people readily to exchange one identity for another, such as Internet chat rooms. That people relish the freedom to explore new technologically-generated options and alternative personal identitiescomplex relationships among decentered selfhood, modern technology, and the possibility of authenticity
Globalisation is often employed to connote the character of advanced capitalism – it has become synonymous with Americanisation/Westernisation/Imperialism which highlights the dominance, still, of European and Western interest throughout the world. To many living outside Europe and North America it is deemed as Westernisation or Americanisation since most of the visible cultural expressions of globalisation are American e.g. Coca-cola, McDonalds. It can be viewed as something that the developing countries play little or no part in. It can be considered as destroying local cultures, widening world inequalities.These associations of the term with cultural and economic neo-imperialism spawned, particularly in the course of the 1990s, an ‘anti-globalization’ movement – or more precisely, some sort of alignment of various interest groups against the globalizing establishment.
Some of the main characteristics of globalisation include:New Communication TechnologiesHigher speed of informationGreater distribution of informationMultinational CorporationsIncreased International tradeIncreased flows of money across national boarders.(Increased ease of travel!)
Along side issues related to globalisation national identity can be seen to underpin the ideas and the work of many artists since the end of the 1980’s and more so has been a major influence on curators. Recently the 2006 British Art Show 6 curators also debated the impact of issues of NATIONALITY AND INTERNATIONALISM. “Exhibitions delimited by nationality, continents and other geographical demarcations have been subject to vigorous critique over the last few years, for many of the right reasons. In a cosmopolitan art world, in which artists travel to make work and take part in exhibitions, the fact an artist is British, Brazilian or Chinese is of diminishing significance. To compare artists from the perspective of their geographical origins is often to emphasise the most superficial aspects of their practice. The approach is fraught with the perils of reductiveness and stereotyping.”(FARQUHARSON, ALEX and Andreas Schlieker, British Art Show 6, 2005, P12)
The "biennale culture" now determines much of the art world. Literature on the worldwide dissemination of art assumes nationalism and ethnic identity, but rarely analyzes it.In our era of biennales and international galleries, contemporary art compels both a new, wider analysis as well as a rethinking of basic forms and definitions. It is generally regarded that globalization is a homogenizing, universalizing model which absorbs cultural differences and therefore ultimately rejects them. This raised the question of whether ‘locality’ retains any significance
The men in 'Work in Progress' are wearing either Inter Milan or AC Milan football team shirts. The type of portrait is familiar from football publicity photographs, where the players stare ahead with their arms held behind their backs. However, instead of being Italian sportsmen, the players are from amateur five-a-side Glasgow teams. Their separation into two sets alludes to the need of individuals to lend themselves a separate identity, while at the same time maintaining common bonds of knowledge and agreed opinion. The implied rivalry echoes the competition between the two Glasgow football teams, Rangers and Celtic.
On another occasion he paid heroin adicts the price of a fix to line up in a row and then permit a continuous line to be tattooed across their backs.This is a new kind of politically-engaged art. True, Sierra is part of the tradition of Conceptual artists going back to the sixties, who condemn art’s unavoidable involvement with capitalism, now taking the form of globalisation.
“Seen from the point of view of the art-world as a system [artworks] appear as the component parts of a uniform machine, which produces a large range of novel combinations that are tested against various publics for marketable meaning.” (Stallabrass 2004, p.151)
“The real story of the art world in the 1990s lies in how it subtly embraced and then reversed this trend toward hypercommodification by using the machinations of ‘marketing’ to shift the focus of art patronage away from the artist and back toward the institution... [The] 1990s did not show its unique aesthetic hand in the emergence of any identifiable period style in the visual arts; rather, it did so with a building boom in stylish museum buildings and a concomitant proliferation of international biennial exhibitions.”
There remains a legacy of European Imperialism - that has existed since the Renaissance – that defined the west as ‘civilized’ and non-western peoples as ‘primitive
Legacy of Eurocentric standardsWatch documentary on line that traces the rise of both Asian and Western civilization in one global perspective
