reklam

The Local Tango and the Global Dance:
An Unfinished Conversation between Vasif Kortun and Cuauhtémoc Medina

Dear Vasif,
There are few pleasures so great as conversation, my dear Vasif. It was really great to spend time with you in such a faraway location as Helsinki. Then I got home and found your almost compulsory invitation to talk about what curating has meant in Mexico since the late 1980s, and I thought about our meeting over noodles and coffee, hoping to draw some ideas from it. I took out your card and read your quite imposing title: Yönetmen from Istanbul Güncel Sanat Müzesi. That sounds grand to me, but what is it? So I thought: why not continue the conversation not over the coffee but across two or three oceans? What is the Istanbul Museum of Contemporary Art? What is Proje4L? How do you envision its role in Turkey in regard to the balancing act between local activists and international curators that we started to discuss in Helsinki?
Cuauhtémoc

Dear Cuauhtémoc,
The man whose name I could never pronounce now has a face. The lunch was memorable for me as well, but why do you have to ask questions first, just when I was gearing up to commence an interview with you?
Regarding your first question, the easy one, Proje4L and Istanbul Museum of Contemporary Art are one and the same; it can be read all together in one breath. Although I am pushing the Proje4L part as a concept, like that of Kiasma or the Baltic or Moderna ¹, it is simply a label. But, let's break the name apart: Proje (an experimental space for contemporary visual arts; a place for multidisciplinarity and critical dialogue); 4L (the shortened name of a modernist housing district close to the museum, built in the 1950s); Museum (a public space open to new and diverse audiences).

Regarding the second, more complex question, I use the dualistic terms (local activists and international curators) only for convenience. The periphery needs a singular center to utilize and to exploit, whereas for the center, there are always multiple peripheries that it can visit upon and dismiss at its own will. Hence, the center does not ultimately need one periphery, and the periphery never really wants to do away with the dualistic system that it inherits and sustains. Who knows if one is not in fact the center of the periphery? So, in a way, I try to operate outside the local/global, center/periphery system; they are orbital constellations interdependent on each other. There are of course tactical handicaps in working simultaneously within both realms-it is one thing to approach these systems as merely operational, but shall we go on?
Warmest,
Vasif

Dear Vasif,
Yes, I think we should go on. First, because it seems to me that there is still something to gain from upholding the operation of the periphery/center dichotomy: namely, preventing a regression into new twisted forms of nationalism and covert nationalist cultural policies. Just recently, an elderly Mexican art critic, Raquel Tibol, proclaimed that Mexico is not a periphery, that "we are both our center and our periphery." This in my view entails an attempt to reconstitute the cozy feeling of a local artistic wholeness, where local artists can be as indulgent as they want with their sense of belonging, local institutions can still pretend to create a local canon and then try to export it without any questioning, and finally local critics (like me) can benefit from an easily achieved local authority. As a friend of mine told me many years ago, in places such as mine there is always the risk of becoming the little king of a little kingdom. Despite the constant violence involved in the arbitrariness of global selection and the constitution of the transnational artistic canon, I feel that the very randomness of this machinery is more exciting and more intellectually effective than the reconstitution of the idea of "international art" as something akin to a United Nations assembly of small national schools.

I would even go so far as to propose that it is only through the current interlocking and, yes, as you put it, the complicity of the periphery and the center that we in the periphery can pretend to search for a sense of radicalism in cultural practice. Very cynically, if you want, I would say that it is precisely because of the center's longing for some kind of political specificity in the art coming from "out there" that we see artists emerging around us who do not conform to the expectations of the market or to local institutional tastes in terms of "quality," "formal discipline," and "seriousness." In fact, political and intellectual radicalism in the periphery emerges and has a chance of becoming artistically relevant because of what I would describe as "foreign intervention"-the displaced utopian and critical desires that the critics and curators in the centers cannot necessarily find in their immediate surroundings.

To a certain extent, this may apply to your own situation. How do you explain the apparent contradiction of Proje4L departing from yet depending on the specific dynamics and resources available in Turkey? In other words, can our local practices survive their inherent unpopularity without the certain stamp of authority that comes from our thin participation in the global sphere? To get more specific, what exactly do you show in your museum? Is it a professional and well-funded venture like Kiasma? Is it concerned with representing accurately what is going on around you in your place?

Dear Cuauhtémoc,
It is precisely the luxury of the periphery that needs a historical dismantling. Otherwise, the contemporary cannot be wholly emancipated. I think it was Luis Camnitzer who articulated in the Hybrid State catalogue the "local kingdom" with its middle- and bureaucratic class base ² . The class base of the peripheral power can therefore be linked to the project of modernity (other modernisms if you will) as the privileged subject and agent.

To talk about today, I am at pains to understand the situatedness of the practice from "out there," and the way it displaces itself from the local tango of cultural economy. Twice-displaced critics and curators that we are, we claim to transport knowledge about a conversational and convertible art practice situated within the local dialect. You spoke so eloquently about this situation-when the Mexican and the Turk met up in a nouvelle Japanese soup joint in Helsinki-in the context of the contemporary art practice as it operates outside the local tango and divorced the humanist disciplines of culture. That weak layer you speak of is the very community that sustains me, although we betray each other now and then.

Having just visited the Seventh Biennial here in Istanbul and comparing it with the Ars 01 exhibition ³ -the way the former is laid out haphazardly, creating an ambiance rather than a reading, using large spaces around which works are scattered in a directionless way-forces me to respond to your question in an honest way. I don't think I can ever attain the level of Kiasma in my little institution, and I will never be able to provide the good care for the works that they do, or that kind of stability. Proje4L does not represent accurately what is happening in Turkey. It is biased toward contemporary expression, forever facing the risks of its own volatility.

You know how hard it is to pursue this line of work when one is both a cultural critic-an active agent in the contemporary visual arts field-and a museological interpreter. I cannot see anything of this sort being possible in the great Middle, North Europe and North America. today; perhaps once, but not today.

Dear Vasif,
I write to you today while bombs are falling in Afghanistan. I find it interesting to displace our discussion of "out there." Perversely, it is the notion of "the center" that most likely seduced the Muslim fundamentalists to stage their fears of globalization by crashing airplanes into skyscrapers. They could not conform themselves to creating a purist Muslim kingdom amidst the mountains and the valleys of Afghanistan. Good children of the religions of "the book" (which in my view involves the idea of the West after all), they thought they could symbolically defeat the Americans and at the same time provoke them into attacking "the Muslim world" so as to induce an overall Muslim reaction against the West. I mean, they could not be so naive as to imagine they would not be attacked in response. On the other hand, American statesmen will ultimately profit from the fact that they have finally restored the idea of a "radical other," reviving their sense of civilizatory uniqueness and their duty to forcibly modernize the rest of us. 

Ultimately, even though the Taliban bans TV, photography, and cinema for their population, Bin Laden needs CNN to broadcast his call for a universal Jihad against Jews and Christians and against all of those who live under Jew and Christian rule. Likewise, American and British governments have trained their "special forces" to parachute into the middle of the dessert through something you could call "applied social anthropology":language, cultural exchange, and local systems of power. Here you have a perfect illustration of the complicity between the center and the edge: both of them are required to advance their positions by means of an efficient administration of their mutual instability. It is hard to even focus one's mind on the so-called collateral damage in such a situation. I admit that rather than making me feel alienated, this whole global tragedy simply proves to me how futile my personal political mores are in the present situation, not only in terms of signing petition letters circulating in cyberspace, but also in terms of how they relate to the very banal questions of art and art criticism. This recent crisis highlights something we have been experiencing for a long time: the difficulty of working out modestly effective political goals and strategies. We are doomed to operate blind to the outcome of our provisory assumptions.

Having said that, I find two really challenging issues in your letter. The first is the image (or should I say mirage?) of something you call whole emancipation. I find this notion really unfathomable. I guess the first thing I will ask you to clarify is how you define "emancipation" in this case: do you mean the pursuit of fairness in cultural exchange, or do you mean the emancipation of our local elites from the demands of their own interpretation of modernism? But to keep the conversation interesting, I'll say a few words on this issue first.

The pursuit of inclusion and the battle against modernizing local dreams are clearly two different issues, which our "global discussions" do not always allow us to distinguish with clarity. I grant you that Camnitzer has a great deal to say about the division of labor that exists between the expectations of the local kingdoms and the question of how to repoliticize their participation in "wonderbread" global art. But to be honest, I guess we (the privileged, doubly displaced ones, as you clearly pointed out) always knew that the center was expecting from us an illustration of "cultural difference" that was mostly a matter of their own needs-the need to deal with local, multicultural politicization around immigrant communities. In response to this yearning, local artists who had no particular interest in that field found a way to insert themselves into the global circulation where (I hope) they intervened more in the direction of questioning the assumptions about cultural practice than of pretending to have anything to do with a "local dialect." They (we, in fact) took advantage of the expectations of exporting a form of local taste to actually champion something I prefer to call "periphery bad taste" or "sophisticated maladjustment"-to address a manifold of both local and metropolitan cultural concerns using any means at our disposal.

My question is in fact a form of confession: I am not currently overtly interested in issues of inclusion. The local dynamics of this place make me feel that more and more I am concerned with the radicality of the specific artistic projects emerging from my surroundings. These works do not need from me anything like a "translation"; they have increasingly integrated, in the sense of carrying within them the elements that make them conversable to informed art audiences from Argentina to Helsinki. What I do, and at times probably with some narrowness of spirit, is to attempt to preserve their local significance in relation to their global circulation, even inside my own city. I'm the one who struggles to keep them slightly localized, at least argumentally, in order both to have something to say about them and to prevent them from being merely a free signifier in the global arena, in the way Orozco's work became a deterritorialized but nevertheless nationally branded type of production in the early 1990s. I probably fool myself into believing that this is a way to preserve their political sense wanting to make it seem that they are advancing a new form of local culture when in fact their work has a built-in internationalism. But perhaps the only thing I am achieving is a brief (and increasingly ephemeral) moment of local consumption (mine at least), before or while these things find their natural way into the global arena. All of this is obviously perverse. At times it is nothing more than the worst kind of justification: I feel that without the center/periphery power games I would end up moving to New York because the art here will become (again) really bad!

The operation has to a certain extent backfired: because this criticism is written for international consumption, it has begun to work better abroad than in this locality, where, if originally written in English, I myself mistranslate it into Spanish and read it to people who justly find it abstruse and removed from their own perceptions. I call this pantomime (retrieving an old surrealist slogan) a form of literary magnification, of inflationary criticism. Surely these contemporary things we like are, as we talked about the other day, forms of cultural practice that have little if any relation to the local academic discourse and to its modern/humanist assumptions. I entertain the fantasy that the good thing about art in Mexico is that globalization caused it to escape the thrust of Mexican culture, and I do not mean any essential ethnic trait but simply the styles and the issues that Mexican writers and intellectuals continue to find so engaging, for example, the critical writings of Ernst Jünger and Paul Valéry. I am certain that those local dynamics of culture are very much unscathed by globalization in art: the local academia and cultural discourse have been forced to accept globalization as "the current thing" without feeling in any way challenged by its implications. 

Let me use my perpetual example: Orozco's work is now seen by the Mexican cultural authorities as a useful currency to claim, inside more than outside, that we Mexicans are as contemporary as any other culture. Even the minister of foreign affairs says that he is going to promote Mexican creativity abroad, from Francisco Toledo's painting to Orozco's installations! For the administrators, contemporary art is simply another of "our" tickets to appearing modern. What I find so displeasing about that brand of new cosmopolitanism is that it tends to be so easily absorbed; compared to this even folklorism is politically problematic.

So the truth of the matter is that the "local tango" is far more resilient than the global dance. At least in the international arena audiences are forced to eat the cake with the theoretical crust, even to the extreme of having people in Helsinki sit for hours listening to the ex-Third Text lot replaying the September 11 CNN tapes before their eyes. So of course I am inclined to believe that you, like me, are involved in some kind of misrepresentation of "local art." Of what kind?
Cuauhtémoc

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¹ Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art is in Helsinki; Baltic the Centre for Contemporary Art is in Gateshead, in the north east of England, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden.

² See Luis Camnitzer, "After the Fall of Bureau Communism," in Hybrid State, exh. cat. (New York: Exit Art, 1992).

³ The Seventh International Istanbul Biennial took place September 22-November 17, 2001; Ars 01: Unfolding Perspectives was presented at the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, September 30-November 17, 2001.