reklam

Dear Cuauhtémoc,
I don't mean the "emancipation of local elites from the demands of their own interpretation of modernism" but I was talking about an emancipation from the local elites' interpretation of modernism, a break from the carcass of the acquisitions of modernity, the nationalist will, the economic and administrative class base. I know it sounds arrogant, even deceptive, to seal it off like that, but how else can the actuality be negotiated without compromise? Should we not admit that the tussle has been more with the institutions of local culture than with the center? From the late 1980s, for about a decade, the translating agencies, -the middle-men- involuntarily had to illustrate the locatable energies of their places of so-called origin. 

This, of course, intensified the rupture between the local elites' interpretation of modernism and the specificity of local contemporary work in the displaced discourse of international syntax. Who won, and what was lost? You know we can't dig trenches or act as snipers any more. There is a triple caveat here: one has to do with the vestige of local archaic power, an archaic power that lacks the idealism of its origins; the second deals with the naiveté of many international institutions; and finally, there is the terribly sobering realization that we now have the power to make choices. The first position is weak; gone is the thrust of the local academic discourse, their monopoly? of information and the privileging translations! Gone are the days of the Splendors of Mexico! ⁴ Regarding international institutions, they have shown remarkable flexibility, have helped artists and curators? to pay the bills, have provided tickets for travel, and we in turn provided them with the critique they needed to extend their license! Let's discuss the third caveat. If we go back to your favorite hobby-horse, Mr. Orozco, is not "art for export"-if I can express it in the most banal way-locked in the reciprocity of the local's imagination of what the center desires and the center's imagination of what the local should desire? I don't think this is a self-conscious process but an interpersonal, collective one. In fact, it collapses the strategic difference between Orozco and Kcho. 

If one issue deals with how we negotiate our arguments into the center and then air them out, another deals with the situatedness of our reading. Twice in the last two years, an artist from Istanbul has put me in a deep quandary. The first instance was when we were doing a critique of a project I had curated. This artist said that she no longer was interested in what she wanted to say to the world, but rather in what she wanted to say to herself. And, a few months ago, during an exhibition planning conversation for Becoming a Place ⁵, she said that I was looking inside from the outside, and that instead I could look at the inside from the inside. The ins and outs referred simply to the situatedness of her work ⁶. She then said in a recent interview "The look at the inside from within is an attempt to understand, transform and produce the context that is inhabited. It's a preference to remain within, in pursuit of genuineness and credibility. And despite its misunderstandings, ill-definitions and prejudices against, it can work also critically. I just want at this point to make a correction: I don't have a direct proposition or judgement on, nor an affirming position for religion. I'm not interested in religion or sin but in the problem of faith and belief in anything about life.

Dear Vasif,
Months have passed, deadlines falling on our heads, and I finally come back to your last letter. I would like to say that if my answer has taken so long it is because you transmitted to me the very anxieties you referred to, for the simple reason that I feel more and more that a perspective of "the inside from the inside" has become completely impossible for me. This of course may involve my inability to interact with some works and artists properly because they seem to me to project an "inside" (both geographical and emotional/psychological/personal) that at the moment appears imaginary. It's funny, but the assignment to write about curating that initiated this conversation had to do in part with acknowledging? that for some people I was imposing a foreign view on local art. In any case, let me address two issues.

First, to what extent does the notion of an "inside" depend on how feasible it is to conceive something like a local art history? I am convinced that the way in which contemporary art in Mexico in the 1990s broke with all local artistic tradition was so drastic that no one can even recall anymore those pre-1990 local contexts. The only artistic references that seem to have meaning for artists operating at the moment are precisely those moments that were left out of the narrative: Alejandro Jodorowsky, Marcos Kurtycz, Ulises Carrión, or even a police tabloid photojournalist such as Enrique Metinides. Artists here, my dear Vasif, are titling their works in English, if not actually writing them in English. We are so integrated by now into the American economy and psyche that the question of "identity" seems to be fruitful only if looked at from the outside: Ruben Ortiz-Torres, who is based in Los Angeles, has more to say about what it means to inhabit the Mexican stereotype by addressing the underlying revolutionary content of Speedy Gonzalez than anybody who is working from within a spiritual or geographical "inside." Would you say that things are radically different in Turkey? Can contemporary artists have a relative dialogue with a historical cultural structure?

The second issue has to do with the question of the interaction between local and global politics. I am immensely impressed with the way Hardt and Negri, in their book Empire, argued that there had been a shift from the old-fashioned idea of a horizontal internationalist class struggle toward a continuous eruption of very local and brief political events based on regional concerns, which immediately touch on central issues of global power without becoming global in themselves ⁷. They spoke metaphorically of a transition from Marx's "Old Mole" to movements that behave more like snakes leaping from regional concerns to challenge the universal order. The Zapatistas, of course, articulated this model. But just a few weeks ago there was another rebellion in San Salvador Atenco, a town a few miles east of Mexico City, by people, branding machetes and taking policemen as hostages, who oppose the expropriation of their communal lands to build a new airport. They were questioning the assumption that extending the global network of business and communications was more important than their existence as a community. And I would say that there is not any more pressing global issue than this.

Once you realize that the more you think locally the more you end up acting globally, developing a view from and to the inside becomes hard to achieve. I guess that one of the things we find interesting in artists working from this location (Francis Alys, Santiago Sierra, Teresa Margolles, Minerva Cuevas, to name a few) is that at the same time they refuse to illustrate "globalism" they also show that by operating locally they can have global currency.
Are the conditions of artistic production in Turkey entirely different? How would you distinguish between looking at artworks and artists "from inside" versus merely curtailing their possibility for expansiveness? Perhaps what I am saying is that I find it difficult to address what your friend, the artist, said when she argued that she was interested in working for herself. Call me an ideologist, but such a position has less and less meaning for me.
Apologetically yours,
Cuauhtémoc

Good to hear from you. I guess it is time to close the discussion before it becomes something, or nothing, else.

I am not speaking of conscious processes or illustrations, but of the insider's view that shifts the index from the inside, without having anything to do with local artistic traditions. For me, the least meaningful works today are the neo-exotic, hyper-urban, nontoxic proposals. Something went amiss between the Cities on the Move project and a structure like Palais de Tokyo. This "New authenticity" may be a trap and it may, just may, be translated as the return of the exotic in hyper-urban outing.

I assume that the position of artists in Turkey or Russia-in the region I am speaking from-is somewhat different. For one thing, these places were never subjected to colonialization from the outside, so there is no ongoing relationship of seduction. Rather, one can examine the context of a Muslim urban culture where mental constructs such as inside and outside simply mean different things. But, this is another discussion altogether.
So dear Cuauhtémoc, hope to see you again soon, somewhere.
Vasif

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⁴ This was a blockbuster exhibition, one of the first "selling of nations" exhibitions that took place at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

⁵ Becoming a Place was the inaugural exhibition of Proje4L Istanbul Museum of Contemporary Art, September 21, 2001-[close date?].

⁶ Aydan Murtezaoglu, in an unpublished discussion with Erden Kosova

⁷ See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2000).