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The Column

A Spot on the Globe Michael Fallon March 17, 2005 Michael Fallon

Michael Fallon is back from the College Art Association conference, with thoughts on globalism as an artworld force.

Suddenly there’s a lot of fashionable art-world buzz swirling around the concept of “globalism.” For instance, the Walker Art Center was fixated on the idea in its last big pre-light-dimming exhibition— “How Latitudes Become Forms” (Art in a Global Age). In the show’s catalogue, curator Philippe Vergne hypothesized a current art crisis that echoes this century’s “historical ruptures, the political traumas, and the epistemological breaks” in the Western world, and that arose out of an “Americanization of the world under the guise of globalism and multiculturalism.” In shorthand, this means: Because world culture got so fucked-up in the last century, American culture became dominant, and now art reflects the current overall world-cultural sameness.

Some of you will have already noted the irony that even as Frenchman Vergne was poking under the rock of Americanized global art forces from here in Minneapolis—this relative backwater middle-American burg—he also was climbing the international art-world ladder upon the rungs of globalism. That is, Vergne recently left the Walker to curate the great globalist art enterprise known as the Whitney Biennial in 2006, and then he’s returning to Paris to direct a billionaire’s brand new contemporary art center. No wonder he and other curators with international ambitions are so taken with globalism.

Like most trendy art terminology, globalism is a nebulous concept. In The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Thomas L. Friedman described globalism as a new world system developing from the ashes of the old Cold War order. The victory of democratic capitalism over communism, coupled with the growth of the internet, cellular phone technologies, global positioning, and the resulting era of integration, interconnection, and fast-paced communications, removed many of the barriers that divided nations. Globalism embraces the notion that there is one world, one common home to one humankind, bound together in spite of diverse regional cultures.

This lofty vision is of course rather unrealistic, as Friedman readily acknowledges. “Open your borders to globalization's cultural onslaught without protective filters,” he writes, “and you could go to sleep at night thinking you're an Indian, an Egyptian, an Israeli, a Chinese or a Brazilian and wake up the next morning to find that all your kids look like Ginger Spice.” As we all know, people across the world speak different languages, have varied visions of reality, and pursue competing interests. Traditional national, ethnic, and tribal identities are strong and ingrained and territorial. It’s no wonder then that a globalized world has witnessed clashes between people of different cultural and ethnic backgrounds in recent years: Kosovars vs. Serbs, Israelis vs. Arabs, Hutus vs. Tutsis, Americans vs. everyone else.

The resulting art of the globalist movement vacillates between acknowledging the absurdities of an interconnected world and embracing the absurdities as deadpan subject matter. In “Latitudes,” some of you will recall, artists made references to mundane activities and facts of daily global life as a kind of dry and programmatic regurgitation of everyday minutiae. It was heavily reliant on strategies from the forty-year-old Fluxus movement, though with a touch of pop-cultural referencing every now and then, and it included the Japanese artist who mounted a mock Museum of Soy Sauce Art, the Cuban artists who drew pictures of dance-hall kids on the floor, and a performance artist who attempted a mock car-theft of a quickly-rendered kid-like charcoal drawing of a car on the gallery wall.

The globalist art assumption seems to be that art objects carry weight and meaning, regardless of how joyless, boring, or poorly crafted they are, simply when you give them the “globalism” label and infuse them with theoretical expectation. As with anything that comes pre-labeled, the quality (of skill in making, of thought in conceiving, of interest to the viewer) is unimportant in this work, especially since what passes for globalist art is a flat regurgitation of the quotidian details of modern living, and scarcely a made object at all. So while curators climb their theoretized ladders, art lovers, art critics, and art makers who look for art objects stand below and wonder what all the fuss is in the fog overhead.

“There is some truth to the thesis,” wrote Peter Plagens in a recent Artforum essay, “that contemporary art has fallen into a rabbit hole of, well, non-artness.” Plagens, who began writing about art at the tail end of the modernist explosion of mid-century America, and who admits to being a bit cranky about the new art of today, quotes critic Donald Kuspit’s contention that today’s “postmodern artists are caricatures of artists… Disillusioned by art, they still have illusions about themselves—about what art can do for them (and not what they can do for art), namely, make them rich and famous, or at least newsworthy…” Plagens went on: “Given that art has been chased away from deeper aesthetics… contemporary artists have sought refuge in the fashion, glitz, buzz, and spin that propel contemporary popular culture.” Art today no longer has much to do with aesthetics, or the making of beautiful objects; instead, Plagens says, art has transmorphed into a division of the entertainment industry, and is “commercial pop culture writ esoteric, whiny and small.”

AT THE RECENT CAA CONFERENCE IN ATLANTA, where I had experiences markedly different from Suzanne Szucs’ (mostly because I wasn’t looking for a job, but was there to present a paper on regionalism in art criticism), the term “globalism” came up over and over, accompanied with a constant psychic hand-wringing. Eleanor Heartney, who recently published a book on the Catholic imagination in contemporary art, mentioned globalism in the context of the international art fair phenomenon—which includes such events as Art Basel Miami Beach. She pointed to a recent Jerry Saltz story about how art fairs now rule the art world. “They're adrenaline-addled spectacles,” Saltz wrote,

where intimacy, conviction, patience, and focused looking, not to mention looking again, are essentially nonexistent. They are places where … the unspoken contract that existed between artists, dealers, and collectors has been scraped. As one private dealer gleefully told The New York Times recently, “It's one-stop shopping. The mall experience. . . fashion, parties, and fun all wrapped up in one.”

Someone else in another CAA session explained how the galleries in New York no longer worry about attracting customers to their doors. “They make enough money at art fairs,” she said “to support the gallery for the full year. The rest of the year doesn’t matter.”

It makes sense then, considering an art-market focus on the big international prize, that a prefabricated, slick and over-designed, programmatic and non-offensive art fixated on a globalist idea would emerge. Meanwhile, regional tics, vulgar eccentricities, crankiness and unpolish—such as art made by people like Frank Gaard in Minneapolis, to name one prominent local practitioner of a wholly non-global art—are left behind when the local is discounted in favor of the sterile internationale.

In fact I recently asked Gaard, who has been a unique local voice in art since the late 1960s, and recently was a participant in the Walker Billboard Project (one of five artists commissioned to create a billboard in downtown Minneapolis while the Walker was closed), via email recently what he thought of globalism. “I see globalization much the same as I saw internationalism in the 1960's,” he wrote in response,

as in whatever floats your boat… [I’ve] had discussions about why the Walker doesn't do more about artists here and I always want to say the Walker ain't here, the Walker is globalization… I'll get an email from Philippe [Vergne] and he's in Torino Italy or some other exotic port of call… One could say the Walker outsources its shows, even the architecture is Swiss. Truth is with all the activity these days it does seem like the talent pool has shrunk. … I don't think Picasso could have made out so well these days, no center anymore, markets but a shifting center. Controversy sells papers but I don't think it sells art. A pal of mine was selling his Mapplethorpes after the Corcoran trouble and the flower photos sold and the homoerotic photos didn't, it's great to look at but who wants big dicks in the dining room?

One should know that Gaard often includes big dicks, and other vulgar body parts and physical acts, in his work—which has ranged from straight portraiture to political ranting to deeply disturbing male-erotic fantasia, all rendered in a loose and bright style reminiscent of the comic underground of the 1960s. It is perhaps not surprising, considering the refreshing crudeness of his work, that he has failed to establish a national, or international, career, despite all attempts. Globalism is swallowing up the options for quirky local artists, and it is killing the need for critical assessment of local work. As Jerry Saltz further explained in his essay on art fairs: “Few are further from the epicenter of action than an art critic at an art fair.” This is what really worried people like Heartney and other panelists at the CAA conference—the idea that critics are seen as nothing more than buzz-kill by an art market ruled by the slick globalist curator-ringmaster.

The result of globalism then is, ironically, a less rich art world, in which local flavors of art and regional preferences, not to mention locally engaged artists and writers and audience, are discounted and marginalized by the push of global commerce and marketing strategies. Heartney talked about this in relation to a recent an exhibition called “Thresholds” she curated for the South Carolina Arts Commission. It was a collection of completely non-global art by 53 artists from Florida, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee whose work explores “the many borders inherent in religious belief and practice, among them the borders between life and death, body and soul, matter and spirit, past and present, public and private.” She described the experience as wholly interesting and eye-opening, in as much as it put a finger on a regional flavor existing beyond what is internationally expected in art. She also revealed that when she tried to shop the show around—in particular to institutions in New York she thought the art was perfect for—there were no takers. As she felt religious-based art had much to reveal to New Yorkers after the religion-motivated attacks of 9/11—a subject globalist art, laden with empty visual strategizing, is wholly unequipped to confront—she was particularly puzzled by this lack of response.

I WAS THINKING ABOUT ALL OF THIS AFTER MY RETURN FROM ATLANTA, about how local artists who reflect local conditions and values are locked out of the art market while you can find the same pool of slick interchangeable international artists beholden only to the market in the contemporary art centers in Paris, Tokyo, Sao Paolo, New York, and Minneapolis, and about how critics are an increasingly insignificant voice in the culture—when I got a call from the press manager at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts regarding critical coverage of a strange local project, “Illuminating the Word” (The Saint John’s Bible). Under pressure from the massive globo-corporate entity that has been sponsoring this project—billed as “the only handwritten and illuminated Bible commissioned since the advent of the printing press more than 500 years ago”--she wanted my advice about how to get the art reviewed in a national arts magazine. “Who is writing locally for national publications now? And who can I get to write a story on this for a national publication?”

All I could do was shrug. I know from experience that landing a review in a national arts magazine on such an odd exhibition would be next to impossible. Most editors in national magazines want little from Minneapolis, and even when they do, there are strict notions of what they want to cover—and there is a push for the art to be of a sort with the trends of the moment (not of 500 years ago). To be honest, while it may seem to some artists that critics think themselves king-makers, withholding the favors of reviews for only their worthy minions, the truth is the critic is in the middle, getting it from both ends. In a globalist art market that provides little support for criticism venues, it’s always an uphill struggle to get coverage for local art.

At a moment like this, when a globo-corporation whose existence has helped engender the globalist art market that quashes possibilities for art criticism is asking me to provide criticism for them, I go back to the response I received from the paper I read at the CAA conference. While others in my panel took the opportunity to rant about the loss of regional identity at the hands of globalism, or to cite the (somewhat futile) strategies of young artists to circumvent the globalist art market, I presented a straightforward take on what’s going on in the Twin Cities. After all, there’s a lot happening here that isn’t happening elsewhere. We have an art critics association of 30 members trying to foster art criticism locally; we have mnartists.org; we have a program of public presentations of art criticism at the MIA, and we have a new publication of arts criticism as a twice-yearly attachment to the nationally distributed Rain Taxi—all created locally by local artists and writers and for a local audience regardless of what the globe thinks, even if it’s likely the globe will never even notice.

On this day in Atlanta the audience hearing my paper responded with resounding interest, seeking copies of the publication, looking to hook up and have exchanges with the critics group, and asking for more information about mnartists.org. An editor for a national magazine even suggested the idea of publishing the paper as a commentary in her magazine.

Yes, the globe is big, but don’t discount the power of the local just yet, my friends.