>[!INFO]+ Meta >Author:: Kevin Murray >Date:: 2008 >Reference:: Paper delivered at the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand conference 4 December 2008 >Tags:: #text #VisualArt #south ‘Australia is an egg that hurtles through its latitudes, presumably like other souths.’ In the 2006 issue of the _Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art_, Terry Smith reflected on the moment in New York, 1972, when he was formulating his argument for the seminal article on the ‘provincialism problem’.[1](#_edn1) Reviewing his wine-stained diagram of the time, he considered the seemingly empty spaces in Australia beyond the metropolitan centres of Sydney and Melbourne. For Smith, these empty spaces, disconnected from the Northern world of ideas, gave Australia an unborn potential which set it adrift at the bottom of the world. Thus this oracular image of Australia as an egg ‘hurtling’ across the South. There is one particular word from Smith’s sentence that I’d like to consider in this paper. It’s not so much the strangeness of Australia as an egg, or that this egg ‘hurtles’, but that wistful phrase that begins with the adverb ‘presumably.’ This is perhaps the most mysterious word of all. This disjunction between metropolitan and provincial is certainly not unique to Australia. Our latitude is littered with colonies that surely have had a similarly ambivalent relationship to their northern centres. How is it that we are largely ignorant of their own take on this division? How is it, given the obvious similarities between Australia and other countries at the bottom of the world, that we are largely ignorant of their own take on this condition? How might we work on this adverb ‘presumably’ to either erase it or transform it into a negative? In this paper I’d like to explore how our own conversation about the metropolitan/provincial divide might broaden to include perspectives from other cultures parallel to Australia. To a significant degree, material in this paper arises from the CIHA meeting in Melbourne earlier this year, when we first began to hear voices from these countries in this context. ### After the panopticon Remember the panopticon. Popularised by Foucault, the architecture of the panopticon arranges a series of individual cells around a central tower. They can’t see the person in the tower, but they know that this person can see them. Importantly, none of the prisoners in adjacent cells can communicate with each other. The situation I am discussing in this paper would be analogous to the moment when the panopticon ceased to be. A financial crisis means that the prison can no longer afford to pay its guards, who now desert their posts, unlocking the cells. In the cell we might call Australia, the prisoners have been models of good behaviour. The wardens have even allowed them occasionally into the tower so they can appreciate the efficiency of their operations. Rather than pity themselves, the Australians felt sorry for the prisoners before them, most of which they had to kill into order to make space. At times they even felt superior to the wardens, who had never experienced what it was like to be in a prison cell. The Australians felt privileged to have experienced both sides of the panopticon, even if they always ended up in the cells. But now the tower is being vacated, the Australians must consider what their future will be. Will they remain in their cell? If they leave, how will they deal with other prisoners they have never met? What will happen to the tower? Enough of the metaphor, let’s go back to the basic scenario. The panopticon in this case is a world structured concentrically. ## Changing world The metropolitan/provincial division that Smith and others confront arose as a way of contesting a concentric model of art history. This model places a few metropolitan cities at the centre of a circle of influences. Centripetally, the centres absorb all the cultures of the world. An institution such as the British Museum seeks to be a ‘museum of the world, for the world’.  When the Director of the British Museum was in Melbourne for the CIHA congress early this year to deliver the final keynote for a conference on art history, he highlighted the museum’s African collection. In response to the issue of appropriation, he claimed the museum to be of universal significance, citing recent DNA evidence that ‘We are all African’. According to this logic, the British Museum aspires to be the best location for discovering world cultures like those in Africa. There is no need to go to Africa itself, and we certainly don’t expect any reciprocal relationship. But more significantly, it’s impossible for us to conceive of any institution in Africa would have ambitions as a world centre parallel to those of the British Museum. Centrifugally, the centres radiate new ideas. 20th century art histories of the colonised South are largely produced by individuals travelling north to cities like Paris where they discover the latest strains of modernism which they then bring back down to their home countries to set in train new styles of work. It is inconceivable for us to image it working in the other direction, with a Parisian artist bringing back ideas from the periphery. Primitivism, as a movement that looks south, is still represented as an idea that emerged from Picasso’s visit to a Paris museum. We might recoil to consider the concentric model represented in bold terms like this. Surely this model of art history is now a quaint anachronism that has been outmoded by air travel and the Internet. Yet, what Gerardo Mosquera called ‘axial globalisation’ continues to reproduce this system in galleries, publishing and exhibitions. There has simply been too much economic and cultural capital invested in this arrangement for it to re-structure. However, as the Western economic model is beginning to crack at the seams, a space has opened up for other configurations. The unilateral model seems to have had its last gasp in the Iraq War. Now the rise of emerging economies like China has stimulated a raft of south-south exchanges that work across the grain. We now wait to see how this cross-current flows through the academy. ## Challenges ahead The concentric model is being challenged on a number of fronts. In Australia, the model of area studies has long been the principle means by which the south is represented. Area studies is arranged as a ring of particularities organised around a universal theoretical centre. ### Area Studies The traditional model entails focusing on regions such as Latin America or Africa in terms of their particularities. The general theoretical models remain the same, derived from disciplines such as political or cultural studies. They are variously applied to different regions of the world. But this is an asymmetrical arrangement. It is inconceivable that knowledge would flow in the reverse direction. We don’t look to these regions for universal theoretical ideas. But area studies are under strain at the moment, most evidently due to the decline of student numbers. Interest has moved to international studies, particularly globalisation. There is reason also to argue that the area studies model has been superceded. It belongs more to the older unilateral system, where there is a single universal centre around which other knowledges radiate. Instead, we should be looking to mainstream disciplines to broaden their sources to include non-Western ideas. ## South-South world ### Overseas In the non-Western world, we are beginning to see the spokes of the concentric system interact independently of the hub. In the Social Sciences, the networks of south-south research in Africa, Latin America and Asia are beginning to interlock, with a summit planned in Indonesia next year. There are a number of networks emerging such as InSouth and the South Centre. These centres involve participation not only from countries of the South but also engaged organisations in Europe and North America. In fact, the only part of the world they seem to exclude is Australia and New Zealand. How is it that the ‘great southern land’ is not in the conversation about South? Today I’d like to concentrate on several events on the horizon in South Africa and Argentina. These forums for art history give us some sense of where Australia might be placed in this new order. #### SAVAH In the area of art history, there is pressure on the Congress of the International Committee of the History of Art (CIHA) to consider perspectives from southern countries. I understand that there is resistance to the South on the basis that it is a regional concern that would exclude the majority of members. However, the organisation of South African Visual Art Historians are organising a CIHA colloquium for January 2011 titled ‘Mobility, Circulation, Transnationalism: Art History and the Global South.’ They identify a Global South perspective as one largely concerned with justice in art. This includes issues of repatriation, marginalisation Their principal thrusts are: - to bring to the centre that which, throughout history and across nations, has been traditionally ignored, marginalised, displaced and appropriated, and - to make art, its production, and its related intellectual and industrial activities of such importance for the Global South that the discipline of art history will be reinvigorated, and new voices will be heard. The areas that they target include individualism, connoisseurship, political art and ethics. How this develops as an art history of the Global South will be very interesting, particularly to see what remains of the aesthetic dimension itself. #### Visual Century Project Meanwhile there is an alternative project funded by the South African government to map the history of South African art. The Visual Century Project attempts to situate South African art within a variety of contexts, both local and international. It was initiated and directed by Gavin Jantjes, who then contracted the Africa South Art Initiative (ASAI), where it is project managed by Mario Pissarra. The project can be read as an attempt to tell the story of South African art within its own terms. These terms are largely political: events such as Boer War and the Cold War provide the contexts in which art is read. Rather than politics as a unilateral driver of art history, the project considers the interface of art and general history which includes but goes beyond the political. A major challenge for this project is to include parts of South African society that are normally excluded from the story of art. Craft is arguably the dominant form of creative visual expression in South Africa, but it is rarely if ever seen in art galleries. The Visual Century Project will include craft as an ‘indigenous art’ practised in townships and villages. A working rule for the authors of this series is that art is largely a matter of context. The difference between a curio and work of art is not so much in the object itself but whether it is displayed on a shelf or a plinth. From an Australian perspective, the South African approach challenges the autonomy of art in relation to politics. While there is much contemporary art reflecting anxieties about Africa, there is relatively little ironic reflection on the past as characteristic in Australian revisionism. Does this indicate the absence of a public space, in which these ambiguities might be opened out? Or is irony a luxury that we in Australia can afford, given our more ‘successful’ alienation of indigenous peoples? #### Centro Argentino de Investigadores de Arte Art theory is extremely active in Argentina, with many active associations and institutes specialising in the subject. Unfortunately, their work is hard to access as it is contained in print journals only available in Argentina. So it was a revelation at the CIHA congress in Melbourne earlier this year to meet a number of representatives of on the leading organisations, Centro Argentino de Investigadores de Arte (CAIA). There was an uncanny familiarity about much of their work. Laura Malosetti Costa’s paper on the painter Pio Collivadino revealed his concern to understand how the light of the South differs from his home country in Italy. We could see then how what seemed a uniquely Australian concern, prominent in the Heidelberg School, was actually a common strategy for developing a southern nationalism within the terms of European painting. Next year, CAIA is planning their 20th congress, which will coincide with the spate of bicentenaries.[2](#_edn2) Titled ‘Balance, perspectives and disciplinary renovations in the history of art’, the congress will focus on new ways of understanding the role of art in the formation of national identity. This will include reflection on the role of the art historian in relation to collections and the challenge of new objects, which includes gender, sexuality and mass visual culture. While there is a critical focus on the operations of late capitalism, there is little here reflecting the concerns for social justice that could be found in South Africa. This is especially noticeable in the absence of an indigenous voice. From an Australian perspective, there is a surprising silence surrounding the genocide of indigenous peoples on which the state of Argentina is founded. For a figure such as Torres-Garcia, for instance, who is the author of many iconic works of art, the concept of the pre-Colombian enables him to appropriate Inca designs into his work without any regard for the destiny of its authors. Within the revisionist model, Australian art has been focused exclusively on the condition of Aboriginality. What are the politics involved in taking an interest in the even more extreme repression that has occurred in countries of Latin America? Our natural sensitivity about the stereotyping of foreign cultures would make it difficult to point the finger outright. A more suitable position might be that of the innocent abroad, asking questions with a studied naïvité. But as I will mention later in my paper, we must accept that certain questions can be asked of us in return. The confident republicanism in Latin America makes Australia’s own relation to its northern parents seem distinctly timid. ### Revisionism Within the revisionist paradigm outlined by Rex Butler,[3](#_edn3) Australian art can be read in terms of a dialogue between Europe and its antipodean other. An abiding anxiety of writers such as Bernard Smith, Paul Taylor, Ian Burns and Ian McLean is the derivative nature of Australian culture. A dialectical understanding of the relationship between centre and periphery at least gives Australia some agency, if an ambivalent one. While imprisoned within a lonely cell, the Panopticon does encourage a narcissistic attitude, as thought the guard in the central tower was only looking at you. It is a little humiliating to realise that this attention was shared by so many others. The metropolitan/provincial divide has focused our attention largely on our relation to the north. The weft of connections that might be developed with fellow cultures on the periphery have been largely ignored. What structures might we develop to being this south-south dialogue? ### Journal of Modern Craft As a footnote, this question of the format for south-south dialogue is also something facing the Journal of Modern Craft. While the vast majority of global craft practice now occurs in the South, it is very difficult to give voice to this within the academic format of a refereed journal. We are now setting up a website that will hopefully provide a more flexible space for these voices.[4](#_edn4) ### Australia So in the rising tide of voices across the South, what chance is there that our horizons might broaden to engage with these parallel discourses? The South Project was conceived in 2003 inside a craft organisation as an attempt to realise the potential of craft as a language of cultural exchange while serving the great white hope that Melbourne would one day have its own place on the international art calendar. Having completed its circuit of the south last year with the gathering in Johannesburg, it raised many questions about the meaning of South, particularly the relation between the global and geographic South. Thankfully, there is an Australian network emerging with the aim of opening up academic discourse to ideas beyond trans-Atlantic centres. This has been prompted by the recent book _Southern Theory_, written by Raewyn Connell, the chair of sociology from University of Sydney. He argues for Australia’s role in this emerging dialogue: It is possible to reshape the circuits through which social-scientific knowledge moves, to modify—since we cannot quickly end—the metropolitan focus. The intellectuals of rich peripheral countries such as Australia, and of the privileged classes in countries like Mexico, Chile, India, South Africa and Brazil, have significant resources for intellectual work and the circulation of knowledge. Because of their location in the post-colonial world, they have—or can have—perspectives which overlap with those of subaltern majorities.[5](#_edn5) It is clearly not enough now for Australia to maintain strong academic exchange with the USA and Britain. There are circuits of knowledge that bypass these centres. It seems Australia now needs to take advantage of its place in the world, among the countries of the South, to stay in touch with thinking in the majority world. Politically, Australia has taken bold steps towards this end, establishing itself as a middle power with potential to mediate between first and third worlds, principally US and China. Will our academic institutions follow suit? Southern Perspectives is a network of academics has formed to explore how their disciplines might be broadened to engage with voices from the South. Their aim is ‘to promote ways of thinking that emerge outside trans-Atlantic metropolitan centres.’[6](#_edn6) It is designed to reverse the subject-object relation that has cast the South as a region to be harvested for knowledge, rather that the source of ideas. The challenge is to find an Australian voice in this. ## Core problematic As an exploratory gesture, I’d like to take Terry Smith’s problematic of the metropolitan/provincial divide, to see what other positions emerge in countries that share this condition with Australia. Here we can begin to think of alternative positions that peripheral cultures might take to their forebears in the centre. ## Positions ### Reverse Primitivism One way of challenging the primitivist subject-object relation is to reverse it. There are a number of contemporary artists across the South who have developed an ironic practice in which it is Western culture that is the object of exotic fascination. In the case of Colombian sculptor Nadin Ospina, he has commissioned those who forge pre-Colombian ceramics to make replicas featuring figures such as Mickey Mouse or Bart Simpson. Bart Simpson figures in African versions of this reverse primitivism too, in the case of Brett Murray’s iconic public art for Cape Town. It is not only non-indigenous artists who engage with this irony, the artist Langa Magwa has drawn on the form of the gramophone and linked it to the Zulu horn motif which is traditionally a source of power and healing. Reverse primitivism is a complex phenomenon which evokes the history of syncretic religions such as Shembe, Candomblé and cargo cults that project magical powers onto Western culture. Its project is to turn the table on colonial masters by making them the subject of ridicule. The danger of reverse primitivism, however, is that is essentially a carnivalesque gesture that upturns a hierarchy but only for a temporary release. It seems sharpest when targeting more recent primitivism, particularly in tribal arts and traditional crafts.[7](#_edn7) ### Poor arts Within the capitalist west, the dominant mode for navigating the rich/poor divide is aspirationalism. Accordingly, the poor are encouraged to believe that they can achieve the status of the rich. So a humble maker from a village might one day be an artist lauded with exhibitions in metropolitan centres. The alternative response is gathering strength across the South. The metropolitan/provincial divide in Italy lead to the movement of meridionalismo, mainly a literary realism about the poverty in Sicily. After being hardened by the political wars of Uruguay, Garibaldi came to liberate Sicily from the monarchy. He was followed by Gramsci, whose Southern Question tried to accommodate the struggle of Sicilian peasants in the metropolitan-based Marxist movement in Turin. Arte Povera arose from this as a way of eschewing dominant values embodied in the hard currency of art, particularly its exclusion of the street. When South African writer Mbulelo Mzamane gave the opening address to the South Project gathering in Melbourne, he invoked the ‘re-discovery of the ordinary’ as a project for the South. This resonated quite strongly with the artistic practices of many participants, like the poor craft of Roseanne Bartley and the performance art of Domenico de Clario.[8](#_edn8) In Chile, de Clario performed at the house of Pablo Neruda, whose communist poetry most famously embodies the poor aesthetic. In contemporary Santiago, the movement of _abajismo_ (the low movement) is inspiring many artists to work on the street rather than in the gallery. The poor arts provide a very powerful alternative to aspirationalism and reflect the liberation struggles that are just an important part of the post-colonial history of the South. Yet given all this, there remains a critical weakness in poverty as an aesthetic strategy. Making ‘virtue of a necessity’ can promote acquiescence to gross inequity in society. While the disavowal of aspirationalism might be bad for consumer capitalism, it does potentially consign the poor to their lowly fate. Whatever, the argument does not rest with the poor arts. ### Relational design The principal underlying Mzamane’s ‘re-discovery of the ordinary’ was the traditional African value of Ubuntu, a collectivist ideal that was forged in the truth and reconciliation process as the ethical glue that binds contemporary South Africa. As the South Project unfolded, it attracted a number of collectives operating within the broad relational aesthetic focus on art as a means of bringing people together. This was strongly a part of the exhibition _Trans-Versa_ curated by Zara Stanhope and Danae Mosman for the Santiago gathering. This mode of art resonates with the indigenous values of tribalism that were part of the dialogue. One of the criticisms that has often been made of relational art is that such art tends to be limited to urban audiences.[9](#_edn9) To participate in these events you need the kind of surplus capital that would grant you the time to engage in an exercise that is purely symbolic. Poor people are naturally more concerned with product-based art as a way of earning a living. The relational method is likely to have broader relevance in the field of design. Designers from metropolitan centres are descending on remote communities to engage their traditional craft skills in product development for wealthier urban markets. The value of these products rests not only with its function and decorative appearance, but also the ethical value that is embedded in it. It offers the consumer an opportunity to feel that their purchase is not only providing personal pleasure but also doing good in the world. The relational paradigm offers an opportunity for craft production that goes beyond the souvenir. But here also there are pitfalls. Naturally, such a practice is fraught with tokenism. It can entail a sentimental attitude to the handmade. Complex work needs to be done in balancing strategic essentialism with the credibility of the consumer.[10](#_edn10) ### Western Finally, there is one position that is radically different from all the others. By contrast with others that attempt to satirise or turn their backs on this centre, this approach entails an attempt to take control of the centre itself. In Australia, this is associated the neo-classical ideals that founded the colony. In the early settlement of New South Wales there was a neo-classical ideal associated with the New Holland as a region that would enable the re-birth of key Western values worn out by history in the northern hemisphere.[11](#_edn11) While the colonial mentality eventually superseded neoclassical idealism in Australia, in Brazil it seems to have survived, even flourished. This was encouraged by the transfer of the Portuguese royal court to Rio in 1808. Such a move of the British monarchy to Australia would be simple inconceivable. This has emboldened Brazilian claims such as being the birthplace of modernism that defy the resentment usually expressed by derivative cultures. The confidence of the new is evident in Brazilian modern art. In 1967, Hélio Oiticica created an environmental structure titled _Tropicalia_, which served to initiate a movement that brought together radical art with music by singers such as Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, who would end up as Brazil’s Minister of Culture under the Lula government. Tropicalismo followed a history of cultural manifestos such as anthropophagi that sought to release Brazil from the constraints dependency on conservative European ideals in order to invent their own with overtures to public participation. In his book _Tropical Truth_,[12](#_edn12) Caetano Veloso traces the birth of Tropicalismo to a reaction against the false popularism, particularly the commodification of popular culture in carnival. Inspired partly by _Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club’s Band_, the Tropicalismo sought a more experimental engagement with popular culture, which drew criticism from the left. Veloso’s narrative involves the ‘flame of civilisation’ moving from the cold north to the ‘the American, Lusophonic, mestizo giant of the southern hemisphere.’ A similar move can be found in Argentina. Torres-Garcia’s _Escuela del Sur_ and the journal _Sur_ that published Borges both framed the emergence of the South as continuous with the culture of old Europe. Across the Atlantic, there are echoes of this with the African Renaissance, as well. While this republicanism might be dismissed as a form of aspirationalism, we need to acknowledge the possibility that those in the periphery chose to engage head on with the centre, rather than beg to differ. This is the point of the Beninese philosopher Paulin Hountondji, who wrote [Bantu philosophy] The quest for originality is always bound up with a desire to show off. It has meaning only in relation to the Other, from whom one wishes to distinguish oneself at all costs. This is an ambiguous relationship, inasmuch as the assertion of one's difference goes hand in hand with a passionate urge to have it recognized by the Other.[13](#_edn13) Hountondji argues that African philosophy should take on the Western tradition of thought directly. The alternative path of ethno-philosophy risks consigning African thought to a ghetto of particularisation. While stirring enough, the weak spot of republicanism is the potential arrogance of the claims. The call to wrest the mantle of civilisation from the north depends on a potentially clichéd view of world history, discretely divided into the eras of dominant forces. ## Back to the panopticon Returning to the metaphor at play, various scenes have unfolded in our abandoned panopticon. Some prisoners scattered among different cells have dressed themselves up as guards and mocked their officious manners. Many others have started to organise themselves in a way completely independent of the tower, renovating their cells or buying prison plans from the unemployed guards. And finally the more zealous prisoners have stormed the tower claiming it is their turn to be guards watching over everyone. So what will the Australians do? Will they continue life as usual, acting as if the guards were still in the tower? Or will they provide a haven for unemployed guards, frightened of possible retribution? Or maybe they will try to mediate between those wanting to beautify their cells and those seeking to move into the tower? Australia may not be the only egg hurtling through the south, presumably. [1](#_ednref1) Terry Smith ‘World picturing in contemporary art’ _Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art_ (2006) 7: 1, pp. 24-46 [2](#_ednref2) 200 years ago the citizens of Buenos Aires commenced the May Revolution which set in train a sequence of republics across South America. [3](#_ednref3) Rex Butler _Radical Revisionism: An anthology of writings about Australian art_ Brisbane: IMA, 2005 [4](#_ednref4) [www.journalofmoderncraft.com](http://www.journalofmoderncraft.com) [5](#_ednref5) Raewyn Connell Southern Theory: The global dynamics of knowledge in social science St Leonards, N.S.W.: Allen & Unwin, 2007, p. 228 [6](#_ednref6) See [www.southernperspectives.net](http://www.southernperspectives.net) [7](#_ednref7) Particularly challenging for an Australian audience is the work of Peter Engblom. His Zulu Sushi series of digital photographs explored the purely speculative relationship between Zulu and Zen. Given the status of Aboriginal culture as a sacred domain, Englbom’s work would seem as close as sacrilege as you might get in a secular age.  Engblom is what might be called a ‘white Zulu’—someone who grew up with Zulus and speaks the language fluently. He claims his work is more popular with Zulus themselves than with white people. It is a relief from the tourist gaze. [8](#_ednref8) Kevin Murray _Craft Unbound: Make the Common Precious_  Sydney: Thames & Hudson, 2005 [9](#_ednref9) See Stewart Martin 'Critique of Relational Aesthetics' _Third Text_ (2007) 21: 4, pp. 369-386  [10](#_ednref10) With UNESCO, we are currently devising a Code of Practice for Craft-Design Collaborations that will provide a forum for critically assessing the relationships that underlie this new creative practice. [11](#_ednref11) Robert Dixon _The Course Of Empire: Neo-classical Culture In New South Wales 1788-1860_  Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1986 [12](#_ednref12) Caetano Veloso _Tropical_ _Truth: A Story of Music & Revolution in Brazil_  New York: De Capo Press, 2002 (orig. 1997) [13](#_ednref13) Paulin Hountondji _African Philosophy: Myth & Reality_ (trans. Henri Evans) Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983 (orig. 1976), p. 44 | | | | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | --- | | # Zulu Tango Alpha - Art history after the panopticon | | | [Index](http://www.kitezh.com/articles.asp)<br><br>#### Source<br><br>_Paper delivered at the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand conference 4 December 2008_ | | | [](../index.html) | | | Copyright held by author Kevin Murray <br>For permission to reproduce this article, please contact [Kevin Murray](http://www.kitezh.com/feedback.htm) | |