Global Art and Global Practices

People and cultural objects move relentlessly around the globe and art producers and receivers feel they are part of a broad global community. In fact, the world is now organized around networks of activities, both the causes and the consequences of globalization, that include the global production and consumption of goods and their electronic trading, the global transportation of people, and the mass spread of global communication systems. These interconnected clusters make the formation of new, both virtual and physical, networks of people bound together by cultural, economical, and political relations possible.

In the art world, the process is embodied by the emergence of global collectives of artists, curators, and collectors who are linked with one another in many different kinds of relationships, a recent development which poses the question of whether or not a unified global art movement is indeed taking place. While schools and communities represent a form of physical aggregation per se, other kinds of virtual and supranational collaborations have started emerging, supported by information technology.

Whereas group activities, like guilds and salons, have historically been part of the artistic scene, today’s situation of artistic collectives is all new. They are, in fact, characterized by a very informal nature and flexible structure which is not necessarily geared to the creation of exhibitions or practical projects, but rather to an intellectual cohesion around the construction of new social meanings. Members of these groups remain split between their local communities, where they belong, and the international horizon with which they have to interact.

The advance of globalization has also raised questions that bring this newly connected community together. The issues of deterritorialization, the exploitation of mass communication, the trans national cultural policy, the fair use of copyright, human rights and artistic freedom are only a few examples of the topics that keep these clusters together.

Among the patterns that these formations share, there is an emphasis on collaboration, a flexibility on the part of the members and organizations supporting them, a shared lexicon and a commitment to social and political issues. Platforms, ⁴ mobile curatorial strategies and international cultural programs, are all examples of the globalization trend in art.

This new artistic practice illustrates the emergence of a global public sphere in which actors find a way to develop a democratic dialogue and to promote new levels of artistic interaction.

Instead of focusing on creation, members of the community choose to collaborate in flexible ways within a horizontal field of work that encompasses different agencies and actors. ⁵

Artists themselves have been affected by this tendency and their role within the art community has assumed a new dynamism.

They no longer identify themselves with the Romantic idea of the artist as a solitary creator, but rather as part of the broad

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Papastergiadis N., 2011

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engine of production whereby they are able to shape their ideas. ⁶ In accordance with Howard Becker’s idea of the art world as a sphere of interconnected activities, production, distribution and creation proceed along intersecting tracks. ⁷

Art history, traditionally engaged with classifications of works of art based on geography and time, has been challenged by the fluidity and blurring of regional boundaries and by the process of cultural identity mixing. The geography of art has been reshaped and art historians must deal with these “non-places” of cultural production. Furthermore, the delineation of the constituencies that form the art system is no longer easily achievable and even the philosophical definition of space has been placed under scrutiny. In this context space becomes an ⁸ immaterial concept, matched by a vaster and more general spatial dimension of thought, which, clearly enough, may today extend well over national barriers.

This collaborative vision of the art world has also changed artists’ institutional engagement and the role of museums and galleries. Seen from above, within the perspective of a global and virtual system, museums have lost part of their local and territorial features to become assimilated to hubs coordinating the different activities of the art practice. As the figure of the artist has shifted from that of a creator to a more multidisciplinary role of collaborator, so have museums and galleries changed from static repositories of settled knowledge to platforms for multiple activities. Once again, there is a focus on the dynamism and event-oriented goals of cultural institutions, which have come to represent a place of encounter and discussion for artists and their public.

Orta L., 2009

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Becker H., 1982

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Kaufmann T. D., 2004

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The event status that has been affecting culture and art has been accompanied by a parallel shift from the art object to the art project, marking the emphasis on the whole process as creation, which is in turn the result of mobile strategies of collaboration.

Critics, curators and artists cluster around project-based practices which are very often politically and socially engaged. The diffusion of Internet and communication technologies has expedited collaboration in contemporary art as artists pursue new kinds of interdisciplinary practices, based on new forms of knowledge circulation, self-organized collective activities, affinities with popular culture and emerging issues, and a mediation between local and global communities.

Charles Esche describes the approach of today’s artists as

“modest proposals”, which do not consider the institutional arena an enemy to be challenged but rather an opportunity and resource. The artists’ battle is, in other words, engaged from within the system and with a very pragmatic approach.

According to Esche, as of 1989 art has been ever more frequently solicited for didactical and social commitments primarily as a way to justify the economic development of the art system. ⁹ Today, artists have found a mediated way to approach the art practice, one in which they still strive for alternative scenarios but they do so by starting from concrete necessities and existing objects from inside the system. Concrete necessity is the feature that defines the use of the term “modesty” without however renouncing a broader scale of ambitions. Players in the art world undertake collective projects to develop strategies and analyze existing conditions in many areas of society. They collaborate as individuals in search of a collective creativity and objective results.

The Still House Group is an emerging artist-run organization based in Brooklyn supporting a group of young artists. The aim

Esche C., 2005: 2

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of the group is to help promote and assist one another on a collaborative basis and to encourage the production and exhibition of new work. Since its inception in 2007, the collective has participated in several group or solo shows thus balancing the contributions of individuals and group. The Still House is a good example of one of today’s modes of collaboration. While the fact of belonging to the same geographic community - New York, where most of them met during school - represents the group’s physical ties, the modalities in which they interact suggest an affinity with today’s global art practice which is characterized by the emphasis on collaboration around specific projects. In point of fact, they do not recognize their local community as being a goal or even a characterizing feature of their organization; it is just the circumstance that has brought them together so they can help one another. Their ultimate goal is not to promote themselves under a label as a Brooklyn-based collective or as a group of American young artists, but rather to assist one another in very practical ways. For example, they share the rental costs and other expenses for their studios, they work together to organize exhibitions and presentations of their works and they share and reinforce their networks. They understand the difficulties of living in a highly competitive context and, instead of challenging or opposing the system, they respond by networking and joining their forces.

Within this globally connected community, artists are collaborating for the creation of new social values and for pedagogical dialogues. In 1998, Nicolas Bourriaud described the emergence of a “relational aesthetic”, a phrase that he coined in order to define and cluster the works and methodology of a broad community of contemporary artists. For Bourriaud, today’s art is still carrying on the fight to find ways to improve the human condition that began during the Enlightenment and developed during the course of Modernity and with the Avant-garde; unlike before, however, the present fight has surrendered

the utopian and idealistic elements it once professed. Today artists are not trying to change the world according to preconceived evolutionary ideas, they just want to “inhabit the world in a better way”. Artists’ perspective has changed ¹⁰ because society has changed and they now interact with the existing reality, from production to market and social exchanges.

Relational aesthetics is thus an “art taking as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space”, and its creators refer to a common global urban landscape with a shared lexicon. Bourriaud described today’s society as one of dense encounters and mobility, one in which artists produce works to be “lived through” as opposed to being subjected to the territorial and physical acquisitions of artworks of the previous aristocratic patron-based system. Art is able to ¹¹ produce areas of social exchange and dialogue spanning the opportunities of specific inter-human relations. Art brings people together in order to create a “collective elaboration of meanings”. In this state of encounter characterizing art, ¹² Bourriaud finds the expression of an emerging common trajectory of contemporary art practice.

Relational aesthetics and its social effects are, however, the subject of great dispute. As Papastergiadis notes, it is probably the combination of humanist ideals of sharing with the market logic of outsourcing that has provoked the greatest opposition as the mercantile spirit seems to be prevailing over artistic sensibility. Stewart Martin defined relational aesthetics as the ¹³

“aestheticization of novel forms of capitalist exploitation”, while

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Bharucha described it as “a pseudo-democratic neoliberal appropriation of the creative industry rhetoric of vitality and autonomous performance”. ¹⁴