Art Matters: Illuminating Contemporary ArtShepparton Art Museum2015

LECTURE 2: ART IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT

Globalisation

Yin Xiuzhen, Portable City – Berlin, 2002

• Globalisation is not new

• It is an economic, social, political and cultural process

• Since 1990s, associated with developments in communications technology, shift from industrial to information society, and fall of Communism

• Debated: what globalisation means for the world

• Uneven: clashes of culture, but also allowing for new relations of power

Yinka Shonibare Mr and Mrs Andrews 1998

“I do not necessarily like the term hybrid because it suggests the notion of some outside purity”

Yinka Shonibare, ‘Fabric and the irony of authenticity’, 1996, p. 38

Thomas Gainsborough, Mr and Mrs Andrews, c1750

Yinka Shonibare Mr and Mrs Andrews 1998

Huang Yong Ping, Frolic, 2008Installation view, The Curve Barbican, London

Martha Rosler from "In the Place of the Public: Airport Series”, 1983-84

Marc Augé, Non-Places: an introduction to Supermodernity, 1995

Rirkrit Tiravanija, untitled 1992/1995 (free/still)Installation view MoMA

Doreen Massey, “A Global Sense of Place” from Space, Place and Gender, 1994

Laurie AndersonNew York Times, Horizontal/China Times, Vertical1971

“It sometimes seems as if all the world is on the move. The early retired, international students, terrorists, members of diasporas, holidaymakers, business people, slaves, sports stars, asylum seekers, refugees, backpackers, commuters, young mobile professionals, prostitutes – these and many others – seem to find the contemporary world is their oyster or at least their destiny. Criss-crossing the globe are the routeways of these many groups intermittently encountering one another in transportation and communication hubs, searching out in real and electronic databases the next coach, message, plane, back of lorry, text, bus, lift, ferry, train, car, website, wifi hotspot and so on.”

John Urry, Mobilities, 2007, pp. 2-3

MOBILITIES

Pablo Picasso Les Demoiselle d’Avignon 1907

POSTCOLONIALISM

Mbuya mask, Pende, Zaire

Primitivism in Twentieth Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and Modern

Museum of Modern Art

Curator: William S. Rubin

1984

Local Context

ProppaNow

War memorials and humour

Gerard Krefft, Corroboree on the Murray River, 1858

Local Context:The History Wars

Robert MannKeith Windschuttle

Brook Andrew, Jumping Castle War Memorial, 2010

Can you jump?

Bindi Cole, Wathaurung Mob, 2008from the series Not Really Aboriginal

Okwui Enwezor, global independent curatorCurator of the 2015 Venice Biennale

Curator, Brown University, date unknown

“This is what differentiates the curator from the artist, as the artist has the privilege to exhibit

objects which have not already been elevated to the status of art.”

Boris Groys, Art Power, 2008, p.43

From the maquette for Melbourne Now at NGV, 2013-14

“exhibitions have become the medium through which most art

becomes known”

Greenberg, Ferguson and Nairne (eds),Thinking about Exhibitions, 1996

Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form,installation view, Kunstalle Bern, 1969

Michael Heizer, Bern Depression, 1969

Haus Rucker’s work Oasis No. 7 in Harald Szeeman’s Documenta 5

John Baldessari, Ocean and Sky (with Two Palm Trees), 200953rd Venice Biennale, 2009

International biennial map 2014 from biennialfoundation.org

Ai Weiwei, Fairytale: 1,001 Chinese visitors, Documenta12, 2007

Societe Realiste installation at the 11th Istanbul Biennial, 2009

Artwork for the 2014 Marrakech Biennale

THE LOCAL AND THE GLOBAL

Some Key Ideas from this lecture: Globalisation

• Globalisation is not a new phenomenon, but there was a shift in the 1990s in technologies that changed the way the world works

• The exchanges that have happened over time due to globalisation have led to hybrid cultures

• There have been different responses to globalisation, with some critics identifying it with alienation, others with diversity

• Regardless of your position, there has not been a neat mixing of cultures through globalisation – difference and sameness are both still present

• We can use postcolonial critique to reconsider some of these histories and cultural conditions

Some Key Ideas from this lecture: Context

• Curatorial practice has shifted with contemporary practice• Curators traditionally create context while artists create content• These lines have been blurred with contemporary practice• Artists, however, are the only ones given the transformative

power to turn objects into art• Biennales and blockbuster exhibitions have become the

globalised forms of exhibition making and some of the most common ways that large audiences see art

• Biennales have been accused of flattening culture and ignoring local and cultural differences

• In response there has been a movement around the “glocal”, which is a theory that we need to both look at both universalising and particularising tendencies together

Contact Details

Course Lecturer

Drew PettiferRMIT University and SAM FoundationEmail: drew.pettifer@rmit.edu.auWeb: www.slideshare.net/DrewPettifer