Okwui Enwezor Modernity and Post Colonial Ambivalence
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Transcript of Okwui Enwezor Modernity and Post Colonial Ambivalence
ALTHRMODHRN
Altermodern was thefirst in aseries of fourone-day events. thePrologues, preceding theTate Triennial exhibition.With contributionsfrom prominent writers.art historians, artistsand philosophers. eachPrologue comprisedlectures. performances.films and discussionsattempting to introduceand provoke dehate aroundthe Triennial's themes.
The first Prologueopened the debate withthe proposition thatthe period defined bypostmodernism has cometo an end and what canbe called 'altermodernity'has taken its place. Artmade in the times we livein belongs to the globalera. and is conceived aridproduced~
~and nationalism. The art~yartists'cross-border. cross-culturalnegotiations; a new real andvirtual mobility; the surfingof different disciplines;the use offiction as anexpression of autonomy.
SATURDAY 28 APRIL 2008
TATH BRITAIN
14:00
MILLBANK HNTRANCH
NAVIN
RAWANCHAIKUL
Navins ofBollywood
14:00 and 15.15
AUDITORIUM
STEPHANE GOXE
andJORDI VIDAL
Servitude and Simulacra
16:00
GALLHRY62
TRIS VONNA-MICHELL
Auto Tracking:From Cellar to Garret
16:30
AUDITORIUM
OKWUI ENWEZOR
chairedbyJ.J. CHARLESWORTH
Specious Modernity:Speculations on the EndofPostcolonial Utopia
MODERNITY AND POSTCOLONIAL AMBIVALENCEOkwui ENWEZOR
FROM GRAND MODERNITYTO PETIT MODERNITY
THERE IS A DUAL NARRATIVE that is often taken to becharacteristic of modernity: the first is the idea of itsunique Europeanness, and the second is its translatabilityinto non-European cultures. This narrative argues for the mutability of modernity, thus permitting its export and enhancing its universal characterwhile putting a European epistemological stampon its subsequent reception. The travelling character of this dimension of modernity as export understands modernity as emerging from Europe, say fromthe mid-fifteenth century, and slowly spreading outward like a million points of light into the patchesof darkness that lie outside its foundational centre.Modernity in this guise was projected as an instrument ofprogress. The guiding concepts often associated with it - instrumental rationali , the develoJ>men of a' 'sm - emerge 10 the debate e eentheological and scientiJic [ca on, and provided thcfoundation for the period of European Renaissanceand Enlightenment, in which two structures of power and domination that marked the Middle Ages feudalism and theological absolutism - collapsed.Scientific rationality and individual property thatformed the basis of capital accumulation were triumphant. This colla e shift d the ~cales-of sovereignpower from the heolo' I toth~
The chief principles of secularism - individualliberty, political sovereignty, democratic forms of governance, capitalism, etc. - defined its universal character and furnished its master narrative. Thus emergedthe rightness of the European model, not only for itsdiverse societies, but also for other societies and civilisations across the rest of the world. Most importantly, the export ofEuropean modernity became notonly a justification for, but a principal part of globalimperialism. Among serious critics, the master narrative made the claims of universality susceptible toepistemological and historical distortion when deployed in the service of European imperialism. Thereis good reason for the criticism. Some historians onthe right, such as Niall Ferguson, have argued thatmodern European imperialism, specifically that of
the British Empire, was actually a good thing, not tobe regrl;ltted, as it bestowed a semblance ofmodernity on those privileged enough to have been recipientsof the E pire's civiHsing zeal.· So on the one handthere iso grand 10dernlty i its Europl;lan manifestation . reason an progr S • and on the otheris what could be called petit .odernlty, which repre cnts the export kinb rt of quotation, whichsome would go so far as to designate a mimic modernity through its various European references.
It is this relation between grand and petit modernitythat has contributed to the widespread search for facilities of modernity that represent what the IndianMarxist historian Dipesh Chakrabartywould call modernity's heterotemporal history.2 Chakrabarty argues that the various scenes of modernity observedfrom the point of view of a heterotemporal composition of history reveals the extent to which experiences of modernity are shot through with the particularities of each given locale, therefore deregulating anyidea of one dominant universalism of historical experience. Such experiences, he argues, are structuredwithin specific epistemological conditions that takeaccount of diverse modes of social identity and discourse. ;Ihroughout the twentieth century, all acrossthe world, diverse cultural contexts made adaptingor translating modernity into specific local variantsa pathway towards modernisation, by acquiring theaccoutrements of a modern society. Because of colonial experience this resulted in what could be referred to as grand modernity writ small in cultures- Chakrabarty's case study was India - perceived tobe in historical transition from colonialism to postcolonialism. In comparing different types of modernity, and in our attempts to describe their differentcharacteristics we are constantly confronted with thepersistent tension between grand modernity and petit modernity. How can this tension be resolved? Andhow can the fundamental historical experiences andthe particularities of locale that attend them be reconciled or even compared? It strikes me that all recent attempts to make sense of modernity and bendit toward the multiple situated petit modernities -
,again Chakrabarty would have called these 'provincialities' - are premised on finding a way to render thedivergent experiences and uses of modernity, namely
THE BAZAAR ORWORLD'S FAIR
OF MODERNISATION
I HAVE WITNESSED and marvelled at the breathtakingspeed and scale of the modernisation occurring in bothcountries. Of course, theeconomies ofthese two countries - along with their mod-ernisation, both in depth andin breadth - pale in compar
ison to Japan's, the immediate East Asian referencethat lies equidistant to its two newly modernisingneighbours. Both China and South Koreas financialstrengths derive from a massive export economy.China, of course, is known as the factory of the world,a designation made possible by the fact that its factories are disproportionately the production centres ofcheap global consumer goods that have transformedthe 'Made in China brand into a ubiquitous logo ofglobal commerce. South Koreas industrial power,on the other hand, is characterised by a focus on advanced technology and heavy industry. Each of thesetwo countries has buHt up its infrastructure through
spaces, museums and art fairs all are making theirway to Beijing and Shanghai.ln China alone, the restless imagination and ambition shaping the landscapeof contemporary art is breathtaking. Along with thisshift, especially among intellectuals and artists, a reverse phenomenon of migration is occurring, namely the relocation back to an Asian context from whichmany of them had emigrated years before. Yet it isnot only the infrastructures of the state and privatespeculation that are being revived, but the artisticand intellectual cultures of many cities are also being
remapped. New centres aredefinitely emerging, but rather than cultural and intellectual capital being concentrated in a limited numberof cities, it is being dispersedin many cities as the reversemigration of ideas continuesto explode and expand thecultural parameters of newChina and South Korea.
OKWUI ENWEZOR [BELOW] responding to NICOLAS
BOURRIAun's [TOP] definition of the new 'modern': 'altermodern',The session was chaired by London-based writer, curator and aristJ.J. CHARLESWORTH.
FORMS OF TRANSFORMATION:MODERNITY AS META-LANGUAGE
In fact, over the course of the last sixteen months,3 Ihave had occasion to travel repeatedly to South Koreaand China. On numerous trips, as part ofmy researchwork as a curator, this situation of urban transformation and social renewal was visible everywhere.Underscoring the experiences ofthese trips is an observation of the scale of growth of the contemporary art world: artists, galleries, collectors, exhibition
the necessity to historicise and ground them in traditions ofthought and practice.
To HISTORICISE MODERNITY is not only to ground itwithin the conditions of socia!, political and economic life, it is also to recognise it as a meta-Ianguagewith which cultural systems become codified andgain modern legitimation.The idea of modernity as ameta-Ianguage has been particularly acute for me over thepast year. To travel in Chinaand South Korea recently isto encounter this meta-Ianguage in action and in manyguises. All around cities likeSeoul, Busan, Shanghai,Beijing, Chengdu, Hangzhou,Guangzhou, Hong Kong andTaipei, etc., the clatler of machinery erecting impressiveinfrastructures sounded likethe drill ofthe Morse code typing out the meta-Ianguage ofmodernisation. These structures - from museums, operahouses and theatres to stadiums, sporting centres, highspeed train lines, airports,stock exchanges, shoppingmalls and luxury apartments- bring alive to our very eyesbrand new urban conditionsand cultural spheres that were not remotely imaginable a generation ago. The cities of East Asia havebecome the playground of global architects enjoyingthe patronage ofboth public and private developers.
IN HIS LECTURE AND SUBSEQUENT ESSAY, ENWEZOR drew on works
such as THOMAS HIR8CHORN'S Bataille Monument 2002 [TOP] and
[BELOW] GUY TILLIM'S Congo Series (this work showing supportersof]ean-Pierre Bemba on their way to a rally in Kinshasa, July 2006).
THE ALTERMODERNAND HABITATIONS OFCONTEMPORARY ART
IF THE CURRENT SPATE of modernisation in Chinaeffectively lays waste to heritage and historical glory and instead emphasises contingency, might it notbe reasonable to argue for the non-universal nature
pagoda. This hybridisation may appear absurd to usnow, until we remember that, not too long ago, postmodern architecture in the West was busily inventing these trumped-up styles of the classical and themodern based on a similarly invented autochthonousWestern past. Like latter-day biennales, Chinesecities are theatres of the grand statement, a lot ofwhich have no other purpose than to impress and inspire awe. This has been achieved by what some haveargued as indiscriminate modernisation and urbanisation schemes that have erased much of the cul
tural heritage of old China,sweeping out and destroyingmany old neighbourhoodsand putting in their place unremarkable architecture.4
Chinese bureaucrats, urbanplanners and developers, likelatter-day Baron Hausmanns,are simply unsympathetic to any idea that cities likeBeijing need to be histori-cised, that is to say museumified. Modernity is a continuous project. Its principalfeatures, they may reason,are at best contingent. By thisconjecture, I want to seek outwhat is currently at play inthe relations of discourse inwhich the particularities orprovincialities - I take this tomean the conditions and situations that generate them- of modernity are situatedthrough the practice, production, dissemination and re-ception of contemporary art,
far from any claims to a grand heritage or an arriviste,mimic petit translation.
Yet ancient cities like Beijing and Hangzhou - in acountry that possesses a very old civilisation and society - in contrast feel nothing like museums. Wherevestiges of the past exist, they tend to be peripheralrather than central to modern Chinese cities. Thesecities, if anything, could be likened to temporary exhibitions of city-making, a succession of dizzying obsolescence; a bazaar or world's fair of modernisation.The cities' skylines are full of glass boxes crownedwith the pitched green roofs of the classical Chinese
The ongoing, large-scale process of modernisation inChina and South Korea underscores part of the energy, excitement and senseof newness coursing throughthe various strata of eachcountry, making them contemporary emblems of anew modernity. Travelling inEurope, on the other hand,conveys no such sense of energy, excitement or newness. Europe, on the contrary, feeIs old and dour inits majestic petrification. Infact, many European citiesfeelless like part of our time.With their miles of imperious ceremonial architectureand in the quaintness of thenarrow, tourist-friendly, cobble-stoned streets, walkingthrough these cities feels likebeing in a museum of modernity. The museumificationof Europe is in fact the intention: the display of heritage, historical glory and deadpast. Preservationists of thisheritage and glory play therole of morticians of modernity.
the combination ofgrand and petit modernity, bringing together successful models from both East andWest. That is, they are both undergoing modernisation based on the acquisition of instruments and institutions ofWestern modernity - I mean this in a superficial sense - within a relatively short span oftime,yet without the wholesale discarding of local valuesthat modify the importations.
of modernity as such? This certainly would be truewhen applied to contemporary art. We are constantly entertained and exercised in equal measure by thenotion that there is no red line running from modernism to contemporary art. For the pedagogues of theexistence ofsuch lineage, the chiefemblem ofthis unbroken narrative can be found in the attention givento the procedures and ideas ofthe Western historicalavant-gardes by contemporary artists. On the otherhand, I take the view of this claim, pace Chakrabarty,as a provincial account of the complexity of contemporary art. To understand its variousvectors, we need then to provincialise modernism. There is no one lineage of modernism or, for that matter, of contemporary art. Looking foran equivalent of an Andy Warhol inMao's China is to be seriously blindto the fact that China of the Pop artera had neither a consumer society nor a capitalist strueture, twothings that were instrumentalised inWarhol's critique and usage of its images. In that sense, Pop art would beanathema to the revolutionary program - and, one might even claim,to the avant-garde imagination of such aperiod in China that coineides with the condition and situation that fosteredWarhol's analytical exeavation ofAmerican mass media and consumer culture. But the absence ofPop artin China in the 1960s is not the same as the absenceof'progressive' contemporary Chinese art during thatperiod, even if such contemporary art may have beensubdued by the aggressive destruction of the CulturalRevolution.
If we are to make sense of contemporary art duringthis period in China and the United States, then wehave to wield the heterotemporal tools of historywriting; in so doing, we will see how differently situated American and Chinese artists were at this time.Despite the importance of globalisation in mediatingthe recent accounts of contemporary art - a world inwhich artists like Huang Yong Ping, Zhang Huan, XuBing, Matthew Barney,Andreas GurskyandJeffKoons,for instance, are contemporaries - we can apply thesame mode of argument against any uniform or unifocal view of artistic praetice today. When HuangYong Ping, in the work A History ofChinese Painting
and a Concise History ofModern Painting washed ina Washing Machinefor Two Minutes 1987 (Walker ArtCentre, Minneapolis: below centre), washed two arthistorical texts - the first by Wang Bomin and the latter, one of the first books of Western art history published in China, Herbert Read's A Concise History ofModern Painting - in a washing machine, the resultis a mound ofpulped ideology, a history ofhybridisation rather than universalism.5 Ifwe apply the samelens, say, to the work of Yinka Shonibare, a Nigerianartist working in London, we will again see how he
has made the tension between histories, narratives, and the mythologies of modernity, identity and subjectivity important ingredients inhis continuous attempts to deconstruct the invention of an Africantradition by imperialism. The locusof Shonibare's theatrical and sometimes treacly installations is the fiction of thc Afriean fabric he employs.These fabries and their busy patternsand vivid colours are often taken tobe an authentie symbol of an Africanpast. But they are in fact, products ofcolonial economic transactions thatmoved from Indonesia to the factories of England and Netherlands, to
the markets ofWest, East and Central Africa, and ultimately to Brixton. These artists inhabit what couldbe called the provincialities of modernity and haveincisively traced diverse paths of modernity throughthem. By examining these clifferent locales of practice, as well as the historical experiences that informthem, we learn a lot more about the contingent conditions of modernity than about its universalism.Here again, Chakrabarty offers a useful framework inthis regard by dint ofwhat he refers to as 'habitationsof modernity:6
What could these habitations of modernity be? Onwhat maps do they appear? And in what forms andshapes? The search for the habitations of modernityseems to me the crux of the 'altermodern' , the subject of the 2009 Tate Triennial exhibition and the accompanying discursive projects organised by NicolasBourriaud, its curator. In his outline to the altermodern project, Bourriaud lays out an intellectual andcultural itinerary, a jagged map of simultaneity anddiseontinuity; overlapping narratives and contigu-
ot
a
TRIS VONNA·MICHELL uses the tradition of storytelling to makeenergetic performances that take the audience on amental and physical journey. His narratives, both fictional and non-fictionaL. explore theways history is passed on. Auto-Tracking: From Cellar to Garret wasa new performance piece, conducted in six aets (each lasting approx.7 mins). It reworked previous narratives exploring nations of personaland historical spaces and monuments. which arc embodied, fobricatedoe 80ught for. The spoken-word monologue interwove past and currentverbal scripts. performed between interludes of audio field-recordings.
ous sites of production that form the basis of contemporary art practice globally. The chief claim ofthealtermodern project is simple: to discover the current habitations of contemporary practice. Thus thealtermodern proposes the rejection of rigid structures put in place by a stubborn and implacable modernity and the modernist ideal of artistic autonomy. In the same way, it manifests a rebellion againstthe systematisation of artistic production based ona singular, universalised conception of artistic paradigms. If there is anything that marks the path of thealtermodern, it would be theprovincialities of contemporary art practice today - thatis, the degree to which thesepractices, however globalisedthey may appear, are also informed by specific epistemological models and aesthetic conditions. Within thisscheme, Bourriaud sets out toexmaine for us the unfoldingof the diverse fields of contemporary art practice thathave been unsettled by globallinks. But, more importantly,these practices are measuredagainst the totalising principIes ofgrand modernity.
At the core of the altermodern's jagged map is itsdescription of what its author refers to in his introductory paper as the 'offshore' location of contemporary art practice.7 However, I will foreground thelocation of these contemporary practices as indicative of a drive toward an off-centre principle, namely the multifocal, multilocal, heterotemporal and dispersed structures around which contemporary artis often organised and convened. This multiply 10cated off-centre - which might not be analogous toBourriaud's notion of offshore-based production is not the same as the logic of decentred locations.Rather, the off-centre is structured by the simultaneous existence of multiple centres. In this way, ratherthan being the decentring of the universal, or the relocation of the centre of contemporary art, as the notion of the offshore suggests, it becomes instead, theemergence of multiplicity, the breakdown of cultural or locational hierarchies, the absence of a singularlocus or a limited number of centres.
TOWARD THE EXCENTRIC:POSTCOLONIALITY, POSTMODERNITY
AND THE ALTERMODERN
Ta A LARGE EXTENT, the discursive feature of thealtermodern project seems to me areturn to earlierdebates that shaped postcolonial and postmodernist critiques of modernity and the aesthetic principIe of the universal. At the same time, they launchedan attack on modernism's focus on a unifocal ratherthan dialogic modernity. Embracing these critiques,
Bourriaud's project sets outto explore the excentric8 anddialogic nature of art today,including its scattered trajectories and multiple temporalities, by questioning and provincialising the idea of thecentre, by decentring its imaginary, as Chakrabarty posits in his provocative bookProvincializing Europe. 9 Yetthis excentric dimension ofmodern and contemporaryart is not necessarily a rejection of modernity and modernism; rather it articulatesthe shift to off-centre structures of production and dis-semination; the dispersal of
the universal, the refusal of the monolithic, a rebellion against monoculturalism. In this way, what thealtermodern proposes is a rephrasing of prior arguments. The objective is to propose a new terminology, one that could succinctly capture both the emergence of multiple cultural fields as they overspill intodiverse arenas of thinking and practice, and a reconceptualisation of the structures of legitimation thatfollow in their wake. In his text, Bourriaud makesconcrete what he sees as the field of the altermodern,describing his model as
an attempt to redefine modernity in theera of globalisation. Astate of mind morethan a 'movement', the altermodern goesagainst cultural standardisation and massification on one hand, against nationalisms and cultural relativism on the other,by positioning itselfwithin the world cultural gaps, putting translation, wander-
ing and culture-crossings at the centre ofart production. Offshore-based, it formsclusters and archipelagos of thoughtagainst the continental 'mainstream': thealtermodern artist produces links between signs far away from each other, explores the past and the present to createoriginal paths.
Envisioning time as a multiplicity ratherthan as a linear progress, the altermodern artist considers the past as a territory to explore, and navigates throughouthistory as weil as ail the planetary timezones. Altermodern is heterochronical.Formally speaking, altermodern art privileges processes and dynamic forms tounidimensional single objects, trajectories to static masses.1O
THE OFFSHORE, OFF-CENTREAND PROCEDURES OF RELATION
THE FORMULATION of the altermodern reflects precisely Eduoard Glissant's theory of the 'poetics of relation;ll an idea predicated on linkages and networksof relations rather than on a singular focal point ofpractice. Bourriaud's idea of the altermodern addresses the cultural geography of relations of discourse and practice. He rightly reads contemporaryart as that which always exceeds the borders of spatial confinement, beyond the limited geography ofthe nation and its totalised identity. The altermodernis structured around trajectories, connections, timezones: heterochronical pathways. Such relations suggest that the project is strongly in accord with a largecorpus of scholarship and literature that has madeconceiving an alternate system for evaluating modernity, one in which the off-centre contexts of contemporary art are a core inteilectual principle. Buthave not the practices of art always been predicatedon trajectories and detours, on dynamic forms andmodes of production and dissemination? Is the roleof contemporary art not always the constant refusal of orthodoxy; to display attentive vigilance againstclosure; to challenge ail doctrinaire, unitary discourses on which some ofthe most powerful theses ofclassical modernism rest?
While Bourriaud identifies the shift in recent art asthe desire to mobilise new localities of production,which he perceives today as proper to the field of artistic practice, a related field ofhistorical research (asI have noted several times) has been examining thedimension of the off-centre principle of art-historicaldiscourse for some time. The result of these researchprojects is slowly entering mainstream art-historicalproduction. In the last decade, several scholars haveexplored the structure ofthe heterochronical (think,for instance, of Chakrabarty's notion of the heterotemporal method of organising historical frames)conception ofmodern and contemporary art history.
One such project is arecent exhibition, Turns inTropics: Artist-Curator, developed for the 7th (}wangjuBiennale by the Manila-based Filipino art historianand curator Patrick Flores. In his exhibition project,he proposes an agenda of experimental and conceptualist practices from the late 1960s to early 1980s inSoutheast Asia by four artists working in contextsin which the spirit of modernity was not only transforming the splintered identity ofthe nation, but rapid modernisation was also recalibrating the canonsand languages of artistic practice."· Flores's emphasisoflocation represents a distinct cultural ecology, as itwere, a habitation ofmodernity. His research exploresnot only the shifts in the language of artistic modernity - between the traditional and the experimental,from academic painting to conceptualism - it also interrogates the effects and receptions of modernity bythese postcolonial artists in relation to their belonging to the nation.
In doing so, he directs attention to a text stencilled ona sculpture by the Malaysian artist Redza Piyadasa,which states that i\rtworks never exist in time, theyhave "entry points:"<3 In this text Piyadasa's sculpturedeclares the contingency of its Own history. In fact,it historicises its Own ambivalence towards canonical epistemology. What the stencilled text seems tobe questioning is the idea of art as a universal signthat is a frozen historical datum. Instead, artworksare dynamic forces that seek out relations of discourse, map new topologies, and create multiple relations and pathways. Piyadasa's statement anticipates and echoes Bourriaud's Own suggestion foraltermodernist art, both in its claim for the trajectories of art, but also in the shifting historical andtemporal dimension of the apprehension of such art.
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While none of the four artists whose works were examined in the exhibition have appeared in standard,so-called mainstream surveys and accounts of experimental art and conceptualism of the late 1960sto the present, new off-centre historical researchsuch as Flores's consistently drives us to the harbours of these archipelagos of modernity and contemporary art. The work of Ray Albano from thePhilippines, Jim Supangkat from Indonesia, Piyadasaand the younger Thai artist, curator and art historian Apinan Poshyananda, have clear structural affinities with the work of their contemporaries practicingin the West. Yet their work - made with an awarenessof, and in response to, specific historical conditions- shares similar objectives with the work of otherpostcolonial artists from different parts of the world,including those living and practicing in Europe.
These objectives would be familiar to emerging scholars such as Sunanda Sanyal, whose research focuseson modernism in Uganda;'4 Elizabeth Harney, whohas written extensively about negritude and modernism in Senegal;'5 or the magisterial writing on modern and contemporary Indian art by the eminentcritic Geeta Kapur.'6 Art historian Gao Minglu has engaged equally rigorously with contemporary Chineseart, and with the same objective!7 In a sirnilar veinof historical archaeology, the Princeton art historianChika Okeke-Agulu has studied and written persuasively on the generative character of young modernNigerian artists in the late 1950S during the periodof decolonisation.18 But by no means am I suggesting that many of the artists examined in these various research studies are obscure in their own artistic contexts. Their artistic trajectories belong exactlyin the heterotemporal frames of historical reflectionand the chronicles of their art are part of the heterochronical criticism and curating that has been partofthe discourse oftwentieth- and twenty-first-century modernity. However, viewed with the lens of a univocal modernist history, one that is predicated on theprimacy of centres of practice - what Bourriaud refers to as the 'continental "mainstream''' - can thesepractices be understood as forming more than an archipelago, and in fact exceed the altermodernist impulse? They certainly do expand the purely modernistnotion of artistic competence. These issues are at thecore of recent writings and research by the BritishGhanaian art historian and cultural critic KobenaMercer, who explores the diverse off-centre contexts
of late modernism and contemporary art in aseriesof anthologies focused on artistic practices and artists in Africa, Asia and Europe!9 Similar issues weremapped in the seminal 1989 exhibition, The OtherStory, a project curated by the Pakistan-born Britishartist and critic, Rasheed Araeen at the HaywardGallery, wherein he examined the contributions ofhitherto unrecognised non-western modernist artists to European modernism.20
These surveys and situations of off-centredness areemblematic of the large historical gaps which today,in the era of globalisation, need to be reconciled withdominant paradigms of artistic discourse. In seekingto historicise these contexts of production and practice, a dialogic system of evaluation is established. Itresolutely veers away from the standard and receivednotions of modernity, especially in the hierarchicalsegmentations that have been the prevailing point ofentry into its review of off-centre practices.
MODERNITY, POSTCOLONIALITYAND SOVEREIGN SUBJECTIVITY
WHATEVER THE ENTRY POINT for the altermodernartists, there remain some boundaries between thelocations of contemporary artistic practice and thehistorical production of modern subjectivity. Theseboundaries are tied up with the unfinished natureof the project of modernity. Consequently, I wantto examine in more detail some ideas of modernity that could be related to the way hierarchies operate in the recognition and historicisation of artistsand their locations of practice. The course I will follow could be likened to navigating the different levels and segments ofgrand and petit modernity, albeitwith degrees of separation designating stages of development, movements, breaks in culturallogics, ossification of epistemological models, and transitionsto which we ascribe the norms of the modern world.One logic of modernity to which the altermodern responds is globalisation, aseries of processes synonymous with the emergence of a worldwide system ofcapitalism. We could understand this modernity, inits teleological unfolding, as part ofthe current manifestation of globalisation as a force-field ofwinners,near winners and losers. (The losers being, obviousIy, those thoroughly subordinated and utterly disenfranchised by modernity's centuries-Iong progression
from the worlds of indenture, slavery, imperialismand colonialism, to the aggressive, retributive wars ofrecent memory.)
This field of retributive conduct has at its disposal theoverwhelming capacity to erase and deracinate subjectivities that inhabit the cultural localities of petitmodernity. This makes the large claims ascribed togrand modernity less an avatar of enlightened cultural and material transformation, and more a structurewith a dark core. It seems fairly impossible to thinkof modernity without linking it to concepts such assovereignty, equality and liberty as they have been developed across domains of life and social practices.Pace Michel Foucault's theory ofbiopower,21 a rangeofthinkers have focused on this dimension ofmodernity, aspace in which the master and slave dialectic iswrit large. This dialectic, developed by Hegel, dissociates sovereignty from the practice of self-governance,and instead embeds it in the interrogation ofthe relations between power and subordination.
However, subordination is directly linked to howpower exposes the subordinated to structures of violence, to acts ofhistorical erasure. In this area of analysis, Giorgio Agamben's extension ofbiopower and biopolitics was an attempt to sketch out the conditionsaround which what he calls naked life is summoned:astate ofliving in which individual sovereignty is exposed to its most basic, barest dimension, to execution.22 In terms of ideas surrounding modernity andcolonialism, this thinking has been singularly ilJuminating, and has been taken up by other thinkers.The feminist literary scholar ]udith Butler, for exampIe, in arecent reflection on the prosecution ofthe waron terror and the hopelessness of prisoners caughtin its principal non-place, Guantanamo Bay, addressed the issue of naked life in the essay 'PrecariousLife:23
Pushing further the frontier of this thinking is thepowerful writing of theorist Achille Mbembe, especially in an essay in which he summarises the dimensions ofbiopower, bare and precarious life as thezone of necropolitics. In the essay Mbembe exploredthe fundamental relationship between modernityand violence, particularly in the apparatuses of thecolonial regime, such that 'To exercise sovereignty isto exercise control over mortality and to define lifeas the deployment and manifestation ofpower:24 For
Mbembe, necropolitics is the condition under whichconducts related to sovereignty - as he amply demonstrates by citing the policy of apartheid in SouthAfrica or the predicament of the Palestinians in theoccupied territories - are inextricably bound up withexercises of control over existence, of individuallivesand their narratives. Most examinations of the artistic work coming out ofSouth Africa during the apartheid era confirms how artists were overwhelminglypreoccupied with the structures of violence and itsdirect manifestation as part of the condition of colonial modernity and thereby establishes art as oneexploration of the question of sovereignty. Here, resistance to violence and the rigorous assertion of sovereign subjectivity becomes in itself the subject andnarrative of art and cultural production.
Facing away from culture, Mbembe in his critique, forexample, sees political theory as tending to associatesovereignty with issues of autonomy, be it that of thestate or ofthe individual. He argues however, that
The romance of sovereignty, in this case,rests on the belief that the subject is themaster and the controlling author of hisor her own meaning. Sovereignty is therefore defined as a twofold process of seifinstitution and seif-limitation (fixing one'sown limits for oneself). The exercise ofsovereignty, in turn, consists in society's capacity for self-creation through recourse to institutions inspired by specificsocial and imaginary significations.25
To distinguish this relation of seif-institution and seiflimitation, the central concern he notes targets instead 'those figures of sovereignty whose centralproject is not the struggle for autonomy but the generalised instrumentalisation 0/ human existence andthe material destruction 0/ human bodies and populations:26 Two of Mbembe's historical examples areSouth Africa and Palestine. In the fate of these twospaces, he identifies the fundamental rationality ofmodernity, arguing, 'that modernity was at the originofmultiple concepts of sovereignty - and therefore ofthe biopoliticaI:27 Artworks such as those by WilliamKentridge, in films such as Ubu Teils the Truth 1997,
and Paul Stopforth, in his 1980 drawing series Death0/Steve Biko, to name only two instances from SouthAfrica; and by Emily]acir in her exhibition Where We
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Ei'RENCH PHILOSOPH ER JORDI VIDAL'S Servitude and Simulacra, codirected with STEPHANE GOXE was screened at tbe AltermodernPrologue. It is at once a filmic essay about contemporary thought, acurated exhibition commentated by its author. and a supplement tohis book of the same title. VIDAL has produced poLemlcal statementsagainst postmodernism and its reduction of modernism's promlse ofsociaL equality and justice.
Gerne From 2003, dealing with the emotions of separation, conf1nement, banislul1cnl and exile experienced by PaJestinians - alt form part of the artisticresponses to the concepts of overeignty and the biopolitical.
It strikes me that the idea of the altermodern, as itdeviates from the limits placed on life and subjeetiviLy by the instrumental violenee ofmodernity, Call1lOt
be captured by focusing alonc on shirts in IoeaJes oepractice or by strategics of resistanee against domination. 1hc altermodern is tobc fOtlud in thc work of art itself; the work ofarl as a manifestation ofpure diffcrcnce inall the social, cultural and political signs it wields to elaborate that difference. It is thespace in which to fulfil theradical gesture 01' refusal anddisobedience, not in the formal sense, but in the ethicaland epistemological sense.Such a stance - what I take tobe altermodern - with difference writ large as the fundamental quest 01' the object 01'art, can be identified in suchdiverse works as the installa-tions 01' Thomas Hirschhorn, the radiant paintings 01'Chris üfili, the splayed anatomies ofMarlene Dumas,the paintings on animal sacrifice as a metaphor forhuman suffering by Iba Ndiaye, the 2008 film Hungerby Steve McQueen and many more.
FOUR MODERNITIES
IN NAVIGATING the different segments 01' modernity, one could weIl imagine the different levels 01' itsdevelopment or in the hierarchicallayers 01' its construction, as the zones 01' differing concepts 01' lifeand death, subject and non-subject, as the sites01' the biopolitical, as the scenes 01' struggle 01' sovereignty, as domains 01' exception. Here I am employingthe segments metaphorically to situate the hierarchies 01' modernity, and in so doing to catch itsover-spill into domains 01' everyday practice, cruciallyart.
Considering this over-spill, and following the schema01' the hierarchies 01' modernity, especially as it bearson cultural and artistic practice, I want to conceptualise what I see as the four domains 01' modernity.The first three domains lays out the architecture forthinking the link between differing zones 01' life and,indirectly, cultural practice. The fourth and last issceptical 01' attributes ofmodernity as such. It is obvious that when the concept 01' modernity is broachedin recent scholarship, the defining characteristic isoverwhelmingly skewed toward the idea 01' one sin
gle modernity, that being theidea that modernity is essentially a project fundamentally connected to the development 01' Western capitalismand imperialism. FredricJameson's book, A SingularModernity,28 partly suggeststhis. In fact, he was brutallysceptical 01' recent attemptsto expand the definitions 01'modernity into such thingsas 'alternative modernity',l\frican modernity', 'subaltern modernity' or other suchdesignations. To him moder-nity is inextricably bound tocapitalism, and globalisation
is its current and main feature. But by perceiving allother modernities as flowing from this one single,grand narrative as the fount 01' historical development, what emerges is a narrower, unifocal, monocultural and less heterochronical perspective 01' modernity.
However, new debates have been historicising thediscourses 01' modernity in other to propose a moreheterogeneous, multifocal, polycentric, broader interpretation 01' categories 01' modernity. Many 01' therecent scholarship do insist that there has never beena single modernity but multiple modernities, as S.N.Eisenstadt has argued.29 The economist and philosopher Amartya Sen also applies a multifocal interpretation 01' modernity as he lays out and describesthe changing modalities 01' modernity based on abroad view ofthe human community and identity.30
Björn Wittrock develops a comparative analysis 01'early modernity, examining particularly the dimensions ofthe public sphere in the Indian subcontinent,
Europe, China andJapan.31 The FrenchAnnales historian, Fernand BraudeI, also argues for the diachroniedimension of modernity as a long process of slow evolution in which there are no linear, unidirectional flows of time. Rather than a singular causality, heplaces a strong emphasis on the study of microsystems and events - on trade and cultural exchanges among competing interests in the Mediterranean,for example - that provide a more complex, but overarching world picture.3" In the context of twentieth-century globalisation, Arjun Appadurai arguesfor a modernity seen and experienced predominantIy through a scalar analysis of mediated exchangestelegraphed by representations such as images,sound, technology and ideas.33 The philosopherKwame Appiah has recently examined modernitythrough the lens of cosmopolitanism,34 a view thatappears to be in accord with some ofthe objectives ofthe altermodern conception of contemporary art.
There are four categories that I identify as emblematie of the conditions of modernity today: supermodernity, andromodemity, speciousmodemityand aftermodernity. For the sake of our focus on visual modernity,my categories may simplify the point. But they willnonetheless serve as points of entry for the photographie images I will reference later.
A.SUPERA10DERNITY
THE FIRST CATEGORY postulates the essential formsof modernity through the general character andforms it has taken in European and western culture.This category ofmodernity emerges directly from thegrand narrative of modernity. lt is the zone of whatI call supermodernity, to borrow Mare Auge's term.Supermodernityrepresents the idea ofthe 'centre'. It isa domain ofpower, and is often understood as greatlyevolved, or highly 'advancea or 'developea.lt is generally acknowledged as fundamental to the development of the entire framework of global modernity,namely the world system ofcapitalism. Therefore, it isfoundational to all other subsequent claims and discourses of modernity. All of them follow in the wakeof supermodernity. The main coordinates of supermodemity, as developed through the Enlightenment, aremarked by notions such as Jreedom, progress, rationality and empiricism.lt is through these ideas that theconcepts of sovereignty and autonomy emerge.
To understand the nature of the next two categories of modernity requires paying close attention tothe four coordinates exemplified in supermodernity,because they are the framing devices that allow usto describe whether a cultural sphere is pre-modern,modern or anti-modern, insofar as it concerns theworld of modernity that we have inherited since theages of discovery and imperialism. Supermodernity isdeeply embedded in structures of power and has atits disposal superior and formidable infrastructuresof force to continuously maintain and advance itsagenda. More importantly, it tends to represent ourview ofmodernity in relation to cultural positions andpolitical contexts that may subscribe to the idea ofmodernity for whieh Bourriaud has gone searching for new possible artistic imaginaries that deviate from or may even blaspheme against its suppositions. For six centuries, supermodernity has beenstubbornly resilient and has remained the example towhich other modernities respond. This is the modernity that is well-captured in Mbembe's necropolitics,because of its capacity to standardise zones of livingand practiee.
B. ANDR0A10DERNITY
THIS BRINGS US to the next category of modernity,its second level. If supermodernity understands andclaims for itself the sole category of the developedand advanced, we can designate the next level, which- because of historieal circumstances - is imaginedas not to have evolved to the same tertiary degree, asdeveloping modernity.lt is not difficult to guess whiehsegments ofthe global order occupythis circle ofmodernity. Specifically, developing modernity today refers to broad swaths of Asia, especially China, India,South Korea, etc. In a true sense, this circle of modernity is caught in a cycle that I designate as andromodernity, meaning that it is a hybrid form of modernity, achieved through a kind of accelerated type ofdevelopment, while also devising alternative models of development. Andromodemity, as such, is alesser modernity since its principal emphasis is development or modernisation, as JÜTgen Habermaswould have it.35 Because it is still modernising, andromodernity has neither the global structure ofpower nor the infrastructure of economic, technologieal,political and epistemological force to promulgate itsown agenda independent of the systems (museums,markets, academies) of supermodemity. lt therefore
laiintompltctlcio
1t
t
J1
lacks, for the moment, the capacity for world dominance. Moreover, much of its development is seento be based principally on the affective elements ofmodernity, that is they are deeply embedded in theprocess of modernisation; in the way things appearto be modern (hence the obsession with acquiringtbe accoutrements of a modern society, even if socially, there are distinctive differences between various zones oflife.)
C. SPECIOUSMODERNITY
THIS BRINGS US to the next circle, which relates tothe state of Islamic modernity today, especially intbe present state of rebellion into which it is plunged.According to some detractors of the rise of politicalIslam and the extremist strains that have emergedout of tbe radicalisation of politics in Muslim societies, the problem of this rebellion is essentiallyone of modernity, the idea that these societies havenever been modernised. One reason given for thisstate of affairs within Islam is the lack of democraticparticipation, which encoutllges and, in fact, fomentsauthoritarian rule by either the clergy in theocratic Iran or the absolute monarchies in the Arabianpeninsula or dictatorships such as Saddam Hussein'sIraq and Bashar al-Assad's Syria. The absence ofdemocratic participation, the argument goes, makesit impossible to bring into existence modernisingforces that would bring about modernity. Wben it ispointed out that countries like Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Iran,Lebanon and Turkey, have each undergone periods ofradical secularisation throughout the twentieth century, such instances are often dismissed as superficial attempts at modernisation; therefore what theyleft in their wake is a kind of speciousmodernity. Onthe inverse, the long process of reform taking placewithin Muslim societies today is just as often labelIedas a nihilistie, anti-modern movement. Whether specious or not, anti-modern or not, it is neverthelessthe case that Muslim societies are radiealised, andwithin that radiealisation lies the seed of a biopolitical gesture that is a response to the programs ofcolonial modernity. Politieal Islam is thus not aconsequence of a speciousmodernity that neverassimilated into its structures an authentie modernity based on the four rationalities of supermodernity, but part of a postcolonial form of address seekingnew models and political cultures.
The rise of Islamic radiealism throughout the MiddleEast, and the incipient revolution that explodedwith the overthrow of the Shah Reza Pahlavi and thePeacock Throne in Iran, and with it, the sacking andoccupation of the American embassy in Teheran byuniversity students, unleashed a radical postcolonial force that is distinct from the forces of decolonisation in the 1950S and 1960s. The overthrow ofthe Shahnot only revived political Islam, it placed it at the centre of global discursive formations in which it has remained since tbe founding of Al-Qaeda in tbe 1990S.Thougb political Islam was already weIl financed botb ideologically and intellectually witb tbe formation oftbe Muslim Brotberhood by Hassan Al-Bana inEgypt in tbe 1920S, and its intellectual transformationby its chief ideologue Sayyid Qutb - the first demonstration of political Islam's will to globality was tbetheocratie organisation of its power in Iran in 1979.36
The Islamie revolution in Iran signalled tbe changedcontext of superpower politics or, pace Mbembe, necropolitics. It not only introduced a new actor on theideologicallandscape - an actor wbo decides on thelimits oflife and controls and mobilises the organisations of death - it also imagined a new politieal community separate from and permanently antagonistie to structures ofpower and infrastructures of forcespecific to supermodernity. As such, the early 1980sinaugurated a remarkable cultural and political shiftin global terms.
The signal event ofthis historical shift was the returnof Ayatollab Ruhollah Khomeini to Teheran from exile in Paris after the triumph ofthe resistance againstthe Shah. As the spiritual leader ofthe Islamic theocracy that has governed Iran to date, Khomeini presided over the radieal ideological repositioning of Iranaway from the epistemologieal and cultural dominance of the West to Islamic ethics, not only as a system of governance but as a worldview based on theKoran as the supreme tool of religious, political, cultural, social and economie conduct and identity.The revolution in Iran was not just an act of insurrection against supermodernity, attacking the dominant assumptions of imperialism that accompanyit; the revolution posited itself as an instrument ofspiritual and therefore social and cultural purification from the stain ofWestern, godless decadence. Inthe end the revolution, though political in the pedestrian sense, was in fact, about culture and identity: Islamic modernity as a counter-model and real
NAVIN RAWANCHAIKUL i8 a Thai artist who divides his time between Thailand and Japan, and whose famiLy roots are Indian andHindu-Punjabi. Far the Altermodern Prologue he showed Navins0/ Bollywood 2006, which borrows from Bollywood song and dancecinema. and i8 part of the artist's ongoing investigation into identitythrough bis gLobal search for ather 'Navins'.
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Mrica proper, as far as History goes back,has remained - for all purposes of connection with the rest of the world - shut
up; it is the Gold landcompressed within itseH - the land of childhood, which lyingbeyond the day of selfconscious history, isenveloped in the darkmantle of Night. Its isolated character originated, not merely inits tropical nature, butessentially in its geographical condition.38
If Mrica is no part of historical consciousness, therebylacking 'Spirit: how can it lay
claim to any experience of modernity if not from aneducation derived from the master narrative ofgrandmodernity? If the Muslim world is speciously modernand Mrica not yet modern, then the two societies exist in anti-rational systems of theocratic fundamentalism or tribai ethnocentrism. Each of these societies is reduced to cultural spheres whose experienceof modernity have been developed out of oppressionand violence and therefore in need of reconciling tomodernity. However, Islamic societies tend to farebetter than Mrican ones in debates around modernity. Mrica is a zone which many reflexively and categorically declare as the antithesis of the modern imagination, a place ofthe absence ofmodernity, whereevery aspect ofthe conditions ofliving specific to modernity has been effaced or erased. By this thinking,Mrica is the true epigone of modernity. If Bourriaudposits the entire structure ofhis project as altermodernist, Mrica, it may be said, at the very least is ajtermodern not only because the narratives of modernityin Mrica are predicated on an encounter of antagonism but also in the invention of a new Mrican char-
Latour's idea that the world has never been modern.37
Mrica shares part ofthe scorn about its non-modernity that is also directed at the Muslim world. ButIslamic societies do enjoy greater respect than Mrica,because, there is a classical Islamic past which Mricais said to lack. German philosopher G.VY.F. Hegelmade this explicit, when he wrote:
D. AFTERMODERN
SO FAR, WE HAVE ADDRESSED the three dominant ideas of current thinking about modernity. The fourthidea concerns an area of the world - Mrica - seen tobe the most opaque to the persuasions of supermodernity. Mrica is located in the nethermost part ofmodernity, relegated to an epistemology ofnon-existence that has never been modern, to literalise Bruno
alternative to supermodernity. This position of political Islam is in remarkable accord with the idea ofthealtermodern.
Thus, the test for the power of persuasion of supermodernity can be partly analysed through the sanguine postcoloniallessons of the Islamic revolutionand the various struggles - for better or worse - thathave been undertaken by social and political forcesradicalised by their resentment of the machinationsof the West in Muslim societies. Structuring this radicalisation, and all the splintered cultural ideas and ideologies that rise from it, isthe collision of two irreconcilable positions: on the onehand a Western ethnocentricexceptionalism that continues to prescribe a civilisingethos for the Muslim world,and on the other, an Islamicfundamentalism that mercilessly attacks the West andits allies with nihilistic violence. This meeting is a collision of political forces andculturallogics, an altermodernist relation marked by aface-off between colonial modernity and postcolonial modernity. However, the distance between colonial modernity and postcolonial modernity isone of degrees, for each incorporates and contradicts the other. Each is the mirror of the other. Theirstrained interpretation of the other is what hasproduced the kind of cultural antagonism that currently bedevils Western and postcolonial discursiveformations, further enervating the competing institutional structures, epistemology, ideals, faith andidentity.
odern.31
.modertId- ButAfriea,
hAfriea. Hegel
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aeter of modernity that emerges after the end of modernity. The modernity to whieh Mriea responds, andwhieh it struggles to disaggregate from its social eontext, is the arehiteeture of eolonial modernity. It is inthis sense that situations of modernity in Mriea areaftermodern, beeause, having no relation to historymaking, its modernity ean only emerge after the endof the modern. Such modernity, more than in other parts of world, would be based in large part on aprojeet of disinheriting the violenee of eolonial modernity.
This is partly what the reeent images produeed bySouth Afriean photographer Guy Tillim seem to suggest: thatparts ofMriea - Congo, Angola, Madagasear,Ghana and Mozambique - have undertaken ineondusive projects of modernisation. Tillim's photographs depict processes of anomie. Viewed througha eonventional lens, these images tend to eonveyand confirm the idea that modernisation has beenmarked by failure in Mriea. To a large extent, the images are produets of a eertain ethnography of modernity, in the same way that my pereeption ofEuropeancities evokes the speetral nature of a museum of petrified modernity.
Tillim has been photographing in Mriea for morethan a deeade now. His images ean be superficiallydeseribed as reportage, a mode ofphotographie production that ean either oversimpHfy eomplex situations or may illuminate aspeets of such situations asworthy of examination. Working with the verve ofa photojournalist and an aid worker, over the yearsTillim has earefully inserted hirnself and his eamerainto spaees that would normally be off-bounds formost photographers. He has made various Mrieancities the haunt of his photographie enterprise, forinstanee photographing over aperiod of six monthsin the tough tenements of Johannesburg, in modernist buildings that have entered astate of ruin asthe urban eontext of the post-apartheid city beeamereplaeed by a sense of siege. Likewise, TilHm hasroamed all over Mriea, to various regions of eonfliet,searehing or, as some would say, seavenging for images of societies in near-eollapse. On first eneounteringmany of Tillinis images, the tendeney is to view hisphotographs as the work of a zealous sensationalistor an ethnographer inseribing fantasies ofvisual frisson against,the backdrop of social eollapse.
The reeent series of work by Tillim, like his Jo'burgseries, initially gave me pause, but looking more earefully at the seleetion of seenes and the organisationof the larger eompendium, the logie of his approachrevealed a study of eontrasts between posteolonialstate failure in Mriea and the notion of a eontinentin the throes of entering aftermodernity. To my mindit is in the interseetion between these eontrasts, thepromise and failure of deeolonisation, and the slowproeess of a eounter-modernity that is about to takeroot in Afriea. Tillim summarises this vision of a yetto eome modernity, writing about his images:
These photographs are not eollapsed histories of post-eolonial Afriean states or ameditation on aspeets of late modernisteraeolonial struetures, but a walkthroughavenues of dreams. Patriee Lumumba'sdream, his nationaHsm, is diseernible inthe struetures, if one reads the signs, asis the death ofhis dream, in these de faeto monuments. How strange that modernism, whieh esehewed monument andpast for nature and future, should earrysuch memory so well.39
Throughout different parts of Mriea new discourses and patterns of modernisation are not onlyrethinking the entire agenda whieh eolonial modernity bequeathed the eontinent, but social scientistsand researehers have also been articulating possible theories for a type ofmodernity and a strueture ofmodernisation that ean take hold in Afriea. This mo·dernity, it is hoped, is one that will emerge at the endof the projeet of sapermodernity. It will perhaps marknot only an ideal of the altermodern, but will initiatea new eyde ofthe aftermodern.
Tillim sueeinetly artieulates that spirit of the yet-toeome: 'In the frailty of this strange and beautiful hybrid landscape struggling to eontain the ealamities ofthe past fifty years, there is an indisputably Mrieanidentity. This is my embraee of it:40 His photographieprojeet is an expression ofthe hope that showing thedeeaying legaey of eolonial modernity in Mriea is notan attempt to mourn the loss of some great past, buta possible tabala rasa for a future eomposition. It disarms and dispossesses the eolonial inheritanee, andshows, as Jürgen Habermas argues, that modernity isan ineomplete projeet.41
NOTES
1. NJALL FERGUSON, Empire: Ihe Rise undDemise 0/ the British World Order and (he Lessonsfor Global Power. New York 2004. In a subsequent,vork. NIALL FEROUSON, Colossus: The Price 0/American Empire. New York 20004. Ferguson actually argues for an expanded American adaptationof the British model.
2.. DIPESH CHAKRABARTY, ProvincializingEurope: Posl-colonial 1hought and HistoriealDifference. 2nd ed.• Princeton 2007, p.x:vii.
3. These trips. totalling around l5 visits - 4 toChina and 11 to South Korea - took place betweenJune 2007 and early November 2008. They weremade while I worked in Gwangju, South Korea.as artistic directoc of Gwangju Biemrale. an eventfounded in 1995. in thewake ofSouth Korea's transition to democracy in the 1990S. Tbe biennaleform, an exhibition model that eombines massive seaIe with unabashed theatricality, is itselfa product of a certain idea of cuJtural modernitythat has made its way from the late nineteenthcentury in Eu rope to the explosion it presentLy enjoys alJ over the world, and more so in Asia in thetwenty-first century.
4. NICOLAI OUROUSSOPF, 'Lost in the NewBeijing: The Old Neighborhood', New York Times,27 July 2008; and 'In the Changing Face ofBeijing,a Look at the New China', New York Times. 13 July2008, In a cOIuparative analysis oE China andPersian Gulf eities like Dubai, Ouroussoff explored how the idea of moderllisation on a massive scale has shifted visionary architecture that.in the past. was largely vlewed sceptically by architects and was, for the most part, peripheralto new theories of urbanism. With the advent ofthese changes in China and in Dubai, Abu Dhabi,Bahrain and Doha, etc., the new frontier of urbanexperirnentation has moved to the East and declined in the West. See Ouroussoff, 'The New, NewCity', New York Times, 8June 2008.
5. In a commentary about the intention of thework. HUANG YONG PING says, 'In China, regarding the two cultures of East and West. traditional and modern, it is constantly being discussed as to whieh is right, which is wrong, andhow to blend the two. In my opinion, placing thesetwo texts in the washing machine for two minutes symbolises this situation and weil solves theproblem much more effectively and appropriatelythan debates lasting a hundrcd years: Quoted inGAO MINGLU, The Wall: Reshaping ContemporaryChinese Art, exh. cat., Albright Knox Art GaIIery,BuffaJo and Millennium Museum, Beijing 2005,p.129
6. DIPESH CHAKRABARTY, Habitations oJModernity: Essays in the Wake ofSubaltern Studies,Chicago 2002.
7. NICOLAS BOURRIAUD, published statementfrom a brochure outline for the 'Altermodern' program, Tate BritalD, London April 2008.
8. In 2001, the fi rst African Pavillon in the VeuiceBiennale in tbe exhibition Authentic/Exeentric.curated by Salah Hassan and Dlu Oguibe, arguedfor this sense or a dispersed zone of practice. Fora productive curatorial and critical explorationof the idea of tbe excentric nature of contemporary, see tbe accornpanying catalogue, SALAH
HAB SAN AND OLU OGUIBB (eds.), Authentie/beentrie: Coneeptualism in Conlemporary A/rieanArt, Ithaca 2001.
9. CHAKRABARTY2007, P.4.
1.0. BOURRIAUD :1008.
J.J.. EDOUAßD OLIBSANT, Poeties 0/ Relation.trans. BetseyWing, Ann Arbor 1996.
12. 'Ihe four artists in the exhibition: Ray Albano(Philippines), Redza Piyadasa (Malaysia), JirnSupangkat (Indonesia) and Apinan Poshanyanda(Thailand). All played multiple roles as influentialartists, curators. critics and historians in each oftheir individual national contexts in the development orthe discourses of modernity and contemporaryart.
13. PATRICK D. FLORES. 'Turns in Tropics:Artist Cucator' in Okwui Enwezor (ed.), AnnualReport: A Year in ExhibiUorls. Gwangju2008, P.263.
1.4. SUNANDA K. SANYAL. 'TransgressingBorders. Shaping an Art Hi8tory: Rose Kirumiraand Makerere's Legacy' in Tobias Döring (ed.),AJrieun Cultures. Visuat Arts and the Museum:Sights/Sites o/Creativity and Conflict, Matatu, 25-6,Amsterdarn and New York 2002, PP.133-59.
1.5. ELIZABETH HARNEY, In Scnghor's Shadow:Art, Politics, and the Avant-Garde in Senegal,1960-1995 Durham 2004.
16. GEETA KAPUR, When Was Modernism:Essays Oll Contemporary ClIlturul Practiee in lndia,New Delhi 2000.
J..7. MINGLU 2005: and OAO MJNOLU, 1heEcology 01 Post·Cultural Revolution Frontier Art:Apartment Art in China, J970-J990S, Beijing 2008.
18. CHIKA OKEKE-AGULU, 'The Art Society audthe Maki ng orPostco}onial Modernism in Nigeria'.unpublished lecture, Princeton University, 2008,See also the remarkabJe study of the relationshipbetween negritude. postcoloniaLism and modernism in Harney 2004 and Gao Minglu 2005. Thesestudies are among a growing list of scholarshipdirected at excavaling the multi face ted historiesofmodern aud contemporary art across divergenthistorieal and cuJturaJ geograpbies. The studiesiIIuminate the basic fact that buried within official Western mainstream art history are cornplextendencies, narratives and structures ofpracticethat do not easily conform to the teleological construction ofmodern and contemporary art. Thesehistories, at the same time, reveal the diverse temporaJitles of modern art by showing that there isno single genealogy orartistic modernity or senseof innovation. Yet whatever lacunae these hi8tories inbabit, they do reveal modernity as aseriesoftrajectories moving in multiple directions, andthey are equally in fOl'med by culturaL ideologieal,formal and aesthetic logics.
19. KOBENA MERCER (ed,), CosmopolitanModernisms (2005); DiscrepantAbstraclion (2006);Pop Art und Vernacular Caltures (2007); aud Exiles.Diasporas and Strallgers (2008): Annotating Art'sHistories, London and Cambridge 2005-8.
20. See RASHEEN ARAEEN, 1he Other Story:Afro-Asian Artisls in Posl·War ßritain, exh. cat.,Hayward Gallery. London 1989. This landmark exhibition and its accompanying catalogue was oneof the earliest attempts to employ postcolonialand postmodern criLiques to examine the ins titutional excJusions of the practices of artists whowere not deemed to properly belong within themainstream canon ofhistorical legitimation.
21. MICHEL FOUCAULT. 'Right of Death andPower Over Life', in Jhe Hislory 01 Sexuality: AnITltrodliction, trans. Rohert Hurley, I. New York
1990, PP.135-59.
22. GIORGJOAGAMBEN,HomerSaeer:SovereignPower and Bare Life. trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen,Stanford 199B.
23. JU DITH BUTLER. Precarious Life: The Powers0/ Mourning and Violenee, London and New York2004·
24. ACHILLE MBEMBE, 'Necropolitics', trans.Libby Meinljes, Public Culture, vol.15, nO.1. Winter2003p.12,
25. Ibid., P.13.
26. Ibid., p.14.
27. lbid.. p.l).
28. FREDRJC JAMESON, A Singular Modernity:Essay on the Ontology of the Present. London andNewYork 2002.
29. SHMUEL N. EISENSTADT, 'MultipleModernities', in Daedalus, vol.129, nO.1, Winter2000, pp.1-29,
30. AMARTVA SEN, ldenlity and Viotence: ThelltUSiOHS ofDestiny, New York 2006.
31. BJÖRN W1T'rROCK, 'Early Modernities:Varieties aod Transitions', in Daedatll8, VOl.127,nO.3, Summer 1998, PP.19-40.
32. FERNAND BRAUDEL, 1he Mediterraneallund the Mediterranean World in the Age oJPhilJip11. trans. Sian Reynolds, Berkeley 1995: for a moreoverarching study of the historieal developmentin relation to modernity, see FERNAND BRAU
DEL, A History of Civilizations, trans. RicbardMayne, London and NewYork 1993.
33. ARJUN APPADURAl,ModernityAILarge: 1heCullural Dimension 0/ Globalization, Minneapolis1996.
34. KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World oJStrangers. New York2007.
35. See JÖRGEN HABERMAS, The PhilosophieaLDiscourse 01 Modernity: Twelve Essays, trans.Frederick Lawrence, Cambridge, Mass. Ig87.
36. The Iranian revolution marked a shift fromthe modern poJitks of Gamel Abdel Nasser's panArabism.
37. See BRUNO LATOUR, We Have Never BeenModern, trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge 1993.
38. G.W.F. HEGEL, 11le Philosophy 0/ Hislory.trans. J. Sibree, New York 1956, P.9t.
39. This is an excerpt from an email statement sent to tbe author by GUY TILLIM on 25September 2008.
40.1bid.
41. HABERMAB 19B7.