Obama, Crisis, Two Realities and Change
A letter from Hou Hanru to Hans Ulrich Obrist
By crisis in a historical system I shall mean not conjunctural difficulties within a system but a structural strain so great that the only possible outcome is the disappearance of the system as such, either by a process of gradual disintegration (leading in unpredictable directions) or by a process of relatively controlled transformation (aiming in a predicted direction and therefore its replacement by one or several other systems). In this sense, a crisis is by definition a ‘transition’, and ‘transitions’ in large-scale systems tend to be (probably necessarily) medium-long in length, taking often 100?150 years. We are now living in such a transition ? one from a capitalist world-economy to something else. This something else is probably a socialist world order, but by the nature of crisis, it is impossible to do more than suggest probabilities of direction.
? Immanuel Wallerstein*
Dear HUO,
For sure, the most exciting news since we last wrote is Barack Obama’s election as the next US president. Not only are those living in America elated; millions of people all around the world are also showing their enthusiasm and hopefulness, many even more fervently than the Americans. Yes, Obama shows us hope, hope for change that we all need so much in the contradictory and uncertain time of globalization, or globalization of liberal capitalism, that has profoundly changed social, economic, political and cultural structures almost everywhere in the world, often causing serious social polarization, division and conflicts in spite of ‘progress’ prompted by all forms of speculation and uncontrolled economic ventures.
Ironically, this hope for change arrives in parallel with the onset of the gravest economic crisis since 1929. In a way, the choice of Obama reflects the desperate cry for rescue by the American people from a crisis far more profound than mere economic difficulties. One should understand the crisis not only as a chronic and inherent phenomenon of capitalism itself that can be resolved within the existing framework of economic adjustments, but more importantly as a fundamental and structural impasse of the current capitalism that has dominated the global economic and social system for decades. It is directly and indirectly related to other social and environmental crises as an accelerating agent and, in many cases, a catalyst.
It’s time for fundamental change. How to imagine and implement viable proposals for effecting this change is now the very challenge for the new political milieu, incarnated by the soon-to-be inaugurated Obama administration. After the excitement, new uncertainty and anxiety along with hope and imagination lie before us.
The art world faces the same destiny
After the euphoric booms of the increasingly globalized market and museum systems, from which we recently heard the swan song of Damian Hirst’s astounding auction record (a trope perhaps equally applicable to the likes of Jeff Koons’ exhibition at the Palais de Versailles, or Chanel’s ‘Mobile Art Museum’, or the spectacle of the Beijing Olympics opening with fireworks by a global art star), we are now seeing a free fall of almost all those gains of the past several years. Are we back to the departure point? Or is it time to look for new roads?
Over the past decade, the global contemporary art scene, like the global economy itself, has expanded and developed at unprecedented speed and scale to reach practically every corner of the world and become a spectacular and effective agent of economic and social ‘progress’. It managed to achieve the very goal of capitalism: to fully merge creativity and capital, imagination and production, culture and consumption. This apparent success, however, like that of the financial sector, has been based on the highly risky and speculative assumption that the exchange value will ultimately replace the cultural value (use-value) and turn the whole ‘traditional’ value system upside-down. It’s true that there has been a fantastic opening of the dominant, Western-centric system towards other parts of the world: China, India and the Middle East are now the hot spots of global speculation and investment. However, this has not necessarily proven to be a real cultural opening and restructuring of the system based on veritable equality, both in terms of cultural understanding and value exchange. Instead, in most cases, it’s been simply a shift of focus, a new tendency to swallow and integrate ‘the other’ into the established hegemonic system of production and consumption. Few have managed or even attempted to understand the real significance of the rise of creativity and productivity in the ‘non-Western’ world: its impact on how modernity is being reconsidered and reinvented in a pluralistic world. There is hope that, instead of utilizing the ’emerging’ scenes as a new asset to consolidate with the current system, ‘alternative’ systems of creation, production, evaluation and circulation can be invented to generate new visions and strategies of cultural diversity on a global scale.
A closer look at the phenomenal global enthusiasm for Obama’s election and anxiety over the economic crisis initiated in America reveals, indeed, the contradictory and ironic fact that most parts of the world still regard the USA as the magnetic center of global politics and economic superpower. Thus potential change in America, good or bad, still has a direct impact on almost every other part of the planet, affecting the everyday lives of everyone, like falling dominos. We still live in a world with a single center of gravity!
Dual Realities
The reality of the ‘global’ art scene is similar. The programs of some major American museums and the index of the New York auction market (occasionally joined by London or Paris) remain the main references for many in terms of evaluating the ‘progress’ of global art, despite those programs being generally conservative, provincial and detached from the real evolution of artistic and cultural visions, actions and values in the rest of the world – especially those outside the West – and market systems that are increasingly distinct from the dominant one. Meanwhile, the mainstream media follow the same logic, celebrating and promoting the expansion of the dominant system, while various channels of information, communication and discussion, often in the form of low-cost publications or, especially, the internet, are forming a new system of circulation of much more original information and ideas about ‘alternative’ art scenes.
We can now see that there exist two realities in the world, or two views of the world, both in the broader social macrocosm and the micro-domain of art: one being the mainstream, established or official, which continues to hold on to the Weltanschauung of the past that still dominates our perception of things; and the other being the global multitude – that intense, progressive, open assemblage of difference and diversity – which has surpassed such conservative perceptions through acts of critique, experiment and innovation from different positions to negotiate the relationship between the global and local. There is a reality to be changed, and another reality in which change is already underway. One reality is in crisis, and this forces us to shift our perceptive horizon towards the other. Crisis always implies new opportunities. And this time, it points to a departure from the old reality’s paradigms and values and to the embracing of new systems generated by the ongoing changes in the other reality.
My dear HUO, in our previous conversations, change, alternative visions and actions, as well as different curatorial strategies to achieve real restructuring of the systems of the contemporary art scene so it can become truly global ? not only in its operative mechanism but also in its values and its cultural and ideological roots ? have always been key issues. In fact, searching for experimental and even radical alternatives in terms of curatorial models, strategies and, ultimately, the understanding and definition of artistic activities, has been the very endeavour we’ve shared, together with many artists, curators and other colleagues, over the past few decades. However, for some time, we’ve noticed there has been no ‘outside’ possible in the current global economic, political and cultural system. But with the crisis of the ‘inside’, can we start looking into the possibility of imagining new ‘outsides’, new ideals that don’t fall under the old paradigm of utopia, but a truly effective ‘alternative’ world that will eventually become a new world with more relevant conditions for imagination, renovation, justice and ultimately, democracy – with opportunities open to everyone in the global world?
Yes, we can!
There are many ways to bring about the change. Fundamentally we need profound ideological, cultural and political mutations so we can really depart from the hegemonic system of the old reality. Here, Immanuel Wallerstein’s critical insight into the ‘modern world-system’ founded upon the historic formation of European capitalism and its expansion, along with its social and cultural systems, in the name of universalism is particularly inspiring. And we should actively respond to his subversive call to ‘unthink social science’ in order to go beyond the ‘the limits of nineteenth-century paradigms’ – ideological constructs such as Orientalism, human rights and liberal capitalism that have become the ‘universally’ taken-for-granted norms and the sources of Western-centric power, of which our dear concept of ‘art’ is an inherent part. Wallerstein’s claims, inspired by Ilya Prigogine’s work on ‘dissipative structure’, which seeks to challenge and destroy the rationalist, Newtonian, or ‘universalist’ mindset that has formed the establishment worldview for over three centuries in favour of an entirely new vision of the universe based on ever-changing, multiple spatiotemporal systems of self-organization, fluctuation and permanent chaos, are at the forefront of contemporary anti/alter-globalization movements that have their intellectual, cultural and political roots in concepts of multitude, cultural hybridity and social transformation.
It’s time to challenge the concept of art again. To a great extent, we’ve been part of this global movement with our work on developing new modes of artistic production and curatorial practice that seeks to produce a totally new, dynamically complex system based on trans-disciplinary, collaborative and self-organizational modes of imagination and action that ultimately reopen the possibility of merging life and art in order to generate a new category of creative activity, such as we’ve strived to manifest in our common projects since Cities On The Move (1997-2000), in our ongoing conversations and our individual projects. With the historic but contradictory conjunction of economic crisis and Obama’s election, and in the art world with the falling of the dominant system of production, representation and consumption and the rapid emergence and empowerment of the alternative forces, notably in the non-Western art scenes, we have more reason than ever to believe a quantum jump is possible and even inevitable.
Let’s not only hope, but also act, and act together!
A hurricane is passing by. And this time, it’s not only taking down the old world, but also bringing us towards a new reality.
Ever yours,
HHR
*Immanuel Wallerstein, Unthinking Social Science: The Limits of Nineteenth Century Paradigms, 2nd edition (Philadelphia: Temple University, 2001) p. 23
Next
https://www.art-it.asia/en/u/admin_columns_e/KCJEbj0rUPS32XeQhBom/
Previous
https://www.art-it.asia/en/u/admin_columns_e/4VCIUPAsGijKlSuHBhWv/
Index
https://www.art-it.asia/en/u/admin_columns_e/9zBAU4WxiwpIvnY65VuF
Originally printed in ART iT No.22 Winter/Spring 2009