globalization - The Global Contemporary

Art in America, July 1989, The Global Issue. The issue included statements of 14 artists about the 'advent of a new global

post-modern visual culture'. Magazine cover scan.

When reviewing the events of the year 1989, a great number of images spring to mind: perhaps it is the day when Günter Schabowski accidentally declared the Berlin Wall open, or the uprising in South Africa prior to the reforms that led to the collapse of the apartheid regime. One could not but think of the end of the Cold War, and there may even be a few who recall Nintendo’s release of the first GAME BOY. But who has ever considered the year 1989 as a turning point for the arts? {readmorelink}Continue reading ...{/readmorelink}

Let us take a brief look back to the year 1989: in February, just a few months prior to the military crackdown on the pro-democracy Tiananmen Square protesters, Chinese artist Xiao Lu, fired a gunshot at her installation entitled Dialogue on show at the exhibition China/Avant-Garde in Beijing. Xiao Lu thus gave voice to a form of contemporary art that was not rooted in western Modernism. Moreover, in May of the same year, the Centre Pompidou in Paris opened the exhibition Magiciens de la Terre. For the first time works by artists from countries such as Haiti, India, Madagascar, Australia and South Africa were displayed alongside their counterparts from the main art centers. The exhibition included a series of works that, previously, would have been labeled ‘World Art’ and confined to ethnographic museums. Although the exhibition was controversial, it was the first attempt by a major art institution in the West to open the eye and the mind to a truly global art. Finally, in November the exhibition The Other Story opened in London, pointing to the contribution of Afro-Indian artists to British modern art, despite being forgotten by official historiography. The exhibition was curated by Pakistani artist Rasheed Areen, whose Third Text Journal had already begun rewriting art history from a ‘Third World’ perspective, in 1987.

This series of events pointed to the development of a new global geography of art which was to lay the foundation for the contemporaray multi-voiced and multi-centered art world. But was it really that easy – or might this be only half the story? Find out more at the Room of Histories at the exhibition The Global Contemporary. Art Worlds After 1989.

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When did we start to refer to art as being 'contemporary'? After modern art ceased being contemporary? And at what point does contemporary become historic? During the 20th century, the understanding of art was based on a conception of art history that made it possible to refer to art in terms of a clear timeline of styles. In this sense, each work of art could be related to a certain point in history, either by way of a response or else in contrast to what had already become established in art. However, now, one may observe, this idea is no longer relevant for contemporary art. Were we to cast back in time in order to address something as apparently paradoxical as the 'history of the contemporary', we would then find ourselves in the 1980s, the era in which globalization first became a buzzword. {readmorelink}Continue reading ...{/readmorelink}

Concomitant to the global changes unfolding in 1989, the art world faced an increase in the appearance of current art production from outside the European-American hemisphere. This shift to a global perspective confronted the western art world with a diversity of simultaneous art worlds that resisted being subsumed under its own tradition and history. The western concept of art thus became susceptible to fundamental reevaluation: ought one to now rather refer to modernity in the plural, in short, could it be that there is more than one avant-garde? Art became contemporary no sooner than its history was put in question by a diversity of conflicting histories, in other words, when its universal styles and forms were rendered 'local' by the image worlds of the 'Other'. But does the term contemporaneity then imply that we have come to an ideal state, to an ,end of history‘? Is there nothing more to strive for? And if there is 'a' history of contemporary art, then who is supposed to write it?

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Face the Facts: 1989 & the Arts

Is Art Forever Contemporary? 1989 and the Globalization of Art