“I am not part of the romance with the local”
Juste Kostikovaite
28/05/2012
Cuauhtémoc Medina is an art critic, curator and historian, with a PhD in History And Theory of Art from the University of Essex, and a BA in History from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).
Since 1992 he has been a full time researcher at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas at UNAM. Between 2002 and 2008 he was the first Associate Curator of Art for the Latin American Collections at the Tate Modern.
Cuauhtémoc Medina, together with his curatorial team of Katerina Gregos and Dawn Ades, is in the process of presenting Manifesta 9 – the biennial that takes into consideration the specificity of the local audience. In interviewing Medina, Arterritory.com asked how this process is evolving, and what problems it may entail.
Manifesta venue. Press photo
How do you position “Manifesta9” in relation to “Documenta13”, especially since they are coinciding and based only a half-day ride away from one another?
I need to say I do not know what Documenta13 is about. I understand that chronological and geographical proximity implies that people will start to compare the strategies and alternatives of both events. However, the question of audiences is very central to Manifesta. And I don’t think that it is so just in this, the 9th edition of Manifesta. I made a point about audiences given that this is a nomadic biennial, and it is bound to land in areas which precisely don’t have a full-fledged cultural structure developed, and moreover, places that don’t have a metropolitan pattern of cultural consumption, which somehow grants you a significant starting point to expect both numbers and also, attitudes related to established constituencies of contemporary art. Of course, Documenta is a kind of event that somehow concentrates that kind of energy on the global sphere, it’s site is fixed. Let’s put it this way: there has to be a different attitude tied to the event that behaves like Rome, as compared to the event that has a gypsy strategy. And in that sense, one of the goals of the Manifesta 9 project has to do with the question of “what is the sustainability of these exhibitions?”. Manifesta 9 has to produce a change of attitudes, and that starts with the building of an audience; this is mostly an ability to attract interest – to mobilize the media on the ground, with the intent of creating the need – the love-affair, the psychological and cultural expectation – that in the future will allow cultural practitioners in this area to keep on developing. So one of the reasons why it is correct to have an event of this kind is precisely because in the future, you may have a different social outlook and a different cultural opportunity. By now, the totally ossified and unthought assumption that biennials need to be mega-exhibitions of contemporary artists has to be challenged; to create a more interesting context for contemporary art, you need to operate and establish a dialogue with the viewers, to make the event a turning point among the possibilities of cultural activities and spectatorship in a place like Limburg. It is important to note that Limburg was an area that was populated, and to a great extent created, by coal money; the local audience is basically the offspring of the migrant working class. Therefore, it is understandable that the building of cultural energy here has to have a completely different strategy than for a place that has a more metropolitan audience.
Historically, what Documenta did in 1955 was in a very secondary city in Germany; nevertheless, the biennial has claimed a centrality, and now millions drag themselves over there every five years just to see what is happening. So, the two events are essentially not that very different, except for the fact that Documenta had a chance to produce that effect in a long run, for more than half of a century now, whereas there are all of these utopian expectations around Manifesta – that it has to achieve some of these same effects in a single blow.
Manifesta venue. Press photo
Recently I spoke with “Afterall” magazine director Pablo Lafuente; in speaking about “Documenta”, he said that from the German side, it is not just the art crowd who is coming to see the exhibition: it is a must-see for one million middle-class Germans, who are more informed about art than other Europeans.
I think that you need to take a different point of analysis to understand what happens around Kassel or Sao Paulo, or to take a completely different example, like Istanbul. One should not understand these issues in relation to the structure of class inscription. One has to also look at what was the effect at the moment of institution, and what were the political and cultural tensions that were addressed at that specific point. Kassel involved an operation that, indeed, produced a moment of identity-making in both German politics and Germany's outlook as a nation. In 1955 (and that was the explicit goal of the show) it reversed, in a single blow, the erasure of modernity and the avantgarde as performed by the Entartete Kunst exhibition that was shown in 1937 in Munich. So, Documenta established the idea that contemporary and modern art were to be part of a national project, as well as part of the national social identity. Something similar happened, for instance, in Spain, but with a different pattern and weaknesses, after the transition at the end of the Franco era; because of the violence of the nazist regimes against modern art, it had become part of the official ideology. The availability of that market, which also involves the incredibly significant markets for books in Germany, is to do with that inception, with that meaning.
When you think about the Sao Paulo Biennial, it is both the signifier and the instrument of the modernist outlook of the Brazilian bourgeoisie, as well as one of the Brazilian cultural projects realized after the 50’s. The biennial, in that sense, is not an object that blindly reflects an already existing cultural situation, but rather produces it, and that has enormous consequences. I am trying to suggest that the biennial, as such, defined the new national ethos of some places - it is a political tool. Such as the role of the Havana Biennial – the government made the biennial in order to transpose the politics of third-worldism into the artworld; they gave Cuba the imaginary role of leading a sort of post-colonial common front. It actually had the effect of creating a paradoxical situation on the island by alluding to a certain spirit of global contestation, which is an uncomfortable subject of dissidence in terms of the possibilities of cultural practice in Cuba.
One of the goals of Manifesta 9 is to create the notion of a region that, indeed – in claiming the role, of Limburg as part of the cultural structure; and also, extending it so far as to provoke, or to make it possible, to conceive of the industrial hinterland of Europe as its own. In that sense, the project also had to play at the level of the content: how to involve the arrival of a certain cultural operation with the building and questioning of the local cultural conditions. Of course, the difference is that we are not working here so as to establish, or review, or work in tandem with a new political order. It is not a national formation. But indeed, once you understand that it is the political behaviour of biennials to establish their centrality in the long term, you are bound to think of how to mobilize that power, and what can that moment of openness and that interpretation stand for. On the one hand, I am trying to make an exhibition that alludes to a certain conviviality of cultural practices, of the relationships of the past and the future that relate to the condition of the subjectivity that is produced by the different faces and waves of industrialism; that on one hand, one has to look for a way of reflection which goes beyond that of turning it into a certain identity that questions the utility of the moment – of building the ethnic or origin-based identity models and discourses which are the ones that, today, are very akin to the right wing; but there’s also a quest for a viability of the biennial system, and of Manifesta specifically. I am just going to make one simple claim: one of the political questions that we need to address at a certain moment is how the space that we took for granted for cultural practice and for cultural expenditure – which came from the post-war arrangement of the politics of different European states and was part of the building of the great project of Europe – is now in great danger. Right-wing populist formations are actually targeting contemporary art culture and cultural budgets as things, that in their view, shouldn’t be part of political projects and social design. They are effectively hoping to subsume (as it happened in the USA in the 1980’s) the entire cultural field to a market logic that, of course, just plays for structures of cultural consumption that come from the cultural industry, the mass media and other forms of identification – I mean, things that go from nationalistic forms of ethnic hatred to the moment of identification that is at the core at every Hollywood movie or soap opera. So, at this particular point (the point I am now making goes beyond this project), we need to understand the political significance of defending, with the audience, the social context which creates a space. To have a cultural field, we need to be able to mobilise the audiences, to reach them, to make us absolutely necessary, to preserve a space, so to speak, in the political structure. We need to fortify the relationship we are actually involved in, which is changing and exchanging with the audiences.
In that sense, I feel that beautiful and enviable level of freedom, and sometimes self-indulgency, of the contemporary art world in Europe, which is something that has to be referred to by questioning how it operates in reality. Really, I am making this point given the fact that in Limburg, they do not have big institutions, no bourgeoisie middle-class, so there has to be another kind of exhibition. Beyond that, I think that the contemporary art world and biennials need to push forward, to force an engagement in which art needs to be somehow arguing for the need of the cultural space it occupies; that will actually excite people to support the fact that political structures spend money on culture, and we need to become relevant in a completely different way than being just marketable. And therefore, I think that Documenta also has to start thinking about that. We know a great deal about what has made the contemporary art field possible, particularly in Europe – it was the long-term gift of the post-war political and social arrangement. Now, with the wind of neo-liberal political politics reaching the center, this might be a very serious threat; because the political arrangement is starting to look at some issues, such as health, education and culture, communication, exchange and diversity, and believing that they are not relevant elements nor in the public interest, and that therefore, they don't need to be subsidized and paid for by taxes and the state. It is a beautiful opportunity: everytime that Manifesta happens, there’s a certain social structure that, somehow, is investing in those values. I think that is happening in Limburg, specifically because the local institutions are involved in the deal, and we just need to be able to sustain it for political reasons. I think there is a radicality of the content that we need to focus on there.
Manifesta venue. Press photo
By presenting your curatorial strategy for “Manifesta 9”, you were quite extensively talking about the local, how to address the “real”. You also spoke more about the historical approach, and less about direct action or contemporary art. I find your strategy contemporary, although being not contemporary at all.
Let me try to explain. I think it is very obvious from our conversation that I am not part of the romance with the local. There is a twisted dialectical problem in it as long as it is a questioning of fake universality of modernism and a fake universality of what was effectively an Eurocentric culture; of course, the claiming of the local was the relevance of the specific local bonds of questioning, of specific local works that ought not be marginalized because they were actually busy in their political and their cultural sphere. That relationship with what is locality, I feel is totally different; and most of the time, it's actually contrary to the love of the locality, the claim of identity, the defence of tradition. Sometimes I feel that writers and curators do not make those distinctions. Of course, coming from a place that used to be even geographically wrongly put, but even locally wrongly put in the South, like Mexico, it is important to have a moment that claims the relevance of what was possible to be done there, because that locality has been crossed out of the debate after the moving-in of modernism from the USA, and the branding of everything in the South, and particularly Mexican, as original and therefore, meaningless. So the moment you actually start to have an affirmative argument about locality, you can easily turn it into right-wing populism. You can easily just start to reproduce your own reviewed attachment, the emotional ties with structures of power and forms of claims of tradition that just become reactive to the brutal challenges imposed by the way capitalism keeps on changing. So, somehow in this project, what we are trying to do is to take the extremely exemplary quality of the locality in relation to what is, after all, the only possible universal process (which is changes in living and landscape, as produced by capitalism). Indeed, that is a note that is relating a specific question that has an immediate interest and appeal for a certain local population, which already is a product of a universal process, in what is the mining region built by the immigrant communities at the beginning of the last century, because of the discovery of coal. So as to fortify the questioning of the difference between those different social eras, so as to look into matters, such as coal, beyond the locality of Limburg, beyond the nationalism of the mind, beyond a space of identification; to somehow inscribe the story into a much bigger picture, where we can actually share that story of imprints and changes of the productive system. I believe that in a specific way, the project is trying to be a practical and productive criticism of the romance of locality – by showing that you can actually address that specificity without sliding into cheesy, kitchy politics. I mean, it is very hard to imagine that from the contemporary art field, we could make a claim that could be useful by reinforcing these identities. There’s a completely different business in actually breaking down these identities, taking for granted naturalized, invisible identities produced by the market and the state. When you actually produce the forms of subjectivity that come from the oppressed – taken from the Indians' sub-altered identities, there you are actually dealing with the oppressed and almost erased, claiming their diversity; you are opposing the totalization of the national identity. Along the years, I believe that there is something incredibly wrong and practically dangerous in the easy way – when people classify and take options between localism and cosmopolitanism, between particularism and universalism. It can sometimes be negotiated. How the structure is dealt with the case, how the inscription is standing with the infraction. So yes, I think that is is clear that there has to be an alchemy when you reach both points; with some luck, a biennial needs to make three things on site in order to create a temporary center (this is a simplified dogma, from which I am coming). You need to be able to bring out the questioning on what is contemporary art at large, by following it from practically every corner of the earth and by seeing it as a tendency of the structure of the universalizing capitalism, or “the new cosmopolitanism”. Second, you need to be able to think about moving bodies and minds into places, so that they see something that is not dematerialised; you need to be able, with the same argument and structure, to have a dialogue with a very specific place within a very local social setting which, on top of it all, is actually going to take the risk of investing into this global operation. Instead of inviting them to make the most horrible, contemporary right-wing judgement, which is: “are they paying for this with my taxes”? Everybody who says: “paying with my taxes”, will eventually lead the way to the destruction of the social sphere; what you actually need to say is: “we are very happy to be part of this conversation”. The third level of the debate – which I really consider as the concerns of the kitchen, the matters of the studios – is how they relate to the history of biennials, to the self-referential debate of biennials. Now, how do you bring all of these three levels together? It is really a Hegelian dilemma. It really has to do with making these three things within contradictions, but without collapsing. From the kitchen point of view, to make a biennial possible – it was not feasible for Limburg to make that claim. It could not work for the global art world unless the local audience would consider that contemporary art is relevant. And we better pack our suitcases, go home and do something else; as curators, we try not to do things.
Manifesta venue. Press photo
It struck me how similar structures, which had the same power in the last century, and economical structures intertwined with the state. Economical power overtook the power of the state and restructured the flows of people, the flows of bodies; and the same is happening now. There's tension in saying: “our people are going somewhere”, when in reality, the people are mining the same coal, but this time – in the service industries.
To arrive to the questions that you just posed is the goal of this project. Putting those questions forward from the beginning would prevent them from arising; as if I would make an exhibition making those claims, rather than making them arise. Indeed, what is important in looking back into the region (which we are not doing, but it will happen with the audience coming from all over the place), is to actually notice that in the period when people projected these fantasies of the relationship between hegemonic national building and industrial development in Europe, you were actually building multicultural societies based on long-distance migrant workers, foreigners. This place was full of foreigners in 1925 (it is quite shocking) who actually created the conditions of industrialization in Europe; therefore, the process continues, because we are under the same cultural regime. How these flips in relation to ideological components of state formations, how much of the state power lies in the hands of the elected members of the political class or the non-elected board members of the global companies, or the power of the social biological control brought by the conjunctions of contemporary discourses about the body and development of biological techniques, that changes. But ultimately, there has to be reflection on a slightly longer historical span to think on those issues and to act on them. The show is not historical – we are trying to do a contemporary art exhibition that has to do with the thinking that composes this place. Which cannot be taken that there is en epistemological game in what contemporary art has meant; and we can depart from that knowledge, from those questions, to look at other fields. We have a historical art exhibition, “The Age of Coal”, which is infused with the kind of way in which contemporary artworks are thought to be, so that the questions that we take for granted, we need to make about the world. In some ways, we are trying to review the previous art objects, their metonymic significance, how the materials that they are using can be the material of a certain social context, how they are sensible to the changes of social society in aesthetics, not in their narrative or subject matter. Historical art exhibition is infused with the contemporary.
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First, it is made to challenge and seduce at the same time; what people take for granted is heritage here, while elsewhere, it is actually assuming something that contemporary art takes for granted – that old, unexpected and surprising is a form of critique, that is – it is opening questions, and also opening the question about what is the cultural agent which comes directly from the contemporary field. Now, the difference between this situation and the standard operation is that we are not asking the artists to take these questions into completely new works all the time; in delegating that function, we are not assuming that those questions can be achieved through direct action procedures in three weeks, in the village, with three plasticine boxes. We assume that those are very complex and long-term questions, and that they need to be addressed with a certain historical perspective, as well.
Manifesta venue. Press photo
Chris Dercon, the director of Tate Modern, expressed his fascination with “ones which depart from being a mere physical body, the ones who are becoming communitie”, like Burkina Fasso project.
It is good to say that I really feel that we need to understand that we are producing social forces, these institutions without the idiotic freedom of Demurge. We depart from existing structures. We need to operate on understanding on what they are. Chris Dercon is describing the object with a certain intentionality, which allows him to make the decisions to reach those goals. He is producing a good hegemony; one thing that we have to to learn, or re-learn, is that we can produce good hegemonies. The thought is – what is good power about, without being horrified in the Christian way. One of the most significant experiences of that community structure that is modern and contemporary art, is physical proximity – bumping and coming together around certain cultural practices or an object. The exhibition form, as we know it now in modernity, has to do with negotiating the corporalization, the physicality of a certain community, which is able to not only look and talk, but to also smell each other. There are these incredibly beautiful chronicles of the meetings in the French salons in the 17th century, which Thomas Crow beautifully compiled, that talk about the smell of the perfume of the French aristocrat colliding with the stink. Chris is saying that one important power that we have is that of operating though convening people, to actually interact, talk, or stare at something, rather than slipping by or avoiding each other, and that is a physical condition that I find enormously powerful. There is a way to renegotiate with the relationship of what we called an object. (I am not saying that art has to be visible and something that can be sold; I think that that is an idiotic reduction.) There is an agent that we are creating, and a social body created around that agent, and there is a historically powerfull decision of the species to communicate through things, of inscribing memories in things, not being able to make signals to each other. I presume that in the next years, museums are going to be evolving in that form and rethinking it, including questions on how to start using the accumulated historical wealth that they were storing in different forms. Clearly, the sort of strange Cold War obsession of piling up atomic bombs was mirrored by the obsession of MoMA to pile up artworks in the storerooms that no one sees. This is a very peculiar anthropological practice; Tate is different. But 95% percent of the works acquired by MoMA, these works are not going to be seen by anyone. They are kidnapped. They are somewhere; they are not going to be lent out, because loan lists are ridiculously long. Institutions have a sick satisfaction from storing them without usage. The question, for me, has to do with pressing past, into the future space that I occupy as a cultural practitioner, writer and curator; it is something that I owe to the biennial system as well. The geographical prejudices that built the imbalanced structures of institutions of modernism were dismantled by the proliferation of biennials. So those that do not come from NATO countries, like me, and I presume, you, also are able to be part of this discussion and dialog, simply because of the Havana biennial; onwards, the whole geography of the system was perverted. I am very committed to preservation; that means that a lack of ambition in using the art, the inexpensive, cheap business of pampering some collections, and instead, using some rather uneducated visual interests, is, on the contrary, putting them in danger.
Similarly, there are institutions, like Tate, that have been constantly challenging the possibilities of the museum. It is still a museum, in an establishment sense, but the routes that they are taking have not been taken before; in that way, they are: a) creating a social institution that is more diverse than any other institution in the UK has been before; b) conveying a social energy towards culture which is constantly arguing for the preservation of culture in Britain and elsewhere – and you cannot keep pointing out that it is an elitist structure; and c) opening possibilities for many other practices in many other places in the world to take place. Tate has to be judged in a completely different way than the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, which I don’t think that, in the long-term, has shown that is is building a different kind of society around it; it has been a good showcase, adventurous in its social commitment, and it has not been launching intellectualism. We need to come down from critisizing the museum, the biennial, the artist; move away from qualifying, specifying and distinguishing one operation from another. We have to say, that “this biennial is doing this”. For example, the Mercosul Biennial has reinvented the educational possibilities of the biennial in a way that makes its operation make sense more than any other biennial in all the world. So in Porto Allegre, this biennial has to be defended. By defending the biennials at large, they are saving the badly cooked biennials that do not matter. We are constantly trying to tap money which is floating around over there, but without trying to refine the negotiation. When the big bulk of the resources are in danger of being lost because we do not have a proper argument for what we are doing, then the operations are feeble. There has been an argument in the field to get the money “10% above” of the project. Both of the resources are coming from society. Tate, up to now, has been able to play both of these roles beautifully. It has a very interesting program. It has built a social contract that builds audiences. Yeah, it also has ability to come to the surface and help. There is a certain alchemic trick there, but it is not missing any of the three points.
Cuauhtémoc Medina
