MAPPING SOUTH-SOUTH CONNECTIONS AUSTRALIA and LATIN AMERICA Edited by Fernanda Peñaloza and Sarah Walsh Studies of the Americas

STUDIES OF THE AMERICAS

MAPPING SOUTH-SOUTH CONNECTIONS AUSTRALIA AND LATIN AMERICA Edited by Fernanda Peñaloza and Sarah Walsh Studies of the Americas

Series Editor Maxine Molyneux Institute of the Americas University College London London, UK The Studies of the Americas Series includes country specifc, cross- disciplinary and comparative research on the United States, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Canada, particularly in the areas of Politics, Economics, History, Sociology, Anthropology, Development, Gender, Social Policy and the Environment. The series publishes monographs, readers on specifc themes and also welcomes proposals for edited collections, that allow exploration of a topic from several different disciplinary angles. This series is published in conjunction with University College London’s Institute of the Americas under the editorship of Professor Maxine Molyneux.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14462 Fernanda Peñaloza · Sarah Walsh Editors Mapping South-South Connections

Australia and Latin America Editors Fernanda Peñaloza Sarah Walsh Department of Spanish and Latin Washington State University American Studies Pullman, USA University of Sydney Sydney, NSW, Australia

Studies of the Americas ISBN 978-3-319-78576-9 ISBN 978-3-319-78577-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78577-6

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019931740

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifcally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microflms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifc statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affliations.

Cover image: © Maria Fernanda Cardoso. “Dibujo de Mariposas/Butterfy Drawing.” 2004. Butterfies, glue, perspex, metal. 122 x 122 x 1.4 cm. First Prize Jupiter Art Competition, Gold Coast Art Gallery. 2004 Cover design by Akihiro Nakayama

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Acknowledgements

Mapping South-South Connections is the result of three years of work and quite a lot of support. The frst people that deserve our thanks are those that participated in the workshop at the University of Sydney in July 2015 that served as the inspiration for this collection: Gai Bryant, Barry Carr, David Corbet, Michael Jacklin, Jim Levy, Vek Lewis, Alfredo Martinez-Exposito, Sara C. Motta, Kevin Murray, Cristina Rocha, Robin Rodd, Peter Ross, Catherine Seaton, and Irene Strodthoff. Not all of them are represented in these pages, but they all contributed to a lively and dynamic discussion about the purpose of Latin American studies in Australia and continue to contribute to the developments in that feld. That conference was also supported by the Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship Project “Race and Ethnicity in the Global South.” The project’s leader, Professor Warwick Anderson, not only saw the value of the workshop and subsequent volume, but also has been a tireless advocate for expanding the study of Latin America among Australian scholars. The Department of Spanish and Latin American Studies at the University of Sydney through SURCLA, Sydney University Research Community for Latin America, also provided support for the workshop. A special thank you to Anne Walsh, department chair at the time of the organisation of the workshop. Fernanda Peñaloza would like to express her deepest gratitude to co-editor Sarah Walsh; the organisation of the Workshop and the com- pletion of this volume coincided with a very challenging period at a personal level, so it was essential for the carrying out of the different stages

v vi Acknowledgements of the project, to have such a supportive colleague. In addition, the real- ities of being an academic migrant woman with family responsibilities requires a great deal of patience, understanding, and encouragement: so special thanks to Frank, Qilqa, Lola, Mateo, María Esther (1942–2015), Juan, and Silvina. Last but not least, great appreciation for the ongoing encouragement of Professor Yixu Lu, Head of the School of Languages and Cultures, University of Sydney. Sarah Walsh would like to acknowledge her co-editor Fernanda Peñaloza for her support not only in this publication but in her experi- ences traversing the feld of Latin American Studies as a junior scholar. She would also like to thank her colleagues at the University of Sydney who created such a collegial environment to work through the “Race and Ethnicity in the Global South” project: Miranda Johnson, Sebastián Gil-Riaño, Ben Silverstein, and Jamie Dunk. A special thank you to Warwick Anderson and Hans Pols for being constant supporters of her work and keeping the history of science community at the University of Sydney vibrant. Finally, the fnancial and intellectual support she received from the European Research Council Project “The Colour of Labour: Racialized Lives of Migrants” and its director, Cristiana Bastos, was critical during the fnal editing of this collection. Contents

1 Introduction: Why Australia and Latin America? On Mapping Connections and Its Implications for Knowledge Production 1 Fernanda Peñaloza and Sarah Walsh

Part I South-South Perspectives and Transpacifc Flows

2 Decolonising the Exhibitionary Complex: Australian and Latin American Art and Activism in the Era of the Global Contemporary 23 David Corbet

3 La Bestia as Transpacifc Phenomenon: Indigenous Peoples’ Camps, Violence, Biopolitics, and Agamben’s State of Exception 59 Victoria Grieves-Williams

4 Common Ground: Connections and Tensions Between Food Sovereignty Movements in Australia and Latin America 81 Alana Mann

vii viii Contents

5 Rethinking the Chile–Australia Transpacifc Relationship in Light of Globalisation and Economic Progress 111 Irene Strodthoff

Part II Diasporic Connections

6 Mavis Robertson, the Chilean New Song Tours, and the Latin American Cultural Explosion in Sydney After 1977 145 Peter Ross

7 Latin American Diasporic Writing in the Australian Migrant Magazine Tabaré 173 Michael Jacklin

8 Sydney’s Iberoamerican Plaza and the Limits of Multiculturalism 197 Sarah Walsh

9 Screening Latin America: The Sydney Latin American Film Festival 223 Fernanda Peñaloza

Part III Comparative Readings

10 Days of the Dead: Australian Encounters with Violence in Contemporary Mexico 243 Robert Mason

11 Remembering Obedience and Dissent: Democratic Citizenship and Memorials to State Violence in Australia and Argentina 263 Robin Rodd Notes on Contributors

David Corbet is a visual designer, educator, writer, and curator based in Sydney, Australia. He is engaged in Doctoral research at the University of Sydney, following graduate studies at The University of New South Wales, Australia, and Central Saint Martins School of Art, The University of the Arts, London, UK. He is the author/editor of several books and numerous articles and essays on contemporary art. Victoria Grieves-Williams is an historian from the Warraimay people of the mid north coast of NSW in Australia. She works in interdisciplinary and transnational ways to progress Indigenous knowledge as a means of meeting the increasing demands of the Anthropocene. Important in this is the baseline for Indigenous knowledge production in Australia, she frst documented in the widely accessed book Aboriginal Spirituality: Aboriginal Philosophy—And the Social and Emotional Wellbeing of Aboriginal People. This work has led to publications in Aboriginal history, race, politics, including identity politics, and environmental studies. Importantly she has identifed Aboriginal people as living in a state of exception to the Australian settler colonial state and has argued for the creation of a new sovereign republic based on Aboriginal cultural values. https://victoriagrieves.academia.edu/. Michael Jacklin is an Honorary Fellow in the School of the Arts, English, and Media at the University of Wollongong. His research focuses on multilingual Australian literatures and his recent publications

ix x Notes on Contributors in this area have appeared in Australian Literary Studies and Antipodes (on Hispanic-Australian writing) and Southerly, Kunapipi and JASAL (on Vietnamese-Australian writing), as well as book chapters in Bearing Across: Translating Literary Narratives of Migration (2016) and Migrant Nation: Australian Culture, Society and Identity (2017). Alana Mann is Chair of the Department of Media and Communications within the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her research focuses on the engagement of citizens and non-state actors in activism and policy debates to inform the creation of just and sustainable food systems. Her book on food sovereignty campaigns in Latin America and Europe, Global Activism in Food Politics: Power Shift was published in 2014 by Palgrave Macmillan. Robert Mason is a senior lecturer in the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science, with interests in heritage, memory, and violence. He is the author of The Spanish Anarchists of Northern Australia: Revolution in the Sugar Cane Fields (University of Wales Press), and most recently edited Legacies of Violence: Rendering the Unspeakable Past in Modern Australia (Berghahn). Fernanda Peñaloza is Chair of the Spanish and Latin American Studies Department and a Senior Lecturer in Latin American Studies at the University of Sydney. She is a founder member and coordinator of SURCLA, the Sydney University Research Community for Latin America. Dr. Peñaloza’s expertise includes Diaspora and Latin American identi- ties; dominant discourses on indigenous peoples in Argentina, Chile, and Australia; and interrelations between geopolitics, identity formations, and cultural production. She has published widely on the interconnections of aesthetics and ethnography, British imperialist narratives of travel and exploration, and the Argentine colonisation project in Patagonia. She is currently working on a monograph provisionally entitled The “Vanishing Savages” of Tierra del Fuego and Tasmania. Robin Rodd teaches anthropology and critical theory at James Cook University. His doctoral research involved shamanic apprenticeship and copious amounts of yopo. His current research explores political memory and the cultural terrain of citizenship, democracy, and authoritarianism in a de-democratising world. He has worked in Venezuela, Argentina, Uruguay, and Australia. Notes on ContributoRS xi

Peter Ross is an Honorary Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Languages at UNSW Sydney. He has published widely on Latin American history and culture, including a number of comparative studies of Australia and Latin American countries focusing on economic development, the environment, and political, cultural, and regional relationships. Together with Dr. James Levy, he is currently completing a major comparative study of the production and distribution of social wealth in Argentina and Australia. Irene Strodthoff holds a Ph.D. in Latin American Studies from The University of Sydney, an M.A. in International Communication from Macquarie University, and a B.A. in Journalism from the Pontifcia Universidad Católica de Chile. Her research interests are focused on the discursive ramifcations of nation and identity and the distribution of geopolitical power between Australia and Latin America, with focus on Chile. She was awarded the Australia—APEC Women in Research Fellowship in 2017 to carry out research at RMIT University on community and bushfres in Chile and Australia. Sarah Walsh received her Ph.D. in Latin American history from the University of Maryland, College Park. She is currently a Teaching Fellow in the Department of History at Washington State University, USA. Her areas of expertise include: The history of the human sciences in Latin America, women and gender in Latin America, and race and ethnicity throughout the Global South. PART I

South-South Perspectives and Transpacifc Flows CHAPTER 2

Decolonising the Exhibitionary Complex: Australian and Latin American Art and Activism in the Era of the Global Contemporary

David Corbet

Exhibition-Making in the Global South This chapter foregrounds contemporary museums and art spaces as sites of debate and re-inscription across the global South, and as important sites of exchange and dialogue between Australia and Latin America. It posits decolonisation as a key perspective for understanding these currents, and while focussed on visual art and exhibition-making, the aim is to contextualise these within a multi-scalar framing, encompassing individual cultural production, local socio-political histories, and global geopolitical forces. The idea of a global South is to some an imagined community, and a term lacking in precision. However, in recent postcolonial discourse, it has largely replaced hierarchical terms such as ‘Third World’ and ‘Fourth World’,

D. Corbet (*) University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2019 23 F. Peñaloza and S. Walsh (eds.), Mapping South-South Connections, Studies of the Americas, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78577-6_2 24 D. CORBET and is arguably more nuanced and de-coupled from specifc geographies, evoking a relational or topological connectivity. Southern discourse occurs within and across numerous academic felds, and in some of these, membership of the global South is assessed in terms of per capita economic product. On this metric Australia is clearly a wealthy, developed country. Brazil, another G20 country with which Australia is compared throughout this chapter, is equally clearly a developing nation, despite the overall size of its economy. Mexico, also widely referenced here, is a relatively prosperous, Northern Hemisphere, G20 nation, yet unde- niably part of a relational South. Additionally, so-called internal Souths are identifable within many developed countries—either in the form of urban diasporas, or remote communities bypassed by development. Another important measure may be the continuous, living presence of First Peoples, and Australia shares this with many regions of Latin America. However, my focus is not exclusively on Indigeneity, nor exclusively on the global South—these perspectives are shared by artists from many ‘othered’ and historically marginalised groups, including women, queer, neuro-divergent and self-taught practitioners. Across academic disciplines, it is widely understood that coloniality is as much an occupation of mind and knowledge systems as of territory, and much has been written on the way academic structures re-iterate the power formations inscribed in colonial-era epistemologies. Faced with historical brutalities and complexities, it is diffcult not to view Southern creative practice, as well as some emerging practices of the North, within the broader project of decolonisation, which is to say a geopolitical process that is far from a fait accompli. Where appropriate I use this term, with its implications of a work-in-progress, in preference to ‘postcoloni- alism’, which can carry the meaning of a completed project suitable for retrospective study. However, if decolonisation is to be more than just a good idea, we need to clearly understand what is to be decolonised, who should be doing it, and by what methods. In cultural terms—specifcally in relation to visual arts curation and museology—it requires a set of attitudes and practices that actively work to disrupt hegemonic North Atlantic templates for exhibition-making. In practical terms, it means that exhibition-makers need to look beyond institutional knowledge silos and, if they are working on the ‘peripheries’,1 in emergent middle

1 Throughout this chapter the term ‘periphery(ies)’ is used in a critical sense, to indicate historical power relationships between the Northern metropolitan centres and their 2 DECOLONISING THE EXHIBITIONARY COMPLEX … 25 powers like Australia, India or Brazil, do a kind of balancing act— acknowledging the continued importance of Northern institutions, while questioning inherited epistemologies and practices. This requires a willingness to engage, not just with the Northern ‘Citadel of Modernism’, but transversally with our Southern neighbours—and to understand what the Chilean curator Beatriz Bustos Oyanedel has called ‘the link in our tragedies’ (Araeen and Hawyard Gallery 1989; Gardner and Green 2013, p. 443). For reasons of brevity, this chapter has a comparative focus on Australia, Brazil and Mexico as nations of comparable economic and cultural reach. However, my broader research scope includes greater Latin America (Hispanoparlante, Lusophone and Indigenous), Africa and South Asia, as well as nearer Pacifc neighbours. Any navigation of latitudinal, South–South cross-currents quickly runs aground on the verti- cal fssures of North–South relations—the asymmetrical power structures which in metaphorical and sometimes literal terms follow the old slave and resources routes. While some view such perspectives as an irrel- evance in a globalised world, to others they constitute a heartbreaking fracture-zone that continues to distort and poison the planet, unable to transcend the historical consequences of Europe’s sixteenth-century naval ascendancy. In adopting a Southern and in some instances specifcally Australian perspective, the aim is not to diminish the work of important Northern artists, thinkers and philosophers, but to consider their positions alongside less-heard voices from Oceania, Latin America, South Asia and Africa—an approach which could be characterised as ‘reparative contextualisation’. Viewed from a nexus between South and North, it is undeniable that wherever art is being made today under the ‘Contemporary’ rubric, however localised its productive conditions, it is entangled with the still-powerful master narrative of Euro-American (and more lately North Asian) artistic Modernism—its immense epistemic payload, its neoliberal economic heft, and its hegemonic ‘exhibitionary complex’

former colonies, but also with their less-developed internal provinces and dependent vassal states (for instance in the former USSR). Implicit in this usage is the historical hegemony of Northern historical worldviews, epistemologies and histories, now widely challenged if not entirely dismantled. A common Indigenous perspective in many colonised regions is to view their positioning in relation to the North as ‘the periphery of the periphery’. 26 D. CORBET

(Bennett 1998).2 Such is Modernism’s weight, that discourses around the globalism of Contemporary Art cannot be adequately framed without some consideration of its historical infuence.3 The term ‘Global Contemporary’ signals a break from Modernism’s orthodoxies and paro- chialisms, implying a multilateral and accessible terrain, and it carries a certain irony. It posits what in the view of some is a fction, or certainly a very early work-in-progress, but in problematising it from the perspective of Southern artists and thinkers, the aim is to re-imagine what a truly global art landscape might look like. While focused on visual art and exhibition-making, the chapter does not discuss in detail specifc works by individual artists. This is in part because of limited space and the diffculties of evoking the experience of art through static images, but also because it is aimed at a non-specialised reader. The chapter does, however, consider broader aspects of artistic practice and their intersections with socio-geopolitics; with academic, institutional and museum cultures; and with broader notions of locality and place-making. The autonomous white cube, the ‘starchitect’ museum, the grand plaza, the shopping malls of small towns, the refugee camps in constant fux, the ‘no-places’, the borderlands and crossing zones, communities physical and virtual—all are sites of contestation and imagination, of uto- pian dreams, dystopian nightmares and heterotopian emergence.

Modernism Redux: Re-Thinking the Meta-Narrative As a purely art-historical term, Contemporary Art is nowadays used to signify a current, global movement, but with its roots frmly planted in Euro-American Modernism.4 As such it has been variably defned as

2 The Australian art historian Tony Bennett introduced this term. My usage covers the gamut of infrastructure dedicated to presenting, selling, collecting and curating visual art and artefacts, including museums, galleries, institutions, markets, private collections and Academic research departments. 3 I use the term ‘globalism’ here (and ‘globalised’ or ‘globalising’ elsewhere) to indicate a set of attitudes and phenomena, as distinct from ‘globalisation’, which I use to mean the socio-politico-economic forces driving global development and technological convergence. 4 Capitalisation of terms such as ‘Contemporary Art’, ‘Modern Art’ and ‘Modernism’ indicates art-historical movements, as opposed to uncapitalised uses (such as modernity, modernisation, contemporary, contemporaneity) which are construed in the ordinary temporal sense. My usage of Modernism here follows the commonly held historiographic position that the concept of artistic 2 DECOLONISING THE EXHIBITIONARY COMPLEX … 27 post-war art, art since 1960, art since 1989, or—momentarily aban- doning chronology—as post-conceptual art (Osborne 2013, pp. 15–35). Other terms have gained currency in recent years, for example, ‘post-internet’ and even ‘post-historical’ art.5 These usages are essentially periodising ones, and they tend to assume a chronologi- cal progression from Modernism through a transitory and now largely footnoted Postmodernism to our current art-historical era, whenever it is thought to have begun.6 Until the late twentieth century, it still seemed inescapable to view the development of artistic Modernism and its rapid internationalisation as essentially driven by the global North. In this view, it has been led by a metropolitan avant-garde, its historical unfolding corresponding to discernable schools, genres and styles, imbricated with an overarching geopolitical narrative of economic and technological modernisation, and the advance of global capitalism. I say ‘seemed’ because, with hindsight, the narrative/temporal discontinu- ities we take for granted today were, from early in the twentieth century, evident in the diverse manifestations of artistic Modernism across the global South, however it was only from mid-century that they began to impinge on the Northern worldview. These regional Modernist movements, characterised by Nigerian American curator Okwui Enwezor as ‘petit-modernities’, had distinctive local characteristics and chronologies,

Modernity (Modernité) was frst voiced by the French writer Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867). In this view (and there are others), it is a movement of European intellectuals and artists following the French Revolution (1789), which rapidly spread to the Americas and the rest of the world. 5 Regarding the term ‘post-internet’ art, it should be acknowledged that this imprecise descriptor is something more than a periodising term, and is indicative of what has been described as ‘… an internet state of mind – to think in the fashion of the network’ (Archery and Peckham 2014). As such it is differentiated from other manifestations such ‘(inter) net art’ and ‘data art’, which use the internet as a technical platform for their realisation. Regarding the term ‘post-historical’ art see Danto (1997). 6 My usage assumes that the mid-twentieth-century Postmodern ‘turn’ (or ‘reformation’ as I prefer to think of it; Late Modernism to some; the birth of Contemporary Art to others) marked not so much a sudden break as a dialectical development which leads to the gradual epistemological ‘collapse’ of Modernism as a totalising narrative of progress. Its most prominent visual expression was in architecture and urban design, and its principal disciplines were literary criticism, linguistics, philosophy and psychoanalysis. As an art- historical term, it is widely considered to have been coined by the Brazilian writer Mário Pedrosa in 1966, to refer to the end of Modern Art (1975, p. 92). 28 D. CORBET inevitably interacting with local iconography and material cultures (Enwezor 2009). Latin America in particular, with its relative connectivity to world currents, saw the rapid rise of local Modernist art movements, with Brazilian Modernismo, Tropicalismo and Neo-Concretism, the Mexican muralists, the Cuban Moderns and the Argentinean and Chilean avant-gardes being especially infuential. In urban design and architecture, innovators such as the Mexican Luis Barragán, Brazilians Oscar Niemeyer, Lina Bo Bardi, Paulo Mendes da Rocha and landscape architect (and botanist) Roberto Burle Marx, became celebrated international fgures.7 This did not happen in isolation. The simultaneous rise of vigorous regional and national literatures in both colonial and Indigenous languages across the Indian subcontinent, Oceania, Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa, alongside new directions in theatre, music, cinema and dance, gained pace as the century progressed, with the ‘Latin American Boom’ producing a succession of Spanish-language Nobel Laureates in literature. In Brazil, it is common for art historians to cite São Paulo’s 1922 Semana de Arte Moderna as a pivotal moment for the emergence of the Brazilian avant-garde. 1922 marked the centenary of Brazil’s declaration of independence from Portugal, and a coalition of artists and writers was formed to stage a week of artistic events, to run alongside the offcial government celebrations. Lectures, poetry readings, performances and exhibitions and were staged across the city. There was widespread media outrage at these goings-on, much like the response to the Impressionist and Fauvist artist salons in Paris in earlier decades. However, this was an assertion of Brazil’s home-grown artistic identity from which it has never looked back. While no equivalent single event can be cited, Australia rapidly developed its own settler vanguard, perhaps best exemplifed by the so-called Angry Penguins in Melbourne, alongside emerging vernacular styles in architecture and design.8 Across these regions, as in Europe,

7 The prestigious international Pritzker Architecture Prize, historically dominated by Northern architects, was awarded to Luis Barragán in 1980, Oscar Niemeyer in 1988, Paulo Mendes da Rocha in 2006 and (the only ever Australian recipient) Glenn Murcutt in 2002. It should be noted that the Pritzker has been frequently criticised for its failure to recognise distinguished women architects, with only two exceptions: the late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid in 2004, and the Japanese frm SANAA in 2010, made up of the duo Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa. 8 Angry Penguins was an Australian literary and artistic movement of the 1940s, inspired by a magazine of the same name founded by the surrealist poet Max Harris in 1940. 2 DECOLONISING THE EXHIBITIONARY COMPLEX … 29 stuffy, colonial-era academies initially resisted these developments, however their growing popularity was irresistible. Offcial antipathy was soon transformed into a source of national pride—museums of Modern Art were built, and by mid-century powerful national styles and regional schools were well-established, in turn feeding back into the international Modernist loop. In 1951, São Paulo hosted the frst international art biennial to be held outside Venice, founded by Brazilian–Italian industri- alist Ciccillo Matarazzo. Some twenty years later in 1973, another indus- trialist of Italian heritage, Franco Belgiorno-Nettis, founded the Biennale of Sydney, the frst to be established in the Asia-Pacifc region. These large international events nowadays receive substantial government sub- sidies, but at the time were symptomatic of a new kind of private patronage. It is important to note that in their early decades these biennials were largely focused on bringing European and North American art to local audiences. They have in recent decades become important platforms for national talent, however this did not happen quickly or easily, and local artists were largely marginalised in early editions in both São Paulo and Sydney, with Indigenous artists ignored altogether until 1979. The establishment of these local branches of the rapidly globalising Modernist enterprise cut both ways—on the one hand they were an assertion of New World progress and sophistication, on the other they excluded numerous artists whose practice did not ft this narrative. Modernism rapidly became a new orthodoxy, against which later generations of artists would rebel. The sixties advent of American and British Pop Art and its precursors and variants, followed by the rapid proliferation of Happenings, Land Art, Performance Art and Conceptual Art, is a convenient point to call the Northern Postmodern turn, and this is still how art history is written in the North. However, with revisionary hindsight of an expanded feld, we now understand that Indigenous and self-taught artists across the global South, while excluded from the Modernist narrative and often relegated to ethnographic museums, were all the while making work that by century’s end would be welcomed into the world’s museums of Contemporary Art.9 This momentous change gained pace from the

9 Australian art historian Ian McLean and others have written convincingly of the ways in which mid-to-late twentieth-century Australian Indigenous painting (led initially by the Central Desert Papunya Tula movement) grew to occupy an important place in the Australian Contemporary Art world, and by extension the Global Contemporary, advanced 30 D. CORBET

1970s onwards, accelerated by improving communications technology, increasing mobility of people and freight, and the availability of inexpen- sive off-the-shelf art materials. Indigenous artists in Australia and the Americas had for millennia practised their ancient traditions of ochre painting, weaving, ceramics and object-making, however from mid-century, local and international fne art collectors began to take notice, and Indigenous artists were not slow to seize the opportunity. Government cultural policies also played a role, and Australia in particular saw a surge in Indigenous fne art production, channelled to city galleries and collectors via a network of regional art centres established in the 1960s and 1970s. In Latin America, there was an established network of Indigenous artisan and craft markets catering to tourists, as well as up-market fne art galleries selling tribal carvings, weavings and ceramics, and local craft-based economies were also well-established throughout South Asia and Africa. However the material culture of Australian Aborigines had been largely invisible to all but a few anthropologists, so the artistic leap into the Contemporary was all the more astonishing, taking Australia’s art world by storm in the 1980s, and by the 1990s gaining acclaim in major centres of the North. This is not the place to generalise about the aesthetic or formal attributes of these extremely diverse works, however it is safe to say that Australian Aboriginal art, in common with say Tupinambá art in Brazil, or Huichol art in Mexico, is able to speak across cultural divides, and while its motifs and narratives may not be fully understood by non-initiates, it communicates in visual registers which Westerners readily accept. More broadly, the admission of Indigenous and other forms of ‘self-taught’ practice signalled a shift away from the relentless linear trajectory of Modernism, towards a multi-linear,

by a handful of enlightened curators who acknowledged that these artists were making some of the most profound art of our, or any other, time. While distinctions continue to be made between traditional or ‘tribal’ work from remote communities, and that of urban practitioners whose work may more easily ft with international notions of Contemporary Art, all these artists, along with others from the global South, were instrumental in a global paradigm shift away from the anthropological/ethnographic framings that had previously applied (for example to early twentieth-century Arnhem Land bark painting). Bypassing the narrow discourses of local and imported Modernist narratives just as the Postmodern turn got underway, Western Desert artists leaped into the international cohort of the Contemporary as fully fedged members and, in the view of many, rapidly eclipsed the offerings of their non-Indigenous peers (McLean 2011). 2 DECOLONISING THE EXHIBITIONARY COMPLEX … 31 multi-temporal world in which very different artistic traditions could happily co-exist. Certainly, the one thing on which most specialists agree is that Contemporary Art is not a useful descriptor of a style, genre or identifable set of practices (as compared to say, Impressionism or Abstraction). Instead, we should understand it as a multiplicity of inter- secting Postmodern practices, temporalities and sites of production— indeed it is these very attributes which makes Contemporary Art contemporary. The global geopolitical upheavals of the late twentieth century are beyond the scope of this chapter, however throughout Latin America, this was an era when local dictatorships were overthrown, and there was widespread distrust of US foreign policy in the region. The Cold War was at its height. In Southeast Asia and Australia, the Vietnam War loomed large, and successive oil shocks rocked the world economy. Australians elected a progressive, leftist government for a few years, ush- ering in far-reaching social and cultural changes. In Brazil, Argentina and Chile there was a fowering of democracy, a rising professional and business class was becoming vocal, and both urban and rural work- ers were becoming organised. To the intelligentsia of Latin America, the institutional-oligarchic apparatus of the art academies had come to appear conterminous with social injustice, enshrined in corrupt military regimes and local power structures—alien, imported, museum-bound and out-of-date. By the 1980s it was plain that the Modernist paradigm (if not economic modernisation) was fragmenting, along with ‘its greatest edifce, the museum’ (Pedrosa 2014, p. 32). As in Europe, Postmodern thinkers were rapidly re-writing the epistemic rule- book, and a new cynicism developed in relation to the ‘exhibitionary complex’, a concept introduced in an article of that name by the Australian writer Tony Bennett in 1988. Writing in 2010, Mexican curator and art historian Cuauhtémoc Medina evoked the cultural and geopolitical turn:

Although it probably does not seem so extraordinary now, the voicing of the need to represent the periphery in the global art circuits was, to a great extent, a claim to the right to participate in producing ‘the contemporary’. And while the critical consequences of the of inclusion are less central to the agenda of the South than the critique of stereotypes, the activation of social memory, and the pursuit of different kinds of cultural agency, it remains the case that ‘Contemporary Art’ marks the stage 32 D. CORBET

at which different geographies and localities are fnally considered within the same network of questions and strategies. Art becomes ‘contemporary’ in the strong sense when it refers to the progressive obsolescence of narratives that concentrated cultural innovation so completely in colonial and imperial metropolises as to fnally identify Modernism with what we ought to properly describe as ‘NATO art’. (Thesis 7)

As Medina makes clear, Euro-American Modernism, as a cultural force, has not suddenly disappeared from the world—its techniques, legacy, artefacts and continued relevance continue to be promoted and defended in citadels of high culture the world over. Indeed the spectre of ‘neomodernism’ stalks the cultural landscape in a number of guises (Ogbechie 2008).10 However Modernist verities now appear absurd in the increasingly fragmented conditions of a rhizomic, connected, globalised culture, and creative practices so diverse and hybridised as to defy categorisation under the old academic taxonomies. These conditions, and the making of art in them, we might characterise as contemporaneity.

Learning from Brazil: mestiçagem as Method The preceding art-historical account is necessarily somewhat simpli- fed, however its purpose is to contextualise later developments for the non-specialist reader. With these global and regional perspectives in mind, I now take a comparative lens to cultural perspectives in Australia and Brazil. My aim is to explore both commonalities and divergences, and also to further unpack these nations’ relationship to the paradigm of a global South. As we have seen, on economic metrics Australia can be excluded from this grouping, however on other important measures it is part of the South’s socio-topology, and it simultaneously resists and embraces this status in a way that is not quite like any other country. Its colonial legacy and plantation/resource economy has always suggested signifcant commonalities with the vigorous democracies of South and Central America, but the accidents of colonising language (and con- comitant allegiance to various Euro-American traditions) have curtailed direct cultural exchange with the Hispanoparlante-Lusophone world.

10 Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie uses this term to describe ‘the political implications of the modernist sublime in relation to African discourses on modernity in art’ (2008, p. 165). See also Bourriaud and Tate Britain (2009). 2 DECOLONISING THE EXHIBITIONARY COMPLEX … 33

While progress is being made on many fronts, cultural exchange is still remarkably slight. For decades, within Latin America, Africa and South Asia, diverse and nuanced cultural discourses from a decolonising (if not always explicitly Southern) perspective have been advanced on an international stage by numerous native and settler thinkers across numerous disciplines. The works of internationally revered fgures such as Homi K. Bhabha (India), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (India), Anibal Quijano (Peru), Walter Mignolo (Argentina), Paulin J. Hountondji (Côte d’Ivoire) and Leopold Senghor (Senegal, 1906–2001) have been essential citations in their felds for two generations, and many have risen to prominent positions in international universities (and in the case of Senghor, to head of state). In most of the regions from which these thinkers come, it is evident that such perspectives are part of ingrained mainstream political culture, contiguous with earlier liberation and political struggles. This is emphatically not so in Australia, except among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and despite important contribu- tions from a number of non-Indigenous thinkers within the Academy. Sociologist Raewyn Connell is perhaps Australia’s internationally best-known ‘Southern Theorist’, with an explicitly decolonising mission (2007). Which is not to suggest that Connell’s work is enthusias- tically embraced at a local level, indeed she has said very recently that in Australia ‘Academia actively works against Southern and decolonial perspectives’ (2016). In Australian visual arts faculties, such discourses are somewhat muted, with only a handful of non-Indigenous art academics consistently adopting a decolonising perspective, and some further thoughts are advanced below as to why this may be so (Gardner and Green 2013; Murray 2014).11 Within the Academy more broadly, cultural discourse appears overwhelmingly framed from a Northern perspective, and the Australian art establishment appears fxated on the methodologies, institutions and critical journals of the North. It is not surprising then, that in Australian visual arts the main protagonists of decolonising perspectives are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists,

11 Other non-Indigenous Australian writers of note who explore this territory are Susan Best, Vivien Johnson, Stephen Muecke, Vivian Ziherl, Ian McLean and Nikos Papastergiadis, all widely published internationally, however decolonisation per se is not the main thrust of their collective discourses. There is also considerable Australian literature around the so-called provincialism problem (Smith 1974; McLean 2009). 34 D. CORBET along with Indigenous art curators and cultural producers, some of whom are working within mainstream academic or museum contexts. It is also worth noting that despite distinguished careers, few such individuals have been elevated to leadership level within national or state institutions.12 Looking across the Pacifc Ocean from Australia, it is instructive to compare institutional perspectives in Brazil. On several superfcial measures, the two countries have much in common, not least as resource economies struggling with declining world demand and fercely contested environmental battlegrounds. In 2014 the World Bank listed them as the world’s twelfth and seventh largest economies respectively, by nominal GDP.13 They are of similar landmass and southern positioning, extending from temperate to equatorial latitudes, both projecting an atmosphere of progressive politics, successful multiculturalism and societal ‘cordiality’ (Buarque de Holanda 1978). Like Australia, Brazil sees itself as a Western democracy, striving, with mixed results, for an easy internationalism within a fully wired global village. Both have pictur- esque touristic and sporting cultures and, as we have seen, both are sites of signifcant home-grown artistic Modernist schools. Their topological contradictions are similar—both are ‘upside down’ countries where the developed, metropolitan centres lie in the temperate south, their abys- sal lands to the equatorial north (coterminous with the North’s imme- diate South), their cultural landscapes an uneasy amalgam of brave new world, old Europe and ancient, diverse and living Indigenous cultures. Both share a brutal history of colonial occupation. There are, of course, as many dissimilarities as similarities, not least the absences, in Australia, of a large population of African slave descent.14 Colonial chronologies

12 Arts administrator Dr. Dawn Casey has been Director of the West Australian Museum, The Powerhouse Museum Sydney, and the National Museum of Australia Canberra, however she does not come from a curatorial background. Examples of distinguished Indigenous curators are Djon Mundine, Tess Allas, Hetti Perkins, Francesca Cubillo, Tina Baum, Carly Lane, Stephen Gilchrist; artist/curator Fiona Foley, and anthropologist/ curator Marcia Langton. 13 Note that in terms of geo-strategic allegiances, Brazil is a longstanding member of the Non-Aligned Movement, and more recently the BRICS alliance, while Australia is a signa- tory to the ANZUS defence treaty with the United States and New Zealand. 14 The British imported no slaves to Australia, only its own convicts, many convicted for minor crimes. During the Atlantic slave trade era (sixteenth–nineteenth centuries), the Portuguese were by far the most prolifc slavers, and Brazil is thought to have received 2 DECOLONISING THE EXHIBITIONARY COMPLEX … 35 are also widely divergent. When Emperor Pedro I of Brazil declared independence from Portugal in 1822, ending 322 years of colonial rule, Australia had been settled by the British for less than forty years, and was still eighty years away from statehood.15 This comparison is not intended to suggest that Brazil is without ingrained colonial attitudes; indeed I make it because, like Australia, the country also struggles to transcend its colonial legacy. Brazil, however, has been negotiating racial and cultural hybridity for over fve centuries, and if it has any overarching ethnic identity at all, it is mestiço.16 Indeed the concept of mestiçagem is integral not only to Brazilian national identity, but to its cultural production.

nearly four million African slaves up until 1888, when the trade was fnally abolished in national law, following numerous earlier attempts to eradicate the practice. In the early 1800s, with a total population of around fve million, approximately one third are esti- mated to have been of African descent, many born into slavery over multiple generations. Brazil shares this painful history with several other colonial ‘plantation economies’ including much of central America and the Caribbean, notably Cuba. However, Brazil is a country of over 200 million people (of whom 800,000 are Indigenous Amerindians), with over 50% of the population classifed as non-Caucasian, making it the second largest population of African descent in any country after Nigeria. These Brazilian statistics are drawn from the 2015 Revision of World Population Prospects, the 24th round of offcial United Nations population estimates and projections prepared by the Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat. 15 Indigenous Australians were granted the vote in 1962, full electoral representation in 1967, and the legal fction of Terra Nullius was only overturned by the High Court in 1992. The secession of Brazil from the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarve was formally signed into law by Portugal in the Treaty of Rio de Janeiro, 1825. Pedro I was born in Portugal, and returned there to salvage his monarchy, succeeded as Emperor of Brazil by his fve-year-old son Pedro II, who was born in Rio de Janeiro and was known as Dom Pedro ‘The Magnanimous’, ruling from 1825–1891, under a regency until the age of 14. During Pedro II’s long constitutional reign he presided over a working parliamentary democracy, the abolition of slavery (the last country in Latin America to do so), the elevation of Brazil’s Indigenous peoples to something approaching full citizenship, the establishment of a professional civil service, and a lifelong commitment to arts and science, establishing many libraries and institutions of learning, and himself speaking more than 12 languages. This included the Indigenous Tupi language, one of the largest Indigenous groupings in southern coastal Brazil. Native speakers call it variously ñeengatú (the good language), ñeendyba (common language) or abáñeenga (human language). 16 This Portuguese word translates as Mestizo in Spanish, Métisse in French, and I suggest ‘mixed-race’ or ‘bi-racial’ in English. The Portuguese word pardo is also sometimes used. The cultural condition of this ‘mixed-ness’ is referred to as mestiçagem in Portuguese, mestizaje in Spanish, and ‘miscegenation’ or ‘racial hybridity’ in English. In the Latin American world these terms have complex connotations, and are part of a suite of terms 36 D. CORBET

In 2014 art curator Adriano Pedrosa and anthropologist Lilia Moritz Schwarcz co-directed the exhibition Histórias Mestiças at the Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo. This survey of several centuries of art and material culture set out to problematise the many interpretations, temporalities, narratives and imaginaries of the Brazilian condition, from an explicitly decolonising perspective. They propose the ‘nocão de mes- tiçagem’ (notion of hybridity) as exhibition method, and by extension as a way of probing a nation’s history and present condition. Pedrosa had earlier in 2014 been appointed director of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), designed by the revered architect Lina Bo Bardi (1914– 1992), and the repository of Latin America’s most signifcant collection of Modern European art. He prefaced his Histórias Mestiças catalogue introduction with this quote from the architect:

There is an urgent need to re-examine the country’s recent history. An analysis of Brazilian ‘popular’ culture is necessary, even if it is poor in light of high culture. This analysis is not the analysis of folklore, always pater- nalistically supported by high culture, but rather the analysis seen from the other side…It is the Northeasterner of leather and empty cans, it is the small-town inhabitant, it is the black and the Indian, it is the mass that invents, which presents an undigested, dry, hard-to-digest contribution. (2014, p. 32)

Pedrosa is one of the world’s most signifcant curators, a veteran of the institutional art system, and he sees with great clarity the Art Academy’s epistemic hegemony, telling us:

Modernity, the museum and the history of art have constructed the most profound, subtle and devastating system of domination in recent centuries. Modernity is the greatest European invention; its greatest edifce is the museum; its key discipline, the history of art.

He identifes the ‘decolonisation of contemporary art’ as a necessity, and further:

used to differentiate different kinds and degrees of racial miscegenation, all with nuanced social signifcance. While ‘bi-racial’ in English has some negatives, it is arguably a less socially loaded term. 2 DECOLONISING THE EXHIBITIONARY COMPLEX … 37

In this new context, of all the countries of the Global South, Brazil is probably the one with the most mature institutions and the most abundant resources; our institutions should therefore take advantage of this privi- leged combination to encourage non-Eurocentric positions and perspectives, focused on the South. (pp. 25–37)

In Australia there are few equivalent calls for cultural decolonisation from institutional museum directors. As we have seen, where such perspectives exist they are advanced by Indigenous curators and artists, and largely unheard outside the progressive end of Academia. Non- Indigenous Australians, in the creative arts and more broadly as a society, have not, it appears, felt the necessity to, or succeeded in, developing a strong, creolised cultural identity of the kind seen in Brazil, Mexico or Indonesia, as distinct from the colonial inheritance (Langton 2004; McLean 2011, p. 62). Nor have national institutions, despite a successful offcial policy of Multiculturalism (often contested by the political Right), forged a strong sense of identifcation with the regional South, apart from a limited, even reluctant, Asia-Pacifc engagement.17 The suggestion that colonial attitudes persist in Australia’s cultural scene is regarded as offensive by some, merely passé by others, and there are similar attitudes to be found across Latin America, however it appears that ‘The Great Australian Silence’ endures with special tenacity (Stanner 1968).18 It is not an exaggeration to suggest that there is a deliberate turning away from unpleasant truths throughout its society, and Academia is by no means immune. In the visual arts, it sometimes

17 This is a somewhat contestable proposition, and I am not suggesting there is no sense of a uniquely Australian national character, just that it has not embraced Aboriginality or cultural hybridity. The British monarch remains Australia’s head of state (also of New Zealand and Canada), however while in 1993 autonomy was granted by Canada to the new nation of Nunuvut, and New Zealand’s Treaty of Waitangi was enacted in 1840, no equivalent treaty exists in Australian law, and Indigenous peoples remain unrecognised in Australia’s founding constitution. It is sometimes not fully appreciated how relatively recent this constitution is, with Australia coming into being as an independent nation only in 1901. 18 This phrase was introduced, in reference to Australia’s reluctance to face up to the brutality of its wars of occupation, by the Australian anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner (Stanner 1968). For a comprehensive account of Australia’s Frontier Wars which includes Indigenous perspectives, also see Reynolds (2006). 38 D. CORBET appears that the belated admission of Australian Indigenous artists to Contemporary Art museums is considered suffcient, that historical wrongs have thus been redressed, and we can all move on. This need to ‘move on’ is interwoven with a national aspiration to lose any vestiges of provinciality. Writing in 2009, the Australian art historian Ian McLean suggested:

Once upon a time […] Australian artists did take their cue primarily from places like New York, Berlin and London, oblivious to the new Third World avant-garde rising up around them – as Terry Smith’s 1974 essay confrms. Not any more. From Australia the old Western centres on the other side of the world no longer seem hegemonic – even to Europhiles. If their claims are still bathed in the aura of the universal, despite being blink- ered by self-interest, from here they seem only localised cultures. (McLean 2009, p. 628)

McLean’s may be the view within the more mature corners of the Australian art world, however as explored below, the last decade has witnessed a major resurgence of the Euro-American exhibitionary complex, and its new outposts in the Middle East. I suggest that Australia’s cultural gaze, and the aspirations of many young artists both here and in Latin America, are again fxed (if they were ever focused elsewhere) on the Northern metropole, now expanded to include Tokyo, Seoul, Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). It may be a stretch, in our globally connected present, to characterise the resurgence of these cultural axes as a New North (and here the geo-topological limitations a global South become apparent), however let us accept at least the possibility that the collapse of the Occidentalist- dominated East/West binary signals the emergence of an expanded and more potent Northern hegemony. To Indigenous thinkers and those from other cultural minorities across the global South, the Academy’s most urgent task is to decolonise its overwhelmingly Anglo-Celtic and/ or Hispano-Lusophone institutional mindset and monoglot epistemologies. However, as argued below, it is not simply a matter of the ‘pacifc integration’ of missing pieces of the narrative, but of developing new methodologies and world-picturings altogether (Chambers 2014, p. 3). In societies forged by a history of transculturation and racial hybridity, it is apparent that new strategies are needed to challenge national histories of enslavement, displacement and cultural erasure. Historical 2 DECOLONISING THE EXHIBITIONARY COMPLEX … 39 ruptures to human, spiritual and environmental relationships cannot be undone, or adequately healed and redressed, nor can colonial borders be re-drawn. We must live in the world as we fnd it, however we are not, to paraphrase Frantz Fanon, prisoners of history, nor should we seek there, or only there, for the meaning of our destiny (1986, p. 229). From the point of view of the coloniser, decolonisation may be a process of with- drawal, but for the colonised it must be one of advance—a wresting of control of the instruments of power—language, knowledge, institutions. These impulses are visible across all expressions of culture, and the emergence during the twentieth century of new voices in English, French, Spanish and Portuguese literature; in dance, flm, theatre and music; runs parallel to developments in the plastic arts. In the words of Indian/ British novelist Salman Rushdie:

those peoples who were once colonised by the language are now rapidly remaking it, domesticating it, become more and more relaxed about the way they use it – assisted by the English language’s enormous fexibility and size, they are carving out large territories for themselves within its frontiers. (1992, p. 64)

Rushdie’s notion of decolonisation as operating ‘inside’ the English language has strong resonances with the Brazilian concept of ‘devour- ing’ imported cultures from within. The poet and philosopher Oswald de Andrade published his Manifesto Antropófago (Anthropophagic Manifesto) in São Paulo in 1928, and the concept of cultural cannibalism has since become a recurrent trope in Latin American decolonial discourse, alongside the prospect of ‘contamination’ of the European canon (de Andrade and Nunes 1990). Indeed it provided the theme of the twenty-fourth Bienal de São Paulo in 1998—titled Antropofagia Cultural (Cultural Anthropophagy), curated by Paulo Herkenhoff, assisted by a young Adriano Pedrosa. This seminal exhibition posi- tioned antropofagia as its overarching metaphor and strategy, with de Andrade’s Manifesto as its guiding text, and it included a ‘historic core’ with numerous Modernismo works by his Grupo dei Cinque (group of Five) contemporaries, including de Andrade’s wife, the celebrated painter Tarsila do Amaral (1886–1973). Lisette Lagnado and others provide an excellent account of the exhibition and its various ‘contaminations’ in a recently published exhibition history, in which Herkenhoff’s characterises the colonial process as ‘a war between cannibalisms’, and further: 40 D. CORBET

The full logic of the colonial regime appears to be represented throughout the process of religious missions as an ideological preparation for submis- sion […] Redemption signifed rescuing the Indians from extreme ‘barba- rism’ – cannibalism – through their conversion to Christianity; in exchange they were offered the Eucharist as consumption of the transubstantiated body of Christ per the doctrine of the Fourth Council of the Lateran. (Lafuente and Lagnado 2014, p. 14)

This digestive exchange will have an uncomfortable ring of truth wherever Christianity was exported (and perhaps better contextualises Lina Bo Bardi’s above reference to digestion). Herkenhoff vividly reminds us that religion is inextricably imbricated with the narrative of conquest, and that the Christian Bible may be the most potent and embedded vehi- cle of epistemic occupation of all. What can exhibition-makers and other cultural producers learn from these perspectives, and how do they serve the purpose of ridding the global exhibitionary complex of its colonial vestiges? The clear message is surely one of embracing hybridity as method—nurturing new identity formations rather than defending the old. Indian cultural theorist Homi K. Bhabha reminds us:

If the effect of colonial power is seen to be the production of hybridiza- tion rather than the noisy command of colonialist authority or the silent repression of native traditions, then an important change of perspective occurs. The ambivalence at the source of traditional discourses on authority enables a form of subversion, founded on the undecidability that turns the discursive conditions of dominance into the grounds of intervention. (Bhabha 2004, p. 160)

Bhaba’s implicit call, like Salman Rushdie’s, like Oswald de Andrade’s, is for the subversion, or perhaps contamination, of colonial epistemologies. Mexican Australian curator Ivan Muñiz Reed calls for ‘epistemic disobedience, replacing or complementing Eurocentric discourses and categories with alternative perspectives’ (Muñiz Reed 2016, p. 16). This entails more than just the insertion of a ‘belated’ global South into the Northern narrative, rather it demands a progressive re-writing and re-voicing of the narrative altogether. In 2014 Routledge published a timely volume titled The Postcolonial Museum, and its authors make this point: 2 DECOLONISING THE EXHIBITIONARY COMPLEX … 41

Therefore, if the history of modern art, like the history of modernity, is rooted in and ordered by imperial discourse, its narrative, which is historically linear, culturally homogenous, geographically centralizing and politically universal, is mined and exploded by the pressures of postcolonial narratives, discourses and expressions. What is at stake here is not a pacifc integration of the missing chapters of the forgotten, excluded and subaltern voices into inherited accounts, but rather the rewriting of those very histories through the irrepressible presence of these other narrations. (Chambers 2014, p. 3)

The reparative re-writing of the Modernist narrative is now underway in Northern citadels. For example, both the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Tate Modern in London have, in recent years, made visible efforts to include Latin American Modern artists into their collections, and by extension an expanded Canon. In a recent keynote address, the Tate Modern’s director Frances Morris said that her team’s mission was to ‘decolonise Modernism’ and the work- in-progress results are on display for all to see in London (Morris 2016). This retrospective re-imagining by major Northern institutions is encouraging, but it is certainly well overdue, and not widely implemented. The question remains: are the institutional attitudes which excluded now-celebrated artists from the Modernist Canon a thing of the past, or is the Academy again belated, celebrating its revised Modernist narrative just as it fragments into the multitudi- nous micro-narratives of the Global Contemporary? The next section examines these questions in relation to a globalised visual arts landscape.

The Rise of the Global Contemporary The Japanese German artist Hito Steyerl has recently written:

Contemporary art is a kind of layer or proxy which pretends that everything is still ok, while people are reeling from the effects of shock policies, shock and awe campaigns, reality TV, power cuts, any other form of cuts, cat GIFs, tear gas—all of which are all completely dismantling and rewiring the sensory apparatus and potentially also human faculties of rea- soning and understanding by causing a state of shock and confusion, of permanent hyperactive depression. (2015) 42 D. CORBET

Here Steyerl succinctly evokes the essence of contemporaneity as an ontological condition, rather than an art-historical formulation. In so doing she characterises the institutional manifestations of Contemporary Art as a fctive construct, a false totalisation imposed on a chaotic and even dangerous state of socio-technological-temporal fux. She also speaks as an artist, and one who lives the precarious conditions under which some of the world’s most signifcant art is being made. Her prob- lematisation of the Contemporary reveals an unease, not so much with the diverse interpretations of the term, but the institutional edifce of the exhibitionary complex—the sustaining infrastructure of museums, curators, academies, journals, commercial galleries and private collectors, still overwhelmingly weighted towards Northern institutions and markets. Despite the supposed collapse of a North Atlantic hegemony, there is widespread and persistent distrust of institutional competence to present the most vital art of our time. Following Cuauhtémoc Medina’s charac- terisation of Modernism as ‘NATO Art’, it can be argued that the Global Contemporary signals little more than a post-NATO, G12 cultural hegemony that, while promising equitable access and multilateralism, remains largely impenetrable to outsiders. And, like the regional petit- modernities evoked by Okwui Enwezor, we have seen the emergence of equivalent petit-contemporaries, cadet branches of the hierarchies in New York, Basel and Shanghai. On a global level, and microcosmically present in centres such as Sydney, Buenos Aires and São Paulo, there is a powerful nexus between infuential über-gallerists, collectors and artist superstars, strongly linked to institutional patronage and benefaction, which has the power to affect the acquisition and programming decisions of major institutions, in turn stimulating market value and prestige. Indeed many of the same people sit on museum boards, while perform- ing various kinds of brokerage and facilitation. Perhaps it has always been thus, however this un-virtuous circle has reached new levels of concen- tration in the twenty-frst century, wildly distorting both markets and curatorial independence. These developments have coincided with the relatively new phenomenon of museum architecture as spectacle and destination, flled with art that Terry Smith has described as ‘Retro-Spectacularism’, alongside the rise of global ‘branded’ satellite museums, for example the new Guggenheim Museums in Bilbao and Abu Dhabi, and the new outpost of the Musée du Louvre, also in Abu Dhabi (Smith 2009, p. 7). Rio de Janeiro in particular experienced a frenzy of museum-building in the 2 DECOLONISING THE EXHIBITIONARY COMPLEX … 43 lead-up to the 2016 Olympic Games. It is admittedly somewhat reduc- tive to confate the offerings the world’s diverse contemporary museums into one category, however the overall trend towards market-driven spectacle and ‘art stars’ is hard to deny. In 2015, British arts journalist Julia Halperin revealed that 30% of major solo exhibitions held in US museums between 2007 and 2013 featured artists represented by just fve major commercial galleries, and this situation is repeated with vary- ing concentrations across the world. Cuauhtémoc Medina has described a Mexican history of exclusion (and in 2006 co-curated with Olivier Debroise a ‘remedial’ exhibition: La era de le discrepancia) (Debroise et al. 2006; Halperin 2015). In his catalogue introduction he relates how in Mexico between 1960 and 1990, such was the institutional and market fxation on the great Mexican Moderns, that most public and commercial galleries ignored the next generation of contemporary artists (now widely celebrated), giving rise to the phenomenon of Los Grupos, the multiple artist and curatorial collectives which formed in response to what can now be seen as a mass failure of institutional imagination. Similar accounts of exclusion can be found in most Latin American countries, and as we have seen, these effects can be traced, in part, to the codifcation of Modernist taxonomies within national Academies. A corollary of this is the consistently poor representation of ethic minority and women artists in institutional settings across the board. According to recent research by US academic Maura Reilly, the proportion of women artists selected for solo exhibitions remains appallingly low, barely nudg- ing 20% in major art centres worldwide (Reilly 2015). Despite these dispiriting statistics, it would be erroneous to suggest that infuential elites are the sole arbiters of what art the public gets to see. Anecdotally at least, there is a correlation between unresponsive institutions and the emergence of vibrant independent art scenes. Aside from metropolitan mega-museums, there is, worldwide, an important infrastructure of independent and University museums, and a growing network of independently funded and artist-run spaces, which provide a signifcant counterweight to market-driven programming. In Latin America, where major public museums largely concentrate on historical collections, University and independent museums assume a great importance. For example, the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) situated on the campus of Mexico City’s independent university (Universidad Autónoma de México, Latin America’s largest university) and the University of São Paulo’s Museu de Arte Contemporânea 44 D. CORBET

(MAC-SP), housed across eight levels of a massive Oscar Niemeyer- designed building near the Parque Ibirapuera cultural precinct, are scaled and resourced at a level which many public art museums in Australia would envy. These institutions, as well as offering extensive exhibition programmes, are important centres of research and scholarship, with nothing remotely comparable among Australia’s relatively modest University museums. Australia however has an important and often-overlooked network of regional galleries, funded mainly at munic- ipal level, and while these are not necessarily centres of scholarship or artistic innovation, they fulfl an important role in the nation’s arts ecology. Australia’s comparatively generous funding for the arts, at national and state level, has arguably reduced the impetus for artists to collectivise in order to bypass institutional systems of patronage, unlike in Mexico where only landmark national and city museums attract signifcant government funding. Brazil has a similar ecology, however its diverse and well-resourced institutions ‘got it’ somewhat earlier, possibly led by the success of Brazilian contemporary artists overseas. It can also be argued that Brazil’s historical material cultures cannot easily compete, in touristic terms, with Mexico’s awe-inspiring Aztec, Olmec, Mixtec and Zapotec legacy, or its great muralists and Moderns, and as a result Brazilian art museums have more readily embraced the Contemporary. Further, Brazil has a long history of corporate support for the visual arts, and organisations like the Bank of Brazil, Santander Bank, Itaú, and the telecommunications giant Oi, each fund major contemporary cultural centres in multiple cities, and support signifcant contemporary collections. Nationwide, a small levy on participating businesses funds the non-proft Serviço Social do Comércio (SESC) network of community centres, with a combined educational, recreational and cultural focus. Across the globe, city administrators increasingly grasp that the presence of artists in depressed neighbourhoods can lead to urban re-generation via an infux of artisanal shops, art galleries, restaurants and creative businesses, in turn stimulating real estate values and civic pride. In cities without substantial arts infrastructure, or where it is largely focused on tourist-destination museums, these activities assume even greater importance. Certain metropolitan areas become vibrant creative hubs, independent of government support, and in small and large cities in Latin America, along with many other global South centres (particularly in Indonesia), this is where the action now is. Across these zones thousands 2 DECOLONISING THE EXHIBITIONARY COMPLEX … 45 upon thousands of small art spaces and collectives are connecting, shar- ing information, facilitating exchanges and mounting hybridised projects on miniscule resources, bypassing institutional and museum-based funding models through a combination of enlightened benefaction and crowd-funding. Although some such transactions continue to be bro- kered in the North, latitudinal exchange is growing exponentially, and historical language divides are being overcome. Perhaps even more important in international terms is the rise of well-resourced, recurring, usually city-based exhibitions—biennials and triennials—which in many cases are produced by autonomous organisations, or are at least not wholly reliant on government funding, through a range of public–private structures. For brevity, I will use the term ‘biennial’ generically to cover these exhibitions, but of course this includes triennials and other recurrent formats such as Documenta, a quinquennial exhibition staged in Kassel, Germany. This notional artistic independence from government infuence does not apply across the board—there are still controversies around artist selections, most often in the selections for the National Pavilions at the Biennale di Venezia. However, and perhaps to avoid government interference, while national representations were adopted for the frst few editions of the Bienal de São Paulo, they were soon abandoned, and have largely fallen by the wayside worldwide. More often these days, the biennial organisation selects a guest curator who is given a large budget, an organisational infrastructure, and the independence to select artists according to his or her own vision. It is common for these individuals to be drawn from outside the country and their (usually unspoken) role is to stir up local art world complacencies. The competition for the top names is ferce, and a series of successful biennials can rapidly build a credible profle for cities, curators and artists. Over time, governments have learned that they do not have the competence to make curatorial decisions. Biennial exhibitions have undoubtedly been the most visible vehi- cles for the development of a Global Contemporary. As we have seen, both Brazil and Australia were early adopters of an exhibition model that began in Venice, Italy, in 1895, and the international spread of this phenomenon has accelerated greatly in recent decades, almost invaria- bly as a platform for living artists. In addition to São Paulo, Brazil now has signifcant international biennials in Porto Alegre (Mercosul Bienal), Salvador (Bienal da Bahia) and Curitaba (Bienal da Curitaba), and an additional biennial of screen-based art (Videobrasil), also in São Paulo. 46 D. CORBET

To the long-running Biennale of Sydney have been added international events in Melbourne (NGV Triennial, Tarrawarra Biennial), Brisbane (Asia Pacifc Triennial of Contemporary Art), and several nation- ally focused recurrent exhibitions. Most Latin American capitals now host international events of this kind, with the somewhat perplexing exception of Mexico, where its frst such offering—the Biennial of the Frontiers—was launched in Tamaulipas state in 2014, but appears not to have progressed to an exhibition. More visible has been the Transborder Biennial, a collaboration between museums in El Paso (Texas) and Ciudad Juárez (Mexico) which had its ffth edition in 2018. While resolutely international in scope, many of these projects have a strong regional focus, and from the late twentieth century have included an increasing number of events with a specifcally South–South agenda. The genesis of the move towards Southern perspectives is considered by many to be the second Bienal de la Habana in Cuba in 1986 (and its successor in 1989), directed by the legendary Lillian Lanes Godoy and principally curated by Gerardo Mosquera.19 Subsequent biennials in Australia, Southeast Asia, Africa and the Middle East have played a part in this narrative, and the Australian art historians Anthony Gardner and Charles Green have provided a comprehensive and nuanced account of these developments since the 1950s, too lengthy to narrate here (Gardner and Green 2013, 2016). A de-centralised, multi-city organisational model is gaining traction, and in 2017 the frst South America- wide biennial (bienalsur) was launched—organised in Buenos Aires, Argentina, but pan-Latin American in scope (including LatinX diasporas worldwide), featuring hundreds of events across numerous cities. The Bienal Centroamericana is itinerant, and since 1998 has mounted editions in different regional cities from its Costa Rica base, a model that is increasingly popular, a prominent example being the pan-European biennial, titled Manifesta. These trends notwithstanding, it is regrettably still the case that, for Southern artists, the greatest international visibility is achieved through exhibitions mounted in the metropolitan centres of the North. In 1989, three years after Havana’s second biennial, the exhibition Magiciens de la Terre, curated by Jean-Hubert Martin, was staged across two major venues in Paris, and although much critiqued at the time, it is

19 For a detailed consideration of the 2nd Havana biennial and its infuence, see Gardner and Green (2016). 2 DECOLONISING THE EXHIBITIONARY COMPLEX … 47 considered the frst event to equitably present to European audiences artists from the periphery, juxtaposed with their peers from the North. In 2002, Okwui Enwezor directed Documenta 11 in Kassel, Germany, seen by many as a riposte to Magiciens, and a natural successor to Paulo Herkenhoff’s 1998 São Paulo biennial, referenced earlier. Certainly, for many in the North, Documenta 11 was the exhibition that ushered in the era of the Global Contemporary, presenting many little-known artists and collectives from countries which had never before exhibited in Europe. Enwezor was the frst, and so far only, non-European to direct a Documenta, and only the second person to also direct the Biennale di Venezia, which he did in 2015.20 The relatively recent embrace of the global South by the Northern art world has given rise to huge vol- umes of critical discourse, much of it unfavourable. The suspicion per- sists among some Southern artist and thinkers that the grand projet of a globalised art world may not be so very different from the world fairs of the nineteenth century, commodifying and exoticising new cultural offerings for a jaded Euro-American (and lately North Asian) palette, hungry for its own lost authenticity (Ogbechie 2005).21 However, what- ever the perceived shortcomings of Documenta’s emblematic eleventh edition, it established a strongly decolonial trajectory, and there is little doubt that biennials, with their increasingly elaborate education and satellite programmes, have greatly improved access for artists from beyond the North Atlantic arc, which has in turn exerted infuence on museum practice and programming, and not just in museums of art. Enwezor’s lead has been followed by a succession of global-minded curators working across numerous subsequent bi/triennials, with many of them going on to preside over important museums.22 This includes some prominent Latin American curators, such as Ivo Mosquita (Brazil), Cuauhtémoc Medina (Mexico), Inti Guerrero (Colombia), Lourdes Ramos (Puerto Rico) and Adriano Pedrosa (Brazil). Few Australian curators have been invited to direct signifcant overseas biennials, however former Australian Centre for Contemporary Art Director Juliana Engberg was appointed

20 The other person to direct both Documenta and the Venice Biennale was legendary Swiss curator Harald Szeemann (1933–2005). 21 For example, see Okwunodo Ogbechie (2005). 22 Examples of itinerant international curators are Hans Ulrich Obrist (Germany), Hou Hanrou (China), Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (Italy), Massimiliano Gioni (Italy), Thelma Golden (USA), Charles Esche (UK), and Stephanie Rosenthal (Germany). 48 D. CORBET artistic programme director for the Danish city of Aarhus, one of two European cultural capitals in 2017. Whether this apparent lack of demand for Australian curatorial talent is the result of the ‘tyranny of dis- tance’, perceived parochialism, or some other factor, is hard to say. What it does mean is that Australian artists are reliant either on the interest of overseas curators (which is reasonably high, especially in relation to Indigenous artists) to ensure their presence in international biennials and museum surveys, or on Australian government-initiated efforts to showcase the country’s creative talents. These latter efforts, while well- intentioned, have not always been well-received by critics (Davidson 2013). While there is understandable cynicism around a frequent-fier cohort of perhaps ffty in-demand biennial directors, there is widespread accept- ance that the guest curator system produces more equitable results than the museum/market/collector axis. For most of these marquee names, a decolonising, gender-diverse and inclusive approach is now implicit, if not always explicit in their artist selections. This has immense implications for artists, and not just from the peripheries. For most practitioners, participation in biennials means not just visibility, but freedom from the constraints of art market and museum-determined formats, opening up new areas of practice, and enabling global networks and connections. Gardner and Green have described in detail how these exhibitions have rapidly developed into felds of artistic and technological experimentation, likening them to laboratories of ideas, both artistic and geopolitical:

So, how had biennials functioned in the construction of contemporary art? They had created and enabled a world-picture of art that was globally networked without necessarily being the handmaiden to globalisation (for servant status was one of the risks associated with the global yearnings of biennials), and which was entwined with the motifs of laboratory-like experimentation and global peripheralism. (Gardner and Green 2016, p. 276)

It is not an exaggeration to suggest that for numerous Latin American, Australasian, African and Indo-Pacifc artists who have achieved international recognition, inclusion in a biennial has boosted both their national and international status, and in many cases edged them closer to that holy grail of creative endeavour—the ability to earn a living from art practice. More women artists, along with other previously marginalised groups, have gained opportunities, and the greater diversity of 2 DECOLONISING THE EXHIBITIONARY COMPLEX … 49 voices and practices has resulted in a richer and more complex landscape of Contemporary Art, including intersections with other, ‘non- art’ forms of material and performative cultures, situated histories and alternative knowledge systems. While the societal reach of these developments should not be exaggerated, biennials are attracting ever larger audiences worldwide, and activating urban spaces well beyond the museum. Arguably, it is in these spaces, rather than in metropolitan destination museums, that audiences experience the true diversity and depth of the art actually being made across the world. It may also mean that mega-museums increasingly serve a different social function altogether— as consumer-focused cultural megaplexes for well-heeled young tourists, thronged with buzzy cafés and gift shops, with shiny and monumental artworks functioning as cool backdrops for Instagram selfes.

The Artist/Curator as Activist So far, this chapter has considered contemporary practice largely in terms of exhibitions and curatorial perspectives. Certainly museum directors and curators are the gatekeepers and shapers of the exhibitionary complex, however they do not make or even, for the most part, initiate the art they show. It falls not to academics and curators, but to artists (and not just visual artists) to be the sentinel species which peers into the future and reveals to us the immanent condition of our lives, as humanity teeters on the edge of the Anthropocene epoch. At the time of writing, the verities that have underlined the global geopolitical order for decades appear to be fast eroding, and the progressive, decolonising narrative outlined earlier appears to be fragile indeed. Quite suddenly the complacencies of American democracy (fctional or real) are themselves under siege, its liberal intelligentsia aghast at the daily media horror show of their political institutions. These developments have disturbing ech- oes south of the Rio Grande, and while many Latin American countries remain resolutely progressive, the powerhouse economies of Mexico and particularly Brazil are under extreme duress, their societies experiencing traumatic political convulsions. Following the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s government appears to be in the hands of a plu- tocracy intent on reversing decades of social and environmental progress. Elsewhere, Venezuela is experiencing social turmoil and Cuba’s apertura (opening up) has stalled. Australia is not immune—the sovereign aspirations of its First Peoples appear stymied in the cul-de-sac of mainstream 50 D. CORBET political intransigence, its progressive society weighed down by a small but vocal white nationalist rump, while geo-strategic sabre-rattling grows louder in the Asia-Pacifc region. In many parts of the world it appears that sinister forms of neo-nationalism, race-supremacy and intolerance are on the rise. Perhaps this is cyclical, or perhaps it is not, and there is every reason for vigilance against a re-colonisation of minds, institutions and international relations by those who would curtail dialogue, erode hard-won freedoms and silence dissident voices. The concluding part of this chapter examines how some artists and exhibition-makers are responding to these rapidly changing conditions, and the terrain on which this plays out—the fraught but fertile nexus between art and politics. It appears that art’s relationship with society is undergoing a seismic shift, and while this has long been evident, there is an increasing tempo to these developments, fuelled by a toxic politico-media culture worldwide, and tabloid ‘culture wars’. For every blow, there is a counter-blow, and one of the most prominent trends in Contemporary Art is work which foregrounds social, cultural and class identity, emerging not only from a personal creative impulse, but also from the collective, and the intersections between individual political subjectivity and group agency within the public sphere. This encom- passes the art of protest and resistance; of Indigenous self-determina- tion; of feminism, ‘masculinities’ and gender diversity; of body politics and sexuality; of masquerade and personal mythologies; of the neuro/ bio-divergent and the self-taught; of displacement and forced migration; of witnessing, trauma and forgotten histories. Emblematic examples of collectivised practice are Brazilian Grupo Contraflé’s art/education projects in urban favelas and rural communities, and their Mujawara da Árvore-Escola (The Tree School) project in participation with Campus in Camps, an initiative of Palestine’s Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency (DAAR). Throughout Latin America feminist art collectives have gained visibility, for example Mexico’s El Maiz es nuestra vida (Corn Is Our Life), Bolivia’s Mujeres Creando (Creating Women), and Cuban Tania Bruguera’s activist Arte Útil network. In Australia, numerous Aboriginal art collectives, both rural and urban, are increasingly driven by women, and research/ exhibitionary projects such the Future Feminist Archive aim to restore important but marginalised art movements. Importantly, while emerging from deeply situated histories and place-contexts, many such projects are able to reach a global audience—for example Aboriginal activist Richard Bell’s itinerant Aboriginal Embassy has travelled to many locations 2 DECOLONISING THE EXHIBITIONARY COMPLEX … 51 the world over, and curatorial initiatives such as Frontier Imaginaries, led by Netherlands-based Australian researcher Vivian Ziherl, operate autonomously across borders, mounting iterations in diverse locations worldwide. As we have seen, international biennials have also been instrumental in facilitating artistic mobility, and have not shied away from socio-political themes. At Documenta 14 (2017), Argentine artist Marta Minujín’s monumental structure The Parthenon of Books (2017)—a recreation of a 1983 work in Buenos Aires, featuring books banned by Argentina’s military junta (ousted that year)—was erected on Friedrichsplatz outside Kassel’s Fridericianum Museum, and here included many kinds of forbidden texts, including those banned and/or burned by the German Third Reich. Recent biennials in Brazil, Turkey, Palestine, the UAE and Australia have also had strong socio-political components, alongside numerous independent platforms. In 2016, renowned Mexican artist Pedro Reyes mounted Doomocracy at New York’s City’s Brooklyn Army Terminal—a temporary installation meant as a parody on what might happen if Donald Trump were actually elected President, which turned out to be frighteningly prescient. Reyes, along with Tania Bruguera (Cuba), Vik Muniz (Brazil) and several North American artists, is part of New York-based Creative Time’s Pledges of Allegiance project, in which protest fags are fown on participating institutions. The traffc is not one-way—in 2017 the UK collective Forensic Architecture’s inves- tigation of Mexico’s 2014 Ayotzinapa killings was featured at MUAC in Mexico City, and in 2018 the joint US/Mexico Transborder Biennial, discussed above, straddled an increasingly weaponised zone. Alongside such physical projects, numerous online initiatives have fourished, ranging from Australia’s Project Anywhere, to Mexico’s Borderhack and Tijuana Calling projects. While Southern biennials and independent art spaces have long embraced such perspectives, there appears to be new willingness within the Northern exhibitionary complex to respond to this kind of art, wit- ness the growing number of major museum exhibitions that engage with the art of protest and resistance, encompassing a belated recognition of Latin American histories. Many such exhibitions are historical/archival in nature, but with sightlines into the contemporary. Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985 was part of Los Angeles’s city-wide, periodic project Pacifc Standard Time: LA/LA, exploring the infuence of Latin American and LatinX art in Southern California and the United States more broadly. The Whitney Museum of American art in New York 52 D. CORBET staged An Incomplete History of Protest, drawing on its extensive collection, and London’s Tate Gallery staged Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, just a few examples of a worldwide trend. Museum exhibitions foregrounding gender and sexuality have also been increasing in number and prominence. Examples include London’s Tate Britain (Queer British Art 1861–1967); New York’s New Museum (Gender as a Trigger and as a Weapon); Sao Paulo’s MASP (Histórias da sexual- idade—Histories of Sexuality) and in Porto Alegre, the Santander Bank Cultural Centre’s independently curated Queermuseu (Queer Museum). The last of these was prematurely closed due to protests by conservative groups which accused the show of ‘promoting blasphemy, paedophilia and bestiality’, fuelled by a recently emboldened coalition of religious entities and a resurgent Brazilian alt-right (Tiburi 2017). It seems that even commercial markets are taking note of these trends—for example, the curated Focus section of New York’s 2017 commercial Armory Show was titled What Is to Be Done?, an English translation of the title of Russian author Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s 1863 novel Chto Delat, written in a St Petersburg prison where he was imprisoned for his socialist beliefs. For such a title—not exactly a call to action, but an activist question—to be invoked by the world’s richest art fair is telling, signal- ling a profound existential unease. However, art markets and institutional museums, while wielding enormous power over artists’ lives, are seldom the driving force of social change. It is individual artists themselves, along with independent curators, who are leading this process via a complex ecology of studios and project spaces—the increasingly connected sites where new art comes into being. At its birth much of this art is small-scale, modest, cerebral, documentary, ‘anti-aesthetic’, un-monumental and even emphatically non-visual. The Australian art historian Nikos Papastergiadis has characterised such art as ‘small gestures in specifc places’, and it is no surprise that, in a spectacle economy, much of this art fies below the institutional radar of the exhibitionary complex, let alone the mandarins of cultural industries and city branding (2008, p. 369). In Latin America and Australia, a prominent characteristic of their recent ‘de-peripheralisation’ is the agonistic collision of two powerful urges—towards the global and towards the local. Many of the projects cited earlier are at once deeply rooted in a sense of place, while connecting into the Global Contemporary. For many artists, various forms of de-territorialised practice are well-established, manifesting across 2 DECOLONISING THE EXHIBITIONARY COMPLEX … 53 international studio residencies and exchanges, far-fung collaborations, global biennials and itinerant projects of many kinds. And, as we have seen, in addition to online spaces, new kinds of physical spaces—the borderlands and crossing zones, refugee camps and ‘no-places’ existing in the shadow of the wall—are sites for new kinds of practice, thought and exchange. Against some of the panoramic worldviews expressed earlier, exhibition-makers must also consider the granular detail of the specifc and the situated, whether they be human relationships, material cultures, local histories or regional conficts. The zone where these many discourses and imaginaries intersect is what might be called ‘the translocal’—a space in which many artists and curators operate. It seems undeniable that across the global South there is a visible and growing nexus between the work of artists and grassroots activist movements, and these developments are arguably the most visible ‘link in our tragedies’, not just between Austro-Oceania and Latin America, but also between diasporic communities across the North. While it is tempting to view such projects in art-historical terms, contiguous with the 1990s (Northern) ‘Social Turn’, many such impulses have a far older genesis.23 They emerge from physical communities and are context-generative, engaged in what Indian anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls ‘the production of locality’, motivated by a powerful connection to place, and a marked urge towards social and environmental engagement, often with real-world outcomes in real lives (1996). Such art/social change movements are most prominent in societies experiencing recent or ongoing political and social struggle, and for reasons discussed above, they appear particularly prevalent in Latin America, and less so in Australia, outside

23 This term was originated by British critic Claire Bishop, to characterise certain late twentieth-century artistic practices, in response to French curator Nicholas Bourriaud’s infuential book Relational Aesthetics. For a fuller context see Bishop (2006) and Bourriaud (2002). There is of course a far longer history of performative and interactive practice in Northern avant-garde art, as distinct from theatre and dance, as well as numerous instances of community-based art projects and place-making of various kinds. However with socially engaged art, or ‘social practice’ as it has come to be known in the United States, we are seeing increasing audience participation and indeed co-creation, to the point where it begins to blur with ordinary life, and the distinction between artist and participants may disappear altogether. Bishop canvasses a variety of views on the implications of these developments, not least that cultural production is moving to occupy a social space abandoned by civic and government institutions. In a later book, Bishop characterises the trend towards Social Practice as ‘a re-turn to the social, part of the ongoing history of attempts to rethink art collectively’ (Bishop 2012, p. 3). 54 D. CORBET of the Indigenous realm. It can be argued that Indigenous artists, despite cultural rupture and the colonial imposition of the Northern Academy, have always worked ‘relationally’ with the communities around them, occupying many hybrid roles as keepers of knowledge, conductors of rituals and makers of sacred objects. Indeed much of their work is not made as ‘art’ at all. For these artists, it may be a matter not so much of ‘a re-turn to the social’, but of never having turned away in the frst place (Bishop 2012, p. 3).

Coda: All the World’s Futures In conclusion, it should be noted that this chapter’s emphasis on socio-political and activist perspectives in Contemporary Art is not intended to over-stress the teleological aspects of contemporary practice over the visual, aesthetic or affective values that draw people to art in the frst place. Indeed, it can be argued that politically or socially-engaged art is only effective when it engages the viewer across a spectrum of affects and meanings, and that this balance—facilitated by curators and exhibition designers—is critical to any kind of empathic connection with viewers. The question remains as to whether art can make a difference in the face of the increasingly violent endgame of failing neoliberal economics, ideological warfare, growing inequality, unprecedented displacement of people, and looming environmental catastrophe. Certainly, the creative arts cannot be a substitute for mass political action and progressive international leadership, however they may play a critical role in ‘connecting-up’ the diverse lifeworlds and anxieties of their publics, and in opening up new ways of thinking about the world. The work of cultural decolonisation has arguably acquired a renewed urgency in the face of new forms of colonialism, and artists and exhibition-makers in Latin America, Australia and across the global South—individually and collectively—will play a critical part in enabling alternative knowledges and progressive futures in an increasingly interconnected world.

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