REGIONALITY / MONDIALITY REGIONALITY / MONDIALITY Perspectives on Art, Aesthetics and Globalization An anthology Södertörn Studies in Art History and Aesthetics 2 Södertörn Academic Studies 57 ISSN 1650-433X ISBN 978-91-86069-93-3 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION Charlotte Bydler and Cecilia Sjöholm 9 1 BETWEEN REGION AND WORLD 21 LOCATION MATTERS: GROUNDING THE GLOBAL IN GLISSANT J. Michael Dash 23 DUST BETWEEN AMERICA AND EUROPE: DETAILS AND TOUT-MONDE IN THE WORK OF ÉDOUARD GLISSANT Christina Kullberg 41 TEMPORAL SENSIBILITIES: GLISSANT ON FILIATION Cecilia Sjöholm 65 5 2 TRANSCULTURATION 83 PROBLEMS OF INTERLOCUTION Lisette Lagnado 85 FROM OBJECTACTS TO DANCETHINGS: ‘TRANSCREATION’ IN THE WORKS OF ROBERT MORRIS, HÉLIO OITICICA AND LYGIA PAPE André Lepecki 105 RE-MEMBERING A CRIME: A REFLECTION ON THE GALDINO JESUS DOS SANTOS MEMORIAL IN BRASÍLIA Patricia Lorenzoni 131 ART, GEOGRAPHIES AND VALUES: THINKING SÁMI CONTEMPORARY ART ARCHIPELAGICALLY Charlotte Bydler 153 THE PHANTASMATIC TOMB, OR METHODOLOGY AND SCHMUTZ IN INTERCULTURAL TRANSLATION Martin Svensson Ekström 173 6 3 NEW WAYS OF CONCEPTUALIZING GLOBALIZATION 207 LEVINAS AS TRAVELING THEORY John Drabinski 209 WORLDS PICTURED IN CONTEMPORARY ART: PLANES AND CONNECTIVITIES Terry Smith 239 CULTURAL TRANSLATION OR CULTURAL EXCLUSION? THE BIENNALE OF SYDNEY AND CONTEMPORARY ART IN THE SOUTH Anthony Gardner and Charles Green 265 AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES 295 7 INT RODUC ION CHARLO E BYDLER AND CECILIA SJÖHOLM CHARLOTTE BYDLER & CECILIA SJÖHOLM ow do we talk about globalization in art and poet- ics? Is it a function of capitalism that replaces aesthetics with market values? Or is it a matter of interpreting aesthetic expressions across cultural borders? Globalization has come to refer to widely distributed eco- nomic exchange processes, communications systems, and political effects on a planetary scale. But it also includes the idea of an outwardly expanding substance or spreading system. The aim of this anthology is to point to a double mechanism at work in the globalization of art: on the one hand, a will to strengthen the regional aspects of its pro- duction, and on the other, a wish to underline the social and cultural implications of its global address. The articles gathered in this volume all point to a tendency or impulse that inevitably accompanies globalization in art and poet- ics, namely, the need to emphasize the regional and local. At the same time, the return to the regional is marked by a global awareness of the need to translate, to create new concepts and new forms of self-understanding. Art and poetics demand an ongoing reinvention of lexica and cate- gories, thus adding to the archives of experience that in- form our ideas of how the relation between the local and the global is constituted. The title, Regionality/Mondiality: Perspectives on Art, Aesthetics and Globalization, signals the double implications of globalization. In the art scene today, we can discern an effort to particularize both the production and the under- standing of art. This effort can be considered through the 11 INTRODUCTION concept of regionality, a neologism that makes a substantive out of the quality of being situated territorially as well as relationally. Bypassing the abstract national level, regio- nality addresses the more tangible physical environment. As can be seen in the articles on the archipelagic thinking of Glissant and on contemporary Sámi art, cultural as well as physical aspects of one’s immediate environment may well be used to signal a form of self-understanding in the face of cultural and economic expansion. The term mondi- ality in its turn has been used in the title of this book to signal the particular character of such expansion. The con- cept derives from the French word for “world” or “people,” and affirms the fundamentally social and cultural charac- ter of “global” awareness. The global expansion of the art scene is accompanied by new forms of self-understanding, pointing back to the question of how a culture or a people can be formed. Since the 1980s, several different factors have been em- phasized in the varied efforts to characterize the new era in the fields of art and aesthetic theory. For example, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, collectivity and cultural relations have been articulated in new terms, as the post-socialist implications of globalization cannot be avoided. Moreover, not only have the great colonial powers such as Great Britain or France had to take into account their own post- colonial situations, but so too have several non-colonial countries been forced to examine the finer layers and com- plexities of their cultural identities. In addition, new media together with aggressive markets have forced more or less welcome changes in the conditions for production and distribution of artistic expressions. Transcultural processes have thus altered poetic forms, markets, curatorial work, and interfaces with audiences. The language of economics – or economic globalization – may inspire a worldview where global capital is the true 12 CHARLOTTE BYDLER & CECILIA SJÖHOLM totality. But that totality is never actually known. Mon- dialisation, by contrast, sums up world and people in a totalization while pointing out their temporal and spatial dimensions. Mondialisation places participants in contem- poraneity in realms of either commonality or foreignness. Contemporaneity is thus shared with others, even if only partially and at a distance. Aesthetic concepts can be used as vehicles to claim a foothold in this contemporaneity, both holding out the common and risking a breakdown of dialogue. The collection of essays brought together here demonstrates the paradoxical abyss entailed in our new “globalized” world, and the power of the link between the regional and the global. Regionality/Mondiality: Perspectives on Art, Aesthetics and Globalization should be seen as an attempt to define the dou- ble position between the regional and the mondial in con- temporary art and aesthetics, bypassing globalization and various totalizing methods of understanding. Each author brings a particular view on these issues. Scholarship in aes- thetics and art today must negotiate not only the question of how expression is culturally shaped, but also how it ad- dresses the paradoxical contemporary situation wherein belonging and non-belonging, the regional and the global, come together. Artistic practices form models for the com- munity we share, either institutionalized and official, or in- formal and diffuse. At the same time, these practices often derive from regional corners that are marginal from a global perspective. The collection has been divided into three sections, suggesting three possible ways to address the issue of the double-bind of Regionality/Mondiality. The first section is dedicated to Édouard Glissant’s theory of “relation”; the second presents various modes of transcultural trans- lation; and the third introduces new ways of conceptual- izing globalization in philosophy, art and aesthetics. 13 INTRODUCTION The first section,Between Region and World, takes the cue from the work of Édouard Glissant. Though a presence in francophone literature and philosophy for a long time, Glissant (together with translations of his work in English) has entered the worlds of art and moving images only in the 2000s. This work of aesthetic translation is in itself in- teresting, but here it will be enough to say that big exhibi- tions, as well as Manthia Diawara’s 2010 filmÉdouard Glissant – Un Monde en relation (One world in relation), have done much to relate his concepts to current aesthetic de- bates.1 Indeed, Glissant offers an especially rich material for thinking of relations within wholes and parts, plane- tarity and situatedness. How do we name regions and worlds in aesthetic registers? Wording is also worlding, as J. Michael Dash shows in “Location Matters: Grounding the Global in Glissant.” The small island of Martinique where Glissant was born figures importantly in his poetry and scholarly texts as an example of how totality can be approached without claims to total understanding. As an overseas colony, Martinique relates to France through unequal and oppressive bonds across the Atlantic; through language use and education, through trade and political rights. Events and characters in Glissant’s texts are ren- dered through multiple perspectives. Never fully under- stood and certainly without a single core personality or nature, persons and plots are fragments that point beyond themselves. Glissant himself invented concepts such as “Relation,” “Tout-monde,” “archipelagical thinking” (and many more) to be able to share the aesthetic sensitivities that nature and history seem to have formed in equal part. Although Martinique’s volcanic warm climate and its loca- tion in the Caribbean world distinguish the small island from the cold Northern sea, the omnipresent nature – and especially water in all its apparitions – is integrated with planetary humanity. In her article “Dust between America 14 CHARLOTTE BYDLER & CECILIA SJÖHOLM and Europe: Details and Tout-monde in the Work of Édouard Glissant,” Christina Kullberg points to Glissant’s resistance to totalizations that impose inevitably reductive under- standings of cultural forms, a reduction that resounds with the violent experience of politico-economic admini- stration. Cecilia Sjöholm’s “Temporal Sensibilities: Glis- sant on Filiation” points to the importance of opening up the cultural dominance of the identity of root-identity