HOW LATITUDES BECOME FORMS JUST HOW DID LATITUDES BECOME FORMS? ON MARCH 7, 2002, Philippe Vergne, Douglas Fogle, Olukemi Ilesanmi, and Aimee Chang engaged in a roundtable discussion of the Walker Art Center’s global initiative and the mounting of the exhibition How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in a Global Age.1 Following is an edited version of that conversation. Aimee Chang: Let’s start with the title of the show … Philippe Vergne: It was the result of a process that started with a discussion about what the exhibition should be and whether or not we should look at a specific theme. We went through many, many options; Once Upon a Place and Total Architecture were two early possibilities. Douglas Fogle: When we first started organizing the exhibition, we used the notion of “metropole” as a struc- turing principle, relating to the cities we were visiting, but that quickly fell out as a strategy. PV: Another idea was to use the show as a reflection of how art practice changes when we change locations. We tried The Third Place, making a distinction between place and space, after the theory of Homi Bhabha.2 We tried Globalism, using that word like the word modernism to see if a comparable shift could be identified in the development of late twentieth-century art. None of these initial ideas were completely satisfying. In the end, we did not want the show to be about a specific theme, to illustrate a theme. We wanted to keep our eyes and minds as open as possible when we were traveling and identifying artists. But we did want to place the exhibition in a historical perspective and to position it with respect to a specific history of art. Harald Szeemann’s 1969 exhibition When Attitudes Become Form was seminal in that it high- lighted shifts in practice that are still very active today, framed the way institutions and curators worked, and identified a very specific range of aesthetics. It reflected a major change in the world during the late 1960s. Mário Pedrosa, in one of his essays on Hélio Oiticica, speaks of an experimental exercise of freedom.3 Such an “exercise” was firmly in place in When Attitudes Become Form, and it became, for us, a way to position our title: How Latitudes Become Forms. When we discussed this title with the global advisory committee, Paulo Herkenhoff found the reference to Szeemann’s show very interesting. For Paulo, When Attitudes Become Form was a very important exhibition that signaled both the beginning and the end of a very specific way of working—the beginning of international exhibitions but also the peak of Eurocentrism. The artists involved in When Attitudes Become Form were almost ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 1 Philippe Vergne is curator in the visual arts department; Douglas Fogle is associate curator; Olukemi Ilesanmi is curatorial assitant; and Aimee Chang is curatorial intern. 2 See Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994). 3 See Mário Pedrosa, “La Bienal de cá para lá” (1970), in Oitilia Arantes, ed., Mário Pedrosa: Politica das artes (São Paulo: Universidade de São Paulo, 1995). -130- HOW LATITUDES BECOME FORMS JUST HOW DID LATITUDES BECOME FORMS? exclusively from America and Europe.4 In selecting our title, I really liked this idea of using latitude in both meanings of the word. Geographically we were changing our own latitude, looking at other latitudes. And we were also giving ourselves latitude with regards to the way our institution functions. The other element that appealed to me about Szeemann’s exhibition was the subtitle: Live in Your Head. Looking at the way art practice has developed over the last ten years, I like the idea of substituting “world” for “head”: Live in your world. The world is increasingly entering the artworks as subject and material and more and more artists are trying to address issues in our world in a responsible way. We also discussed the problematic aspects of our title: Is it okay to borrow from the title of such an important exhibition by such an important curator? It was interesting to see that when we tested the title on our colleagues in the visual arts, they were nervous about it, about us encroaching on something so mythic, so iconic. On the other hand, our colleagues in other fields, who might not have knowledge of the Szeemann exhibition, were completely fine with the title. For them, the title made sense, almost a literal sense. It’s really an homage to what Szeemann identified in 1969, not only in terms of what artists were doing but in terms of the methodology and the language of exhibitions. It’s an awareness about where we’re coming from, our roots in a specific field, and our working methods. It is a marker and a point of reference. In giving our- selves latitude we don’t want to forget or deny our own history. Putting the exhibition in this perspective was a way for us to acknowledge that. DF: Yes. The neutrality of the white cube as we know it in terms of gallery space is so linked to a history of European essentialism and universalism that goes back to the Enlightenment. It’s very interesting to think about the ways in which Szeemann’s practice and the artists he was bringing to the fore started to challenge that assumption of neutrality. There is, I hope, a continuation of that critique in the work we’re doing today. PV: With Szeemann’s show, and the idea of site specificity, the white cube became a structural part of the vocab- ulary of artists. That site specificity is still in place in the way artists work, but there is also an enlarged under- standing of site in the work we’re considering: that of a cultural site. These artists are active not only in a physical space but also in a cultural space. AC: Tell me about the global initiative and the process of deciding to work with a committee. PV: In 1999, Kathy Halbreich, the director of the Walker, proposed that we challenge our way of working and expand our practice beyond our comfort zone. The question that Kathy initially raised was: Is there a new form of internationalism linked to the globalization of the world, and how could we, as an institution, embrace the resulting changes? She was following an informal Walker tradition of looking beyond the United States. The museum has a long history of working in an international field, with exhibitions such as Tokyo: Form and Spirit,5 which at the time was not a mainstream practice. The museum opened its doors to a spectrum of artists, includ- ing Marcel Duchamp, Hélio Oiticica, Mario Merz, Lucio Fontana, and Michelangelo Pistoletto. DF: The global initiative followed a number of other initiatives during the last ten years through which the Walker attempted to look at itself self-critically, to look at its own practice and to transform that practice. The previous initiative focused on developing our audience and our programmatic response to our audience.6 We targeted three different audiences: teens, people of color, and low-income families. The global initiative is, in my mind, the next logical step. We are now looking at the relationship between an institution that happens to ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 4 David Medalla was the only artist in the exhibition with a more complex ethnic and national identity. He was born in the Philippines and is of Spanish, Malaysian, Chinese, and English descent. Since the 1960s he has resided, on and off, in Britain, France, and the United States. 5 Tokyo: Form and Spirit was organized by the Walker Art Center and celebrated the continuity of art and architecture, and the initimate rela- tionship between art and everyday life, in Japan from the Edo period (1603–1868) to 1986. It was presented at the Walker April 20–July 20, 1986, and toured to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the IBM Gallery of Science and Art, New York; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. 6 The Walker’s “New Definitions, New Audiences” initiative began in 1993 and was sponsored by the Lila Wallace Foundation. -131- HOW LATITUDES BECOME FORMS be in the middle of the United States (in what is often snidely called the “fly-over” zone by people living on the coasts) and the rest of the world. Olukemi Ilesanmi: Part of it is not forgetting where we’re speaking from and acknowledging that, demograph- ically, Minneapolis is increasingly diverse and increasingly international. The 2000 census was really amazing because it showed the incredible shifts in the communities that make up the Walker’s potential audience. This initiative reflects not only the larger issues of globalization but how our local context is also shifting and chang- ing. We have to make fundamental adjustments in the institution to keep it fresh and innovative. Luckily, that kind of strategic self-reinvention is part of our history. This initiative is not a baby step; it’s a giant step. PV: In 1999, when we began this initiative, there was a lot of animated conversation around the idea of bien- nials and how they have been changing curatorial and artistic practice. Istanbul, Gwangju, and Shanghai could all be used as case studies. We asked ourselves: How can we sustain the effort started by freelance curators with those biennials? How are they affecting the way artists work and the way institutions work? How can we learn from that? AC: What was the impetus for working with a committee? DF: One of the first realizations the institution had after deciding to take on the project was that we couldn’t do this work without having a group of people helping us.7 PV: We decided that, because of expertise, or lack thereof, we could not just parachute into a country, under- stand the situation, master the network, and bring information back home.