COMMON GROUND FOR MUSEUMS IN A GLOBAL SOCIETY 8 – 9 NOVEMBER, 2010 - SHANGHAI Shanghai Art Museum and MoCA Shanghai CIMAM 2010 Annual Conference ‘COMMON GROUND FOR MUSEUMS IN A GLOBAL SOCIETY’ 8 - 9 November, 2010 – Shanghai Art Museum and MoCA Shanghai, Shanghai (published on the occasion of the 2010 CIMAM Annual Meeting, 8 - 9 November, 2010 – Shanghai Art Museum and MoCA Shanghai, Shanghai); edited by Josephine Watson with the collaboration of Pilar Cortada; sessions transcribed by Mireia Bartels. CIMAM 2010 Annual Conference ‘Common Ground for Museums in a Global Society’ - 2 – INDEX Welcoming remarks Manuel J. Borja-Villel, President of CIMAM, director MNCARS, Madrid 4 SESSION I – THE ROLE OF THE INTELLECTUAL IN CREATING A COUNTER HEGEMONY ‘Seeing Global’ Susan Buck-Morss, professor of Political Philosophy and Social Theory and member of the Graduate Fields of German Studies and History of Art, Department of Government, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 6 ‘East Asia cultures critique’ Xudong Zhang, professor of East Asian Studies & Comparative Literature; chair of East Asian Studies, New York University (NYU), New York 30 SESSION II – EAST AND WEST, THE MUSEUM AS A “DIPOSITIF” ‘Beyond the museum as “dispositif”: counter practices from the South’ Rustom Bharucha, independent writer, director and cultural critic based in Kolkata, India 31 ‘The Museum as an experimental working tool, questioning history, colonization, and cultural displacement through the example of black art’ Elvan Zabunyan, contemporary art historian and art critic; associate professor, University of Rennes, Brittany 39 SESSION III – DIALOGICAL PRACTICES IN A POSTCOLONIAL WORLD ‘The museum revisited’ Tim Griffin, former editor-in-chief (2003-2010), Artforum International 46 ‘Museums as global banks of values’ Catherine David, art critic and independent curator 53 SESSION IV – CHINESE ART MUSEUMS IN CHINESE CONTEXT ‘Chinese contemporary art and contemporary art in Chinese discourse’ Fan Di'an, director, NAMOC National Art Museum of China, Beijing Chairman, Association of Art Museums of China 54 ‘The knowledge production system of art museums’ Wang Huansheng, deputy director, CAFA Art Museum, Beijing 58 CASE STUDIES ‘Museum as a happening: collecting modern and contemporary art in Poland’ Jaroslaw Suchan, director The Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz 61 ‘Yishu, archives, and China-West exchanges in museology to date’ Ken Lum, artist 69 ‘Collections and collectives: tracing the Southeast Asian contemporary’ Patrick D. Flores, curator, Vargas Museum, University of the Philippines; professor of Art history, Theory, and Criticism, University of the Philippines, Diliman 79 -------------------------------------------------------------- CIMAM 2010 Annual Conference ‘Common Ground for Museums in a Global Society’ - 3 – WELCOMING REMARKS Manuel J. Borja-Villel, President of CIMAM Never in history, at least in modern history, has art been more popular than it is today. The number of biennials, art fairs, and museums continues to grow, as do the number of people visiting them. And while each year major museums set new attendance records, it seems as if the voracity, the hunger to attract the masses, increases still more: the more visitors we have, the more visitors we want. It would also appear that this popularity of art and culture has not been accompanied by an increase in education and debate. On the contrary. Broadly speaking, it seems that education levels are today at an all-time low. People do indeed go to museums, but they remain passive; they go to recognize a name rather than discover something they did not previously know. But we here also fall into the same trap, that of programming blockbuster, easy-to-digest exhibitions with the ultimate goal of increasing our audience rather than educating them. While me might believe that with the popularization of culture we are helping to decrease illiteracy, in reality we are creating spectators, passive audiences instead of active readers, and thus contributing to the creation of a new form of illiteracy, a cynical one cloaked in the supposed goodwill of the popularization of culture. We are clearly living in a globalized world, a world that is rapidly changing both economically and technologically, and yet museums continue to be rooted in nineteenth-century notions of identity, memory, and patrimony. In fact, we seem to be trapped between the internationalization of many artistic proposals and the need to preserve our historical roots. These positions are quite often mutually exclusive and defensive in their relation to others cultures. Yet, what are we to do? What are we to do when trapped between a present we don’t like and a past in which we have ceased to recognize ourselves? At times of crises such as the present—and this crisis is obviously not short-term—perhaps we should reconsider our lifestyle, the system in which we live. Right now we actually have an opportunity to change our models of doing politics, our artistic paradigms, our ways of thinking. At this moment the museum has an entirely new role to play. Traditionally, intellectuals were associated with men or women of letters, writers, but in an age like ours, in which the image is so important, intellectuals are those who deal with images, with montage, with the dispositif in the Foucaultian sense. In this day and age, museum professionals and those who reflect on museological concerns deal with crucial issues that constitute the foundation of the museum, namely collecting, narrative-making, and education. While I leave the question open to our speakers and discussants, I would like to say that in these three areas we need to question the traditional idea of property associated with art and culture and begin to think in terms of “common knowledge”; that is, knowledge owned by and shared among everyone. Museums should be custodians, not proprietors. I believe we need to CIMAM 2010 Annual Conference ‘Common Ground for Museums in a Global Society’ - 4 – question the way in which we construct our narratives, our dispositifs. For too long we have taken our inherited tools and concepts as givens rather than as constructions, as sites of power and control. And, finally, we must think in terms of radical pedagogy, by which the spectator becomes a reader, an agent, someone able to create his or her own narrative when visiting a show or contemplating a series of artworks, and, at the same time, capable of questioning that of the institution. For this occasion we have an extraordinary group of speakers, as well as the largest number of people registered at a conference in the history of CIMAM, a great diversity of groups and experiences and a variety of case studies that will certainly enrich our discussions, so I am sure this is going to be a very successful event. I would like to thank the District Mayor of the Huangpu District, the Honorable Zhou Wei, for his hospitality; the Association of Art Museums of China; and the National Art Museum of China, the Shanghai Art Museum, and MoCA Shanghai, and their respective directors Fan Di’an, Li Lei, and Samuel Kung. I would also like to thank our patrons and particularly the speakers. As you know, this is the last term of the present board with which I have been working over the last three exciting years, and which I believe has accomplished a great number of things. I extend my recognition to its members, and especially to Pilar, with whom I have worked for six years, and I must say that I will miss her dearly. Thank you all very much. CIMAM 2010 Annual Conference ‘Common Ground for Museums in a Global Society’ - 5 – SESSION I – THE ROLE OF THE INTELLECTUAL IN CREATING A COUNTER HEGEMONY Seeing Global Susan Buck-Morss Figure 1 Section of the Dunhuang star atlas, mid-seventh century (early Tang Dynasty), displaying from the north circumpolar region, down to a celestial latitude of about +50° (Map 13, Dunhuang star atlas, Or. 8210/S.3326, British Museum) You are looking at a section of a Chinese scroll containing the oldest complete atlas of the heavens that has been preserved from any civilisation.1 It is a seventh-century (Tang Dynasty) star chart, discovered near Dunhuang, an oasis town on the Silk Road where two main branches of the western network of trade routes converge and continue eastward to China’s capital city of Xi’an.2 While the purpose of the Dunhuang atlas was astrological divination (celestial events were believed to mirror those on Earth3), it was based on accurate scientific observation. Beautiful to look at, it is a remarkably precise astronomical document. Its multiple panels are a graphic depiction of the entire visible sky. The scroll displays unambiguously the position of 1,500 stars within the traditional Chinese constellations. Its panels are a sequence of circumpolar regions in azimuthal projection, a method of measurement still in use today.4 The Dunhuang atlas is believed to be a more roughly executed copy of an imperial original, 1 In comparison, the Farnese Atlas, the second-century (all dates in this essay are Christian Era) Roman statue of Atlas holding the celestial globe—famously replicated at Rockefeller Center in New York City—is scientifically naive. Considered to be a copy of a Hellenistic original, it shows the Western constellations from a god-like perspective of the outside looking in and without the positioning of individual stars. Ptolemy’s second-century text, Almagest (Arabic for ‘Great Constellation’) included a catalogue of 1,022 stars but unlike the Dunhuang atlas, without their position in the sky. Lost to Europe until the twelfth century, the Almagest catalogue of stars was used by Dürer to depict the Western constellations in 1515. 2 The Dunhuang Star Atlas was found nearby the town in Mogao, a Buddhist holy site known as the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas cut into the rock of a cliff.