Against Monoculture
Observing art displays over a period of more than 40 years and being exposed to music and literature (with rarer forays into theatre, dance and film), I do notice certain trends that I personally find troublesome.
Inasmuch as we are able to look at a vast array of artefacts from virtually all global cultures, almost all of these artefacts are isolated and celebrated as such. Recently it took museum exhibitions like the Giacometti show at the Tate Modern in London or the Picasso - Giacometti show at the Musée Picasso in Paris, to name but two, to hint at other cultures' influence on the work of these canonical European modernists. At Frieze Masters a few years ago there was a fascinating back to back pairing of traditional American North West Coast artefacts such as from the Haida, Kwakiutl, Tlingit and Tsimshian cultures with works on paper by Jackson Pollock in the booth of Donald Ellis and Washburn Gallery, both New York. Even in the latter display a wall separated the works.
Add to this isolation an ever increasing pressure from political correctness that wants to undo the crimes and discriminations of the past, resulting in even more isolation and you have the making of an "ethnically cleansed" or "ideologically narrowed" art perception.
In many ways I believe that a dialogue between cultures begins with two pieces meeting eye to eye. Every art curator knows what happens when you put one painting next to another: at the very best they start to communicate with each other and make a perfect pair. This can happen between objects from different times and cultures and one look into artists' studios reveals instantly that they jump timelines and cultural demarcations easily. I am not sure that there is a publication that solely traces pinned images in artists' studios, but if there were it would demonstrate a truly global and continuous reach.
Like artists curators need to reach into the collective memory and combine anew what they see and experience. Our museum models date mostly to a time before 1900. It is about time that we update these models and allow for the global experience to take hold, also changing our view of nature and architecture. The latter tentatively embraces parts of nature in ways that seemed not possible before ("green" inside walls for example).
Of course none of this is easy: striving for quality and at the same time opening up the canonical to a flux of high and low will always be a balancing act. Apropos: I will never forget Walter Hopps' installation of early Rauschenberg at the downtown Guggenheim that was magical in its spacing and rhyme. Magnificent in similar ways, with art that covered an enormous swath of mankind, was Jacques Kerchache's installation of non-European art at the Louvre when it opened. And the Sainsbury Center in Norwich excels in its juxtaposition of classic European modern art with non-Western art. Another favourite is Louis Kahn's Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth that combines breathtaking Old Master paintings with equally powerful pre-Columbian, South-East Asian and African art, not to forget the inspired Noguchi garden. The Miho Collection in Japan attempts to present art, in this case, antiquities, in a new context. There is one other example of an eclectic mix of artworks that adds a different tone through architecture and the park it inhabits: Museum Insel Hombroich (the vision of the art collector Karl-Heinrich Müller, working in tandem with the sculptor Erwin Heerich who designed the buildings scattered throughout the park, much to the chagrin of the architectural community). And there are always the great depositories like the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the British Museum in London and the Museumsinsel in Berlin, to name but a few.
To return to the main subject: in addition to the isolation of artworks by ways of cultural definition, there are the added threats of concentrations of power in the hands of artists' estates who can dictate circumstances of exposure. Most of these estates promote openness and are supportive of curatorial efforts to broaden the view of the artist's work, while some shut out any such attempts.
Another problem is the adaptation of one style such as a narrowly defined "Pop Art" by artists around the globe in combination with decorative art that becomes more and more adept at camouflaging for real art. To illustrate but one side-effect of this pre-possessive posture is the mis-interpretation of the work of Sigmar Polke in the United States, who got engulfed and devoured as "Pop", when in fact his work went far beyond it. Subsequently the "art market" rewards such works that "fit the glove" with ever growing price tags, i.e. in Polke's case those most resembling "Warholian Pop".
I still believe that a number of exhibitions that break the afore-mentioned mould would achieve a new awareness in the larger public, just like a series of new editions would pave the way for re-examining the work of unjustly "forgotten" writers in a wider context. In Germany publication of Yasunari Kawabata (in translation) stopped, just as it is almost impossible to find publications of Saint-John Perse (in translation) in London, albeit both winners of the Nobel Prize. Granted: through the Internet's search engines one can dig up almost everything, but it is still amazing that a number of milestone publications are virtually unknown and undiscussed. In its place are relentless releases for the art of the hour, resulting in a narrowing of discourse and a hollowing out of spirit.