Debate: Ethnocentrism

Jean-Hubert Martin: It is a curious paradox that I should have been asked to write a defence of geographically defined group exhibitions in relation to ‘Magiciens de la Terre’ (Magicians of the Earth, 1989), since this was actually the first exhibition of contemporary art not to set itself specific geographical parameters. The exhibitions ‘Galerie des cinq continents’ (Five Continents Gallery, 1995) and ‘Partage d’exotismes’ (Sharing Exoticisms, 2000) took the same approach. I hardly need point out that most previous group exhibitions in NATO countries had restricted themselves to showing artists from NATO countries.
This ethnocentrism, though, allows me to make my first point. The West prides itself on having given a universal dimension to the recognition of cultures, but it is pretty good at taking that recognition on board only when convenient. This is not unlike the way France enslaved the populations that it colonized while at the same time disseminating The Declaration of the Rights of Man and promoting liberal democratic values. People tend to stick to this kind of principle only when it suits them.
Inside the narrow world of contemporary art it is easy to believe that art is produced exclusively by artists whose work is geared to the market and institutions, and who develop strategies to match. But this is patently not true of the art of previous eras: the origins of most objects now categorized as ‘art’ lie in religion or magic, ritual or the cultic. And it is equally untrue of modern art, which opened the doors for work referred to as ‘primitive’ and work by artists who are self-taught (Art Brut). This raises questions that overlap with those of anthropology about human creative activity and material culture.
One cannot help noticing the plight of many contemporary cultural practices that do not enjoy the patronage of the network of galleries and institutions responsible for attributing value. They have fallen victim to the double bind of modernity and colonialism. Modernity excludes them because, in the name of a Hegelian teleology of Western art, it recognizes itself only in agnosticism, and colonialism condemns them as impure and inauthentic since they are the hybrid offspring of contact with our own civilization. The huge volume of widely differing kinds of art produced by the various religions of the world today is an excellent example – it tends to end up in a sort of critical no man’s land, struggling for recognition from a Western intelligentsia that remains totally blind to it.
The only solution is to have the courage to move beyond the narrow realm of the gallery circuit, to be prepared to travel around the world to get some idea, at first hand, of the wealth of creative activity in other cultures, and to try to meet the creators. As a result of the way the contemporary art network and its various institutions have developed over the last decade, museums now have a greater degree of freedom than ever before. Throughout the 20th century they were often criticized for acting as a sort of middleman between the avant-garde and the art market. Thanks in part to Postmodernism, however, this issue has become much less of a sensitive area, and museums should take advantage of this and seek to redress the imbalance in the market where art from other continents is concerned. Economic logic dictates that the market will concentrate on producers who can ensure a regular supply, and as a result many artists from Africa, for example, remain marginalized. It is the role of museums to show them and to give them their cultural place.
To get back to the specific issue of ‘geographically based’ exhibitions, though, I have absolutely no feelings one way or the other. They have all the advantages and disadvantages that go with such a simple approach. Every exhibition responds to a situation at a given moment. Each one needs to be seen in its specific temporal context and, since it consists of a collection of objects and artefacts, each exhibition is a very different thing from a theoretical discourse or a set of intellectual abstractions, although it may be influenced by these. Given the enormous media coverage it has received, one could say the recent ‘Afrika Remix’ exhibition at the museum kunst palast in Düsseldorf has come at just the right time to deal with some of the underlying issues. Given its focus on the recent generalization of the urban milieu, it is tempting to wonder if there might not be something akin to a sense of relief among certain forms of criticism that they can point to a resemblance between these works and our own. Is there no longer any difference between our cultures?
The anti-globalization movement is currently fighting to loosen the grip of liberal capitalism on the planet and to resist the homogenization and levelling-out of differences that it imposes. Culture must seek to align itself with that movement. It must prevent the eradication, in the name of modernity and Postmodernism, of artistic activities generally categorized as ‘traditional’ but which are almost always in a process of continuous evolution, and halt the marginalization of (mainly religious) community arts and self-taught artists.