Global Proposals

As the balance of geo-political power swings and twists in new directions, and forms of art activity that were previously ignored have come to prominence, the bankruptcy of a Eurocentric framework has grown increasingly palpable. If we see the selections and concerns of the major Biennales and large-scale museum exhibitions as an index of the dominant values, then it is clear that the themes of migration, post-colonialism, hybridity and the role of the non-Euro-American artist are now considered to be a vital force within the institution of contemporary art.

How do we measure this change of attitude? While nobody could really call this admission of the 'other' a revolution, many have already characterised it as selective incorporation - an appropriation that ultimately consolidates the institution. Perhaps both approaches miss the subtleties of difference. I would call this change a swerve in the established practices. When the impact of the 'other' became unavoidable, a swerve was necessary in order both to switch orientation and widen the base of recognition. It remains to be seen whether this swerve is sufficient to take us towards the promised land of 'New Internationalism'.

It is worth remembering that political economists have always been conscious that the flow of capital has little respect for national borders. They called this transmission 'internationalism', and it was only when non-Western hands began to guide the flow that they renamed this transmission as 'globalisation'. Within the art world, concepts of globalisation have been at best rather nebulous and at worst oversimplified. Two general strategies are evident in the plethora of group and thematic shows that have toured in recent years. First, an undoing of imperialist oppositions where the intention is to reverse or complicate the pattern of influence. Second, a focusing on the differences within the boundaries of a national culture, thereby acknowledging the activity of artists previously ignored. We thus see a re-evaluation of the status of both the global and the regional.

It is into this lively arena that the Institute for New International Visual Arts (INIVA) was recently launched. INIVA can be seen as a direct result of various critiques of the mainstream British art institutions by Black artists and critics in the 80s. After a long period of inertia and sporadic consultations, the Arts Council of Great Britain and the London Arts Board finally responded. Earlier experiments such as the Roundhouse project were closely scrutinised and a cautious but optimistic report that laid the foundation for the Institute was drafted.

The aim of INIVA is to explore a broader vision of contemporary art. The central concept of a 'new internationalism' contends that the prior frameworks for understanding contemporary art, while espousing to be international, were invariably confined by Eurocentric boundaries and standards. Artists who were not part of this cultural framework were either ignored or handicapped. INIVA seeks to correct this form of discrimination by developing 'new ways of looking at contemporary visual arts...by giving priority to artists who have been marginalised on the basis of race, gender and cultural differences.'

There is still much to negotiate in terms of criteria of influence and the rules of evaluation. It is toward this end that we could see a radical cultural project for the future - one which could seriously question the category of the nation as a valid concept for understanding the enigmatic affinities between a sense of belonging and the creative act. Is it not time to think of possible connections between different places rather than the perpetual excavation of the histories of displacement? How would we define the cultural formations that do not rest on a national territory? It was with such questions that I approached the recently appointed director of INIVA, Gilane Tawadros.

Nikos Papastergiadis: Why do you think INIVA came into being?

Gilane Tawadros: The Institute grew out of the work of the artists, writers and curators in this country. People like Rasheed Araeen, David A Bailey, Guy Brett, Eddie Chambers, Lubaina Himid, Maud Sulter, Sunil Gupta, Keith Piper and Gavin Jantjes. I think it is important to stress that it grew out of a specifically British context. Some of those artists were also working partly as publishers and curators because they perceived gaps in terms of what was being written and exhibited. There was an absence of non-European artists within exhibition spaces and in the teaching of art history. But also an absence of alternative cultural perspectives on contemporary visual art and scholarship. The Institute has grown out of the work of those individuals.

Do you think that this engagement on two fronts at once, as artist/curator, or critic/artist, will be an important feature of the Institute?

Yes, the Institute is concerned equally with visual art practice and with ideas about contemporary art. Artists had to work on both levels because they didn't feel one was sufficient. There is the sense that they were not allowed to act simply as artists in any kind of a neutral way, separated off from the curatorial and critical world.

What was the relevance of the Roundhouse Project?

The Roundhouse is interesting in that it was a failed attempt to reconcile a number of initiatives by Black artists, performers, theatre writers, directors and so on in one building. After that fell through, the Arts Council Visual Arts department was left with the problem of how to allocate funds that had been specifically designated for that project. They were committed to funding exclusively for the visual arts and so held a number of consultative meetings to see how the money should be spent. The resounding response was 'whatever you do, don't build a Black art gallery'. There was a time when it was important to make Black arts visible in the same way that women artists were making themselves visible, but that time has passed. It was no longer the moment to set up something that persisted in the assumption that there was a separate history for Black artists. What people were saying was that they are not separate - you can't differentiate Black art history and practice from White. These things come together and both their currencies are intimately intertwined.

How would you define INIVA's role?

The legitimate subject area for this organisation is both the recent history and contemporary practice of Black artists in this country, and the re-evaluation of Western art. The organisation will look again at what Modernism meant and redefine it. Its structure is unique, since it wasn't set up to be either purely exhibition-making or purely education-led. There is the possibility to cut across those two kinds of spaces, to bring ideas and practice much more closely together. The best analogy is like a sort of production company that will work with institutions or individuals to produce exhibitions, publications, seminars, research projects and build up a library and archive. There is no other organisation with that degree of breadth and flexibility.

But these issues and problems are not unique to Britain. They have been articulated in various forms throughout the world, and I wonder why this institute didn't happen before and elsewhere?

Why here at this particular moment in time? I think it has to do with the specific history of migrant cultures within this country. I think that there is something about the nature of the relationships between Britain and other countries, and of its colonial history which is very specific. The French colonial experience aimed to extend 'Frenchness' around the world, whereas the British experience was not one which made people of those different nationalities British, but brought them together under the umbrella of a British empire.

Let's shift the comparison away from France to another sort of colonising country - the United States. Why isn't there a comparable institution there?

It's a very, very different history. The fact that the designation 'African-American' is used alongside 'Irish-American' and 'Italian-American' shows how different this hyphenated identity is. What struck me very much from discussions with African-American artists was the nostalgia for an Africa as a mother country, as an original homeland. It is something that was expressed by Black political movements in America early in the 20th century. In Britain, the nature of this relationship with a mother country is expressed in much more ambivalent terms. It's much less a question of nostalgia than of negotiating two cultures without being romantic about either of them. Whereas in America you get the sense that there is a desire for an Africa which can somehow bond together the fragmented experience of the African-American experience and make sense of it. There is a tension between a kind of national identity that erases and supersedes any specific identity, and the specificity of experience that needs expression. The challenge that faces both the Institute, and more generally faces us all as we go into the next century, is how we can maintain the specificity of our particular identity and experience, located in the here and now, and yet also speak beyond that specific experience to other people and to other experiences. This involves a mode of inclusivity that is not simply premised on the universals of Modernism.

One of INIVA's central goals is to broaden the cultural aesthetic and get beyond the Modernist claims of universalism. In a sense nobody would be against broadening, because the opposite of broadening is narrowing. But the problem with broadening is that it might move away from rigidity into a sort of open-ended space which is just as destructive, because it moves into flaccidity.

I would question whether broadening necessarily leads to that kind of open-ended, 'anything goes' space, or to use Nelly Richard's phrase to an 'economy of sameness', where things become so equalised that they become undifferentiated. I'm more interested in creating a space for the particular and the specific but not so that they are completely self-referential. I'm more interested in how a specific experience and a particular expression can be mediated in such a way that it finds points of reference with other, very different experiences.

How do you see this mediation occurring?

Well, you have to find a hook. There are a number of possible hooks for engaging with something that is unfamiliar. In the realm of visual works of art, those can be colour, form, or in some cases, words. Any kind of trigger contained in the work itself. I think memory is, for me, a much more powerful metaphor for explaining how that space is negotiated.

But how would I relate to a work which is based on memories that I do not share?

You don't share the specific memory, but there are things which act as triggers to memory. There is a difference between the memory which is particular and specific, and the trigger, which needn't be specific or shared.

How is this triggering device different from the universalism that underpinned Modernism? For instance, the famous appeals by Greenberg and Reinhardt to the purity of colour and form.

I'm talking about a space where you get beyond the name of the artist as a trigger, and actually engage with the work itself. I would argue that we have forgotten how to engage with the work, without the artist's name becoming a trigger for a whole set of references, negative or positive, about the making of, say, abstract painting. But how often do we remove the name and actually deal with the work and what it's actually about? I'm not suggesting we should look at work in a vacuum, removed from social, political, historical context. But why is it that the unfamiliar is so scary and why do we have to wade through a wall of information - anthropological, sociological, literary and often literal - to find a point of relationship with a work of art?

I agree, that the choice isn't between the extremes of either the pure context-free reading of the work and saturated academicism. There is something in-between, perhaps. But you can't deny that some degree of knowledge will always precede our perception of an art object. Is the Institute also trying to deal with how we construct knowledge about an art and culture?

I'm not talking about the possibility of a total knowledge. The phrase 'in-between space' is a really crucial one because it suggests a lack of fixity, a kind of partial state. The intellectual framework in which the Institute operates is not about a form of total knowledge, entailing a sense of linear progress, nor presuming a bird's eye view of the world.

One of the other central concepts that is promoted by INIVA and is related to this notion of the 'in-between' is the notion of hybridity. What is the significance of hybridity for contemporary culture?

That's become such a loaded word. The term 'hybridity' will always carry with it a kind of dystopian vision of plurality which is chaotic and incoherent. There have been attempts, though, to reappropriate that term and to suggest that plurality and fragmentation are what real experience is all about. While we all pine for coherence, we also accept that this desire doesn't relate to our actual experience of the world. I think a lot of this has to do with a profound sense of loss - the sense that we have not only lost those frameworks which made sense of the world for us, but also the belief that such frameworks could exist. And that's where the experience of migrants and exiles has been such an important contribution to visual arts practice and intellectual life in recent years. If you have lived in two or three different places, then the possibility of there being one way of seeing the world is not something which you desire or feel that you have lost: you can't feel loss about a sense of unity you never had. The possibility of seeing the world, not in a singular way, but in a multi-accented way opens up such enormous possibilities. This is the unique contribution of those artists and intellectuals, and it is also the intellectual framework for the Institute.

What do you do with this desire for coherence?

What I'm suggesting is that we have to engage with the possibility that there is no answer. That is a very, very difficult thing to do and that desire is not going to go away.

Is the difficulty of living with this impossible desire the 'new' part of the 'new internationalism'?

I have problems with the term 'new internationalism'. It is not an appropriate label to define the artistic or intellectual propositions of this organisation. It triggers memories of nationalism and internationalism that presume another sort of utopian structure for wholeness and coherence.

Is the tone of INIVA anti-utopian?

It's about posing questions. For instance, the INIVA conference ended with a series of questions, no answers. I think that was right, that's absolutely the tone of the organisation. Artists to my mind, pose questions, they don't provide answers.

Does it have the appropriate structure for that sort of questioning?

I think so because it has the ability to bring together ideas and practice. It has the freedom to operate as a kind of producer of things outside of a fixed space while working in collaboration and partnership with other institutions and individuals. Where an organisation is led by its exhibition programme, it is this which leads the way for its publications, seminar programme and research. For such an organisation the exhibition is both the end product and defining framework. We have the flexibility to hold a series of discussions, to carry out research that may not be linked to a publication or an exhibition or a symposium. I would prefer to conduct discussion and initiate research for which there is a need. As Jimmie Durham said at the conference, given that we are all obsessed with originality and anxious about repetition, perhaps the only thing left to do is to make art that is necessary.

Such needs initially emerged from the initiatives of individuals who were marginalised by the dominant culture. But in the future, what sort of mechanisms would you put into place to ensure that INIVA responds to the needs expressed by those who are being marginalised in their own time?

The challenge for the organisation is to maintain that dynamic, which comes from responding to needs as they are defined by practitioners.

Are there organisations abroad that you would collaborate with?

I don't think there are many organisations that work in this particular way and with the visual arts exclusively. Perhaps there are connections with organisations like the Arab Institute in Paris or the Du Bois Centre in Harvard. There are also smaller groups around the world that do not have such a profile but which are working outside of the recognised art establishments.

How would you identify them?

Well, the word is really out about the Institute, and they are getting in touch with us. We are also beginning to follow up potential collaborators so that we know what's happening and where we can intervene strategically so as not to duplicate initiatives that already exist. Also the Institute's library and archive will hopefully, in the future, exploit new technology to hold and retrieve information on artists and writers from different parts of the world, and to share that information with others. I think that new technology holds a lot of potential for what this organisation seeks to do.

Don't you think that this very technology will be least accessible to those people that you are most desperately trying to get in contact with?

In some cases that will be the case and we can't rely on technology alone. On the other hand, there is the case of rural aboriginal communities in Australia who are now tapping into satellite technology. Nevertheless, I don't think we should take it for granted that everyone has access to technology. I think that this question of access is another key issue for the next century.

You often talk about the next century in a very optimistic way - are you hopeful about what will unfold?

I am hopeful, otherwise I wouldn't be doing this job.

So you believe in progress?

Progress on the level of dialogue and exchange, yes I do. I believe in it very deeply.

And are you confident that you'll survive, financially?

I would hope that, like any other new organisation, we'll be given a fair crack of the whip. It will take four or five years to establish a body of good practice and then I think we should be judged on that practice, on the criteria that we and those funding us have defined. As long as all the players and everyone is clear about what our brief is, and what we are setting out to do, then I feel confident about being judged according to those criteria.

Do you fear that people are already shifting the goalposts?

I think that's a genuine fear. In some cases the goalposts haven't been clearly defined and that is something that I need to address.

What new directions would you and your board like to see in the future?

At our first meeting, the board was insistent that the Institute should build on our strengths, that is offer a dynamic link between artists, writers and curators. That we shouldn't pre-empt that by looking to build a gallery or seeking any other conventional building solution at this stage. The priority is to work with this unique structure and remit. They've also made it clear that we shouldn't act as a funding agency, but that we should work collaboratively and in partnership with other organisations and with individuals. We should be very aware of our particular context, and stress that the Institute is here in Britain: that it has come out of initiatives and perspectives developed in this country and by the work of artists and writers here. The balance of our activities should reflect this and not to be constantly looking outside. And finally, and most importantly to maintain the equal weighting between our four areas of activity: research, exhibitions, education and training.

Finally, do you think its possible to maintain a radical cultural agenda without radical politics?

I think it's impossible to have a radical political agenda without a radical cultural agenda. At the end of the day we are not a political organisation. Of course politics comes into it, politics always comes into art, we are political beings and I wouldn't argue with that. But I'd hate to think that the organisation became pigeonholed as a sort of narrowly defined political organisation which it's not. Whatever politics exists is in the work; It can only come from the work produced by the artists themselves.