Dr Tomasz Kitlinski & Pawel Leszkowicz
Transregional Center for Democratic Studies
New School University
65 Fifth Avenue
Room 423
New York, New York 10003
Tel: 212 280 5446
Fax: 212 2299 5894
Email: tompaul11@aol.com
kitlinst@newschool.edu
Is Cosmopolitanism Possible?:
The In-Between of Identity and Difference in Visual Culture
Contemporary visual culture is characterized by transnationality, decentered, plural and multicultural. After a crisis of the grand narratives which legitimized the mission of the Western human being to transform the planet 'in his own image' (Jean-Francois Lyotard 1979: 63), cultural theory and art alike stands for diversity, although occasionally it is used by partisans of the identitarian politics of nationalism. Does the visual culture of today fulfill our hopes for a transnational society or will it contribute to political divisions of 'imagined communities' (Benedict Anderson 1983: passim)? In other words, is it possible for multiculturalism to continue its role as 'one of the most pervasive and controversial intellectual and political movements in contemporary Western democracies' (Christian Joppke 1996: 449)?
Craig Owens and Jean Baudrillard develop the Heideggerian diagnosis of the world becoming the image: the objective of the image according to Owens is a culture of control and repression (Craig Owens 1992: 175). Therefore nationalism may prove powerful in visual culture; one cites the examples of totalitarianisms which employ aesthetics to serve political goals. However, the sense of artistic expression has always been freedom and the community of artists has tended to shelter the outcasts, refugees and persecuted. The distinctive feature of 1980s and early 90s in visual culture is according to Edward Lucie-Smith plurality and multiculturalism. A feminist critic, Lucy Lippard, also accentuates the multiplicity of the visual in her 'mapping'. In my view the contemporary multicultural art may be viewed at the junction of philosophy and social sciences: thinking about the Same and the Other from Hegel, Freud, Lacan, Foucault, Deleuze (for an interpretation of the problematics see Vincent Descombes: 1985 and Juergen Habermas: 1979) to contemporary social theorists of identity and alterity such as Charles Taylor (1993), Tzvetan Todorov (1993) Ira Katznelson (1995), Zygmunt Bauman (1995) as well as analysts of multiculturalism such as Joseph Raz (1994) and Will Kymlicka (1995). Here, too, belongs the thought of Aristide R. Zolberg (1981) and Yasemil Nughoglu Soysal (1994) on international migrations and the emergence of a transnational civil society.
Let us remind the artistic expression of an identification with the stranger as epitomized in Rimbaud's Je est l'Autre. It seems that after a domination of anti-representation, the artists of the 1980s returned to priorizing the figuration of subjectivity, foregrounded the communication of social, ethnic and sexual belonging and, in some outstanding works, went as far as realizing the Rimbaudian postulate. Usually while discussing multiculuralism the names of such artists as Felix Gonzalez Torres, David Wojnarowicz, Krzysztof Wodiczko or Robert Gober are enumerated; their art reacted to social problems: to attitudes of intolerance towards the homeless, immigrants, AIDS patients. Although the output of Ilya Kabakov and Joseph Kosuth is less obviously multicultural and critical, I would like to discuss briefly their project A Corridor of Two Banalities specifically designed for Warsaw's Centre for Contemporary Art and on show there April 25 - June 13, 1994. The interior of the Centre was converted by the two artists into a conference hall. A hundred and twenty tables with lights above them were divided into a row of Kosuth and that of Kabakov. The two artists of different backgrounds dialogued: the table-tops of the two rows changed into the textual space of the dialogue. Du cote de chez Kosuth, the tables were covered with unifying grey colour and inscriptions by means of silk-screening: quotations from political personalities. The tables in Kabakov's row were raw, cracked, rickety; on their tops the artist nailed the colour photocopies of details of Russian iconography. The rows were arranged in such a way that they sometimes connected: the 'two banalities' of everyday humanity struggled to communicate and relate to each other.
The project explored the stories of individuals in History. Here the subject was the Same and the Other, le Je as well as l'Autre while a difficult synthesis was achieved. The synthetic genre of installation was conducive to a plurality of social meanings; as Kabakov comments on the art installation which 'may unite- on equal terms, without recognition of supremacy phenomena and concepts that are extraordinarily far from one another' (Brandon Taylor 1995: 157). Joseph Kosuth is a consciously intertextual artist who in his works and manifestos celebrates nomadism, including flanerie a la Walter Benjamin. Explicitly, Kosuth argues against art for art's sake and for a socially critical and dialogic culture, an alternative cultural activity: in the West within liberal toleration, in the East outside of the official stream of history. The two trends countered the artistic practice of orthodox formalism (Joseph Kosuth 1994: 8).
When approaching visual culture, the institutionalization of art should be analyzed. It took the curator of A Corridor of Two Banalities three years to talk the venue and the artists into a mutual project. The museum and gallery is often made part of the system of nationalism; thus the exhibiting practice reduce the origin and meaning of an artwork to that of a product of a 'national spirit'. It is not accidental either that museums and their departments function in the nineteenth-century fashion of national divisions ('temples of national art'); the same being true of the history of art which explores the evolution of national art from its 'invented tradition' (Eric J. Hobsbawm 1983: passim) to the full expression of the national idea. 'Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation.' (Ernest Renan 1994: 17) On the other hand, more and more exhibiting spaces provide ground for transnational events: one of them is the Venice Biennale. As Achille Bonito Oliva has it , 'the Venice Biennale has created a new cultural territory which I call transnational and multicultural' (Achille Bonito Oliva 1995:341, my emphasis) Thus the plurality of cultural practices characterizes the Venice Biennale which for over a century has presented a variety of art forms and identity representations. Let us, however, not forget about a dichotomy of general exhibition and national pavilion organization as politics of space in the Biennale. It is important to note the episode when the Biennale, manipulated by Benito Mussolini, entered the fascist propaganda politics. With these reservations in mind, one can speak of a multiculturalism of the Venice Biennale; in particular the 1980s witnessed it in the exhibiting policy. It was the 80s Biennale which hosted the successful neo-expressionist artists, in particular those of the Italian movement of the 1980s, the Transavanguardia, which seems a remarkable instance of multiple identity-narrating art. In 1990 Achille Bonito Oliva inaugurated a zone of the Biennale devoted to young artists and tellingly called Aperto. The 1995 centennial Biennale when the epitome of the vast subjective heterogeneity of the Biennale was an installation by Christian Boltanski, Jewish-Polish-French artist: on the Padiglione Centrale he installed fifteen thousand names of the artists who had participated in its editions were curated by Jean Clair, author of psychoanalytic and cultural studies, Director of Musee Picasso in Paris and Conservateur General du Patrimoine. He presented the exhibition Identita ed alterita of deep intellectual ambitions whose catalogue contained essays by such thinkers as Levi-Strauss, Fabbri, Fumaroli. In Palazzo Gustinian a multicultural exhibition Transcultura was mounted. In 1995 the United States were represented by an artist of Italian origin, Marco di Suvero, whereas this year it is an African-American artist, Robert Colescott.
It is tempting to juxtapose the participants of the Biennale from Italy and Poland; since the Polish Pavillion had been built in 1934 more and more Polish works were shown, interestingly, many of them by women artists. It is not accidental that this year it is a woman artist, Zofia Kulik, represents Poland as the trend of women's art is far from monocultural tendencies. Parallel to the Transavanguardia, their works represent the artists' subjectivity and assertion on the body. The artwork in question narrates multiple cultural identities more often than not in multimedia. Zofia Kulik's are montages of photographic mise-en-scene which explore human corporeality, psyche and historical narrations, for instance, parodies of social realism. In contrast to the avant-garde which according to Gulio Carl Argan searches al di la, the Transavanguardia concentrates on al di qua.'To me the Transavanguardia means looking al di qua (inside, into one's interior). And that is the core of art, of culture, of freedom and of cultural nomadism' (Achille Bonito Oliva 1995:341) The case of a leading Italian painter of the Transavanguardia, Francesco Clemente, is culturally striking: born in Naples, his background is in the classics and philosophy. Clemente studied architecture in Rome where Cy Twombly introduced him to the contemporary visual arts. Since 1973 he has repeatedly travelled to Madras, India and to New York. Erudite and painter of individualized expressionism, Clemente searches for his sources in a variety of cultural and religious traditions.
The contemporary Venice Biennale does not negate local identities, but attempts to build a view of global art, to synthesize the Same and the Other. In the context of nationalisms and fundamentalisms, it seems that multiculturalism constitutes an ethical and cultural therapy: it is urgent to practice the polycentric, dialogical and multicultural postulates in visual culture. Luckily, the Venice Biennale in the 1980s and 90s happen in the cultural context where multiple cultures co-exist.
When 'cultures flow in, out, around, and through state borders' (Michael Schudson:77), in particular art represents a cosmopolitanism -where the artist and the public desire to fulfill a Stoic dream of becoming citizens of the universe- and, on the other hand, the politics of identity which priorizes belonging to a particular group.
The challenges provoked by our 'Second Media Age' which involve epistemology and ethics are addressed among others by a sociologist, Zygmunt Bauman: 'once we have obtained an electronic equivalent of the portrait of Dorian Grey, we may have earned ourselves a world without wrinkles, but also without landscape, history, and purpose.' (Bauman 1995: 44) Likewise, would artworks on line push globalization based on reason and digital logic too far without developing an inner experience of psyche? Although cyberspace may contribute to universalism, it is also used to disseminate identitarian statements as exemplified by projects of a Polish new technologies artist who propagates the issue of the national. Mass visual culture is sometimes used by nationalists who manipulate symbolisms. This is countered, however, by such initiatives as a campaign of Andrzej P▒gowski's billboard poster, distributed in Poland by 'Outdoor' Agency, which depicted a baseball bat against a background of blood stain with a caption 'It is for playing, not for killing'. The bat is frequently used by nationalist skinheads. Although the message of the poster is univocal, it may paradoxically contribute to the stereotype of the baseball bat as instrument of aggression. (Aneta Gryczka 1997: 28).
It seems that the traditional position of art is beyond the national (transnational aesthetic trends, artists' mobility, Republique des lettres) whereas a nationalization of the fine arts was produced by the nineteenth century; the problematics calls for further research. Suffice it to say now that contemporary art, as we have analyzed it in A Corridor of Two Banalities and in the rationale behind the Venice Biennale, stands against monocultural trends. An ironic comment on nationalism comes from Andrzej D│u┐niewski: he installs barbed wire around a little piece of soil in no way different from the land around it (Cornelia Lauf 1992: 120). The epitome of an 'imagined community' centred atavistically around a Blut und Boden and overprotecting them violently.
Both post-Communist and postindustrial societies witness a rise of xenophobia and racism; does a globalization of visual culture constitute a sufficient counterbalance to it? Contemporary artworks are heterogeneous, open-ended and polyphonic objects-messages which represent subjectivity as well as History, individual and global alike. The critical work of a Polish-American artist, Krzysztof Wodiczko, is very revealing here: he projected the image of a swastica on South Africa House in London, constructed a vehicle for the homeless in the United States and, last but not least, sculpted a staff The Alien's
Spokesman by which a stranger can communicate with others; Wodiczko's Spokesman may be regarded as an element of a transnational civil society, described by Aristide R. Zolberg and Yusemin Nuhoglu Soysal. The topical question is how to live together and to respect differences: the visual arts of today provide an answer, however, not without reservations.
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