Xu Bing: A Book From the Sky

Contemporary Art

Meanwhile, curatorial strategies began to shift in ways that reflected this expanded world theater. In fact, as postmodernism came increasingly to know itself, it was discovered that the role of the curator was to be of expanded and intensified importance. It was the curator, even more than the artist perhaps, who aimed artworks at an agenda and who could, by changing strategies, contribute toward changing the agendas (Barme, 13).

In 1984, the exhibition Primitivism in Twentieth-Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern was mounted at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It was widely received like anachronistically modernist, a relic of colonialist attitudes, relegating nonwhite cultures to the status of footnotes or perhaps mascots to Western art history. Five years later, the exhibition Les magiciens de la terre at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, attempted to reshape this strategy for the postcolonial era. Contemporary works of artists from the so-called third world that is from previously colonized cultures were shown with Western contemporary art without any implications of influence or hierarchy. The arts of Africa and Oceania had previously been viewed as primitive or tribal arts; to turn away from such work and look instead at contemporary art by living artists from the former third world—individuals with names and stories—was a clear acknowledgment of the postcolonial situation, of the reality of the present over the past. That, however, was still the West exhibiting the rest. The next step occurred when previously colonized cultures began to exhibit themselves on their own terms, in a new series of international exhibitions of contemporary art in third-world capitals (Keefer, 84).

The Venice Biennale, founded in 1895, had maintained the idea of an artistic and cultural mainstream located in the West. It was identified with late nineteenth-century imperialism and more or less limited to the Western imperial powers. As colonialism passed and previously colonized cultures began to speak in their own voices, they also wanted a visual language that was imprinted with their sense of their own identity. In the postcolonial situation, the image of a culture's self or consciousness and the art activity that leads to it, can contribute to the emergence of new intercultural relationships. A culture's visual tradition, when exported, serves as a kind of ambassador, and visual borrowing and merging constitute a sub-rosa level of foreign policy.

One way to enter into the international discourse was through the institution of the regularly recurring (usually biennial) international exhibition of contemporary art. Starting in the 1960s, such exhibitions were founded in New Delhi, São Paulo, Cairo, Kinshasa, Dakar, Istanbul, Johannesburg, Saarema, and elsewhere. In some cases, such exhibitions were seen as a way to enter modernism. Although entering modernism today may seem an archaic desire in the West, too much of the world it still seems the way to wealth and respectability. At Cairo, for example, it is primarily the Arab world that is represented (though there are Western exhibits, including an American one) and it ...