George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Door to Art of the World, Barely Ajar" by HOLLAND COTTEROn a pay-what-you-wish Saturday evening in late February, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum rotunda was dense with visitors to a new show, “Italian Futurism, 1909-1944: Reconstructing the Universe.“
Suddenly, a bugle squawked out a few notes, and from two upper ramps banners unfurled. One was painted with the words “Wage Theft.“ The other carried a drawing of a world globe accompanied by the phrase “1% Museum.“
A call-and-response chant began: “Who is building the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi?“
“Migrant workers in labor camps! Is this the future of art?“
Then a single voice called out: “The Guggenheim Museum has a museum empire. The Guggenheim should not be on the wrong side of history.“
After about 20 minutes of this orchestrated interruption, which included a tossing of leaflets and the posting of a manifesto, the demonstrators left the premises.
They were members of an activist political group called G.U.L.F. (Global Ultra Luxury Faction), which is affiliated with two larger groups, Gulf Labor and Occupy Museums. For two years Gulf Labor, a coalition of international artists, has been protesting, largely through the web, the state of what some critics likened to indentured servitude of laborers, many from South Asia, brought in to work on a new Guggenheim franchise located on Saddiyat Island — “Island of Happiness” — just off the coast of Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates.
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Protesters at the Guggenheim. Credit G.U.L.F. (Gulf Ultra Luxury Faction)
Asked for a response to the protest, the Guggenheim’s director, Richard Armstrong, said the complaints were misplaced. Construction on the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, designed by Frank Gehry, had not yet begun at the time of the demonstration. G.U.L.F. countered that all the labor-intensive structural groundwork that would make the building possible — roads, sewage systems — had been underway for some time, and reports of worker abuses were rife.
Whatever the reality, in the eyes of at least some art world citizens, the Guggenheim was doing at the very least a convincing impersonation of a globalizing corporation with new headquarters, built by and for the rich at the expense of the poor, to supply a luxury leisure and tourist spot in the Middle East with global art exhibitions.
Global — as in globalism and globalization — has been a period-defining word in talk about art and its institutions in the last few decades. And along with certain other zeitgeisty terms like multiculturalism and postmodernism, it once had a utopian ring.
When the economy, including the art market, bottomed out at the end of the 1980s, walls came down, and long-excluded art came in. Not only did the art of African-Americans, Asian-Americans and Native Americans gain admittance, but so did new art from Africa, Asia and South America, art that we barely even knew existed.
Back then, globalism seemed to hold one main promise: finally bringing us all, with our manifold colors and languages, to the table, where we wouldn’t all just break bread side by side, we’d cook up whole new fusion cuisines.
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Cleaning a work by Jeremy Deller, installed near M+, a Hong Kong museum opening in 2016. Credit Laurent Fievet/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Even before the financial crisis in the late 1980s, there were indicators of incipient change. One came with the 1984 exhibition “‘Primitivism‘ in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern“ at the Museum of Modern Art, organized by William S. Rubin and Kirk Varnedoe, that paired examples of traditional African, Oceanic and Native American objects with Western modern art. The take-away idea was to demonstrate the ingenious use Western artists had made of those “primitive“ sources. Non-Western art objects were reduced to illustrating Western accomplishments.
The response was explosive. In a widely read review in Artforum, the critic Thomas McEvilley, who died last year, slammed the museum with accusations of cultural colonialism. The curators came back with a defense, only to have Mr. McEvilley demolish it and, by doing so, to decisively accelerate a broad rethinking, already underway, of the blinkered attitudes of Western museums toward the rest of the world.
The debate had international repercussions. In 1989 an exhibition called “Magiciens de la Terre,“ organized by Jean-Hubert Martin at the Pompidou Center in Paris, was conceived as a corrective to the MoMA exhibition and had the distinction of being one of the first truly global museum shows, bringing together 50 contemporary artists from Europe and North America with 50 from Africa, Asia, South America and Australia.
But in a different way from MoMA, it gave the non-Western work a primitivizing gloss, beginning with the title. Art by the Western artists was, for the most part, presented for cool contemplation, but the work chosen by many of the non-Western participants had an ethnographic spin as if the objects were expected to do something: heal, receive prayers, create magic, be spiritual. Despite the show’s stated intention to create something like a globalist balance of values, a West-in-control-of-the-rest perspective remained intact.
Still, a door to a larger view of the world did open. But has it stayed open, and if so, how wide?
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Workers last year at the future site of the Louvre Abu Dhabi, near where the Guggenheim is building a branch. Credit Marwan Naamani/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
In terms of genuine globalist reach, MoMA is a more expansive institution than it was in 1984, but only in the area of contemporary art. Global modernism remains either outside its ken or perhaps hidden away in its storage vaults. In any case, we rarely see it.
The Guggenheim has been more on the ball, though too often in a self-aggrandizing, one-shot way. For a show in 1996 imported from the Royal Academy of Arts in London, called “Africa: The Art of a Continent,“ it jammed hundreds of “traditional“ African objects, representing dozens of cultures, into its rotunda in an inchoate, context-free display. It took roughly the same omnibus approach in “China: 5000 Years“ in 1998 and in “Brazil: Body and Soul,“ which opened in 2001. It was no coincidence that these blockbusters came at a time when the museum was working hard to establish international branches.
The situation at the museum has improved. The Guggenheim has mounted some large Asian shows since — a Cai Guo Qiang retrospective in 2008, the 2013 Gutai show — and there are on-staff Asian art curators. But the museum’s much advertised global art acquisition initiative has gotten off to a disappointingly stingy start. The first installment, last year’s “No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia,“ was small and tucked away in a side gallery.
In New York it has been left to smaller museums, often short of money, to pick up the globalist slack in a consistent and venturesome way. These include the Queens Museum, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, El Museo del Barrio, the Studio Museum in Harlem and Asia Society. Most innovative of all was the Museum for African Art, which opened in 1984 and revolutionized ideas about how to present non-Western culture in a Western context. Dismayingly, last year the museum changed its mission and name — it is now the New African Center — leaving its future as an exhibiting institution unclear.
And, of course, what has changed most boldly over the last decade is the global art landscape and the place of museums in it, a story still very much in the process of unfolding. With “Magicien“ as an originating model, international biennials and art fairs have proliferated. Essentially pop-up events, they plunk down large shipments of price-tagged pluralism everywhere, standardizing and neutralizing the experience of “difference” — editing it to a manageable market and determining what we will see in our big, ostensibly “global” museums, the “1%” as the protesters had it.
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A painting seen in “Gutai.” Credit Richard Perry/The New York Times
Some of the newest of these institutions are in the Middle East and China. For the last several years China has indulged in a spectacular binge of museum construction, thanks both to competitive nationalism and to new wealth. New regional museums of archaeological or other traditional material abound. So do private museums housing personal collections amassed by members of the newly rich. There are even museums of world culture, all but unheard-of outside the West until now. Two state-run museums that opened in Shanghai in 2012, one devoted to modern and the other to contemporary art, are mandated to show at least some Western work.
In Hong Kong, among the exclusive shops and restaurants of the developing West Kowloon Cultural District, the colossal M+ museum is in operation even though its building won’t be finished until 2016. The institution’s bias is 20th- and 21st-century Asian-centric work, but it will incorporate significant Western material.
The M+ pointedly calls itself a visual cultural museum rather than an art museum. But with a starter collection that appears to draw heavily on the internationally approved contemporary Chinese canon, it could, without strong curatorial direction, adhere to a now standard-issue global format.
Is there any place to escape from this model among new or newish museums outside the Western sphere? Southeast Asia presents serious possibilities, with a lively art scene and interesting contemporary spaces in Bangkok, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam and Yogyakarta, Indonesia. And Africa, where large-scale Western-style museums are all but impossible to sustain, produces alternatives almost by default.
Institutions like Bandjoun Station in the western region of Cameroon; Zoma Contemporary Art Center in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; and Raw Material Company in Dakar, Senegal, are all small, artist-built-and-run institutions that multitask as exhibition venues, archives, libraries, studios, guesthouses, gathering spots and schools.
Far from being part of the floating world of a market-driven museum culture, they’re thoroughly grounded in a local context, yet, through social media, networked internationally. Given their slender means, they have to stay flexible, light on their feet and open to alteration. In most cases, the one component they lack is a permanent collection. Deeply committed to the idea of art being, intrinsically, a form of social activism, their very existence carries a political charge.
Our big globalizing institutions of modern and contemporary art carry no such charge. Despite their fabulously rich holdings in art, any spark of a vision of the museum as a community of cultures, a forum of equal Others, is hard to find. In this context, globalism is shut down, out of fuel.
Even unbuilt, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi feels like a white elephant, corralled on the Island of Happiness with others of its kind: an Abu Dhabi branch of the Louvre designed by Jean Nouvel, and a performing arts center designed by Zaha Hadid, all constructed by people who will most likely never get in the doors and whose art is still hard to find in comparable museums in New York. Yet it would take a real cynic not to speculate about how this might be different. What if seemingly incompatible institutional features — humane local wisdom and custodianship of treasures of art — could be made to coexist? We’d have museums that are on the right side of history, and in which the future of art would be secure. That ideal is worth storming an empire for.
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Steve Marcus/ReutersDaniel S. Loeb is seeking a seat on Sotheby’s board.
