Another Look at Social Dimension ( 7 of 8 )

The Australian conversations were an attempt to illuminate, in a totally different cultural setting, the effects of self-alienation induced by modernism. It may be claimed that some issues - such as cultural imperialism - encouraged a reconsideration of the Art & Language's situation and led to a partial revision of the group's practice. Consequently, the relation between essay-writing and object-making which had characterized the group's practice since the early-1970s became less fluid; less, perhaps, a matter of "theory testing" and more a question of generating polemical texts and puzzling out the problem of their strategic placement. This sense of political certainty, coupled as it was with a relative lack of ironical purchase on what were presumably political moves, was not shared by all those in the group. Towards the end of 1976, Art & Language found itself in an untenable condition, riven by internal conflict over the dilemma of whether to literalize the political dimension of art or remain situated within the social limit proscribed by avant-garde practice. Ranged against each other were those who considered themselves to be artists caught in the paradoxical web of cultural politics with no clear way out and artists who believed the way forward to be a direct engagement with radical politics for the purpose of the creation of "effective" visual propaganda.

* * * "The cultures of globalization" is the title of a recently-published collection of essays edited by Jameson and Masao Miyoshi. The title seems to me to be a fitting coda to this essay, pointing as it does, the way towards the future and the problems with which artists and intellectuals must face, whether they be concerned with the destruction of local cultures or are simply interested to puzzle the relationship in high art between market dominance and regional influence.

In 1974, Art & Language questioned why Latin American artists, or European artists, or Asian artists should look to New York when it came to their own existence. Why, it was asked, do artists outside New York remain intent upon "mastering" the precepts of a modernism that is essentially alien to their life-world? If those in Art & Language were "artists out of work" who felt strongly about artistic practice being less about making objects and more a matter of trying to live the impossibility of the situation, then what part could art play in this situation? What sort of work is possible when one believes that the dialectic between certain (historically determined) needs and desires should never be considered to be open to resolution?

This problematic was contextualized by an artistic practice that bore many similarities to Conceptual art, but was not Conceptual art. A great deal of it was motivated by the demand that we talk about ourselves in the art world without necessarily telling others about the artworld. There was a mindfulness about cultural hegemony, but little interest to take up Gramsci's challenge to fight for what he called the "high ground" of culture. These quixotic postures were not resistance to change, either; they are probably as unconvincing for today's practitioners as Donald Judd's claim that art in the U.S. is not "cultural decoration for American imperialism" had been for Art & Language and others during the 1970s. (Don Judd, Letter to Irving Sandler in reference to the panel at the College Art Association 1973. See also Judd's "Imperialism, Nationalism and Regionalism," October 1975.) Jameson has proposed to define globalization as "an untotalizable totality which intensified binary relations between its parts - mostly nations, but also regions and groups, which, however, continue to articulate themselves on the model of 'national identities' (rather than in terms of social classes, for example)." (Jameson, Preface to "The Cultures of Globalization.") He goes on to suggest that we ask other questions of this particular state of affairs. For instance, is globalization a "matter of transnational domination and uniformity or, on the other hand, the source of the liberation of local culture from hidebound state and national forms?" This was certainly the dilemma that faced Art & Language during a series of discussions initiated at the Student Cultural Center, Belgrade, in late-1975. There, young Yugoslav artists felt strongly that the State's conservative definition of art as easel painting, sculpture and printmaking, coupled with the Yugoslav Artists' Union unwillingness to recognize as art what we now benignly term "new genres" (e.g., Conceptual art, performance art, etc.) amounted to a policy of exclusion. But the official policy could best be countered, argued the Yugoslav artists, by reference to the example of the success of the very same "avantgardist" practices of the West that Art & Language was determined to undermine. At the same time, these young artists had a real antipathy towards the promotion of a national, Serbian culture, whose expression in the visual arts amounted to the State's promotion of naïve painting on glass. Within the international exchanges, therefore, one finds the inscription of class relations and struggles within the nation-state. This sort of theoretical analysis would certainly add a new dimension to our understanding of the phenomenon we have been perhaps too quick to call "cultural imperialism." (During the early-1970s, there were undoubtedly good reasons and a clear sense of political urgency attached to such judgements; I am thinking particularly of the case of solidarity with the Chilean socialists.)

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