The Myth Universe Pageant

“Art Worlds in Dialogue—From Gauguin to the Global Present,” at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Germany, is a vast exhibition of 450 works by 126 artists that takes stock of a century of cross-fertilization in visual art. A timely and constructive millennial exercise under the banner of globalization, it combines an historical overview of European and American modernist art influenced by non-Western cultures. Through the inclusion of contemporary artists from the last 20 years (though none from Canada, but more about that later) the one-sidedness of the “Dialogue” which took place in the early part of the 20th century becomes more conspicuous. Here the colonies “talk back” in the same space that houses the colonizers.

What makes the early depictions of “primitive” cultures, by Paul Gauguin, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein, Karl Schmidt-Rotluff, among others, suspect is that the “dialogue” in the early 20th century was mainly a one-way conversation. Little interest was shown in the meaning, for the colonized peoples themselves, of the cultural objects and rituals. These were eagerly appropriated to signify a utopian paradigm of innocence and natural freedom believed lost in the secular conventions of Western culture. With post-colonial hindsight we’re able to recognize that many of the early modern works in this exhibition conform to the Western myth of a natural paradise, which reveals a stunning ignorance of colonial oppression. Hanna Höch’s ironic series of photo-montages, entitled “Aus einem ethnographischen Museum (1924),” forms the notable exception. Whether intended as political comments or not, these exquisite cut-and-paste images of “primitive” art objects and Western magazine pictures (mostly of women) can be read as acid comments on the consignment of both women and native art to the passive space of the pedestal and the museum, where they could be adored as signs of purity and nature.

Yet, the historical section of this exhibition can hardly be dismissed as being sins of the past. The show shines with brilliant works by such canonic artists as Brancusi, Klee, Moore and Matisse, as well as by many contemporary artists who persisted in their search for new forms, styles and materials. What they sought were ways to express meaning and feelings that transcended the specifics of local culture. Paul Klee’s luminous Tunesian paintings, Barnett Newman’s Midnight Blue, a 1970 painting of a dark field with a searing blue line, Zao Wou-Ki’s Wind (1954), in which Chinese letters are transformed into leaves blown upwards by a dark primordial energy, are just some of the brilliant attempts to turn art into a universal language.

Somewhat surprisingly in this age of insistence on cultural differences, the hope that art can have universal meaning is not completely dashed in the work representing the contemporary scene. Some non-Western artists borrow back methods and forms developed in the West, and the resulting hybrid art often creates transcultural, if not universal, meaning. Yan Pei-Ming’s Tête de Bouddha (1999), for instance, combines an Eastern icon with a Western painting style. The resulting image of a thinking head signifies the human condition of living in the material world as a conscious, sentient being.

Other works, too, rise beyond the frames of the cultures from which they originate. To name a few, Turning Around the Centre is a sculpture by Shirazeh Houshiary, consisting of four cubes measuring one by one metre, carved out at the top into geometrical hollows lined with lead and gold leaf. Wolfgang Laib displays 63 brass dishes filled with mounds of rice mixed with pollen, lined up on the floor in front of a rock. The sheer beauty of these works reaches beyond specific cultural practices to become signs of a human connectedness rather than of cultural separation. Laib’s installation, displayed in a gauzy space built with theatrical scrims, fulfills a need to contemplate the deeper mystery of life away from the scramble of the everyday. Such works provide sacred sites in the secular space of the museum.

A shared understanding of the meaning of life is, however, mostly a utopian ideal, waylaid by political realities of difference, conflict, separation and oppression. Most of the contemporary artists in this exhibition find their inspiration in such confrontations. The seclusion provided by Laib’s installation is unique in a setting where the contemporary works vie for attention in a boisterous clattering of styles and a range of politically charged subjects.

Yet only occasionally do the works refer to specific political events and injustices; Jimmie Durham’s La Malinche, a poignant sculpture of Hérnan Cortéz’s mistress, is an exception here. Political protest and victimization take second place in this exhibition to no less politically loaded questions of identity and meaning, where art navigates between the problematic trajectories of global consciousness and local rootedness.

One of the most vivid examples of the effort to preserve local identity is Frédéric Bruly Bouabré’s L’Alphabet Bété (1990-1991). Bouabré, a 78-year-old self-taught artist and visionary who lives in Abidjan, on the Ivory Coast, exhibits 449 postcard-size drawings in ballpoint and coloured pencil. Each drawing illustrates, with common objects and activities from Bouabré’s environment, a phonetic sound of the language of his people, the Bété. Bouabré’s work demands respect for a distinct local identity at the same time that it shows a desire for this identity to be known and included in a larger global community.

Cai Guo-Qiang, Jimmie Durham, Mona Hatoum, Kcho, Yinka Shonibare, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Xu Bing, showing in Cologne, were all seen earlier in the exhibition “Crossings” at the National Gallery of Canada in 1998, as well as in several other international exhibitions. The return of the same names is, however, somewhat problematic. Who makes these lists, what criteria are used, and what kind of art is never seen? Why, for instance, have the curators of “Art Worlds in Dialogue” not discovered art in Canada, a country that has centuries of practice in dialogue and collision between cultures? Where is Emily Carr, with her passionate interest in the Northwest Coast? Or Robert Houle, a Native artist, in turn intrigued by Newman’s interest in that place? Or Gerald McMaster or Shelley Niro with their humorous approaches to appropriation and stereotyping of Native culture? Or Lani Maestro and Jin-me Yoon, who for years have explored multiple cultural identities? The list could go on. The troubling question remains, who is responsible for Canada’s invisibility in the international art scene?

A truly democratic world of connected differences still seems far off in the present global situation dominated by the West. The Cologne exhibition, however, is one of several recent indications that, at least in the “Art World,” inclusion of non-Western culture is being taken seriously. Others are the appointment of Okwui Enwezor as the curator for the Documenta XI to take place in 2002, and the new biennials in Istanbul, Johannesburg, Havana, Caracas and Seoul. The roll-call at established international exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale now, at least, includes non-Westerners. ■

“Kunstwelten im Dialog—von Gauguin zur Globalen Gegenwart” (“Art Worlds in Dialogue—From Gauguin to the Global Present”). Museum Ludwig, Cologne, November 5, 1999, to March 19, 2000. Curators: Yilmaz Dziewior, Marc Scheps, Barbara Thiemann. Catalogue: Kunstwelten im Dialog—van Gauguin zur Globalen Gegenwart (Cologne: Dumont, Museum Ludwig, 1999), 576 pp.

Petra Halkes contributes frequently to Border Crossings. She lives in Ottawa.