How does the “South” appear on the Art Empire’s Map?
Some Necessary Political Questions

“The Venice Biennale has for over a century been one of the most prestigious cultural institutions in the world. Established in 1895, the Biennale has an attendance today of over 300,000 visitors at the Art Exhibition.”

--from the Venice Biennale website (www.labiennale.org)

“At 72 Malick Sidibé is the undisputed master of his photographic generation. No artist anywhere is more deserving of the 2007 Biennale of Venice’s Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, and none more worthy of being the first African so honored.”

--La Biennale di Venezia. Press release, 15 May, 2007

“The Guggenheim Abu Dhabi is the largest museum in a series of cultural institutions planned as part of the Saadiyat Island Cultural District, which will serve the world as a destination for the advancement of knowledge and the understanding of culture through the arts.”

--from the Guggenheim Foundation website (www.guggenheim.org)

The legacy of colonization and racism still worries the European present, it won’t to go away, and it keeps on re-surfacing as a morbid reminder of the intense level of cultural violence that was aimed at the “other” over centuries.

This violence has left one of the most profound visual imprints on all aspects of the modern world. The deliberate refusal to see those constructed as “other” as being subjects in their own right defines a literary and visual legacy that has become part of the dominant Eurocentric construction of world history. The fact that theorists and critics have exposed this reality has not reduced its operational power: the lack of recognition of indigenous cultures (which have been historically misrepresented in the West as backward and savage) is a defining marker of the pre and post-colonial eras. But aesthetic modernism—that amorphous obsession of Western art history—almost never registers either the violence of colonialism or the erased subjectivity of the so-called native. And whenever art from the South is discussed, it seems like anxious discussions about what modernism was, when it occurred, and how it continues to resonate are never too far away.

Be that as it may, Europe and North America still continue with the tired cultural business of display and discovery. If we attempt to discuss cultural difference in this framework—or to develop a critical movement within photographic and visual art practice—we quickly reach the dead end of a systematic negation of art institutions altogether: in practice, a self-silencing. It’s also important to note that the globalization of the art world has resulted in a new category of artist: the professional ‘other’ who, casual as you like, will claim the position of being post-race, afro-politan, or alter-modern—depending, of course, on whatever curatorial opportunity presents itself. Chameleon like practice has now taken centre stage. What is left of and on the margins?

The imperial North has historically taken charge of controlling the means of visual production and constructed a worldview that is founded on Western mythologies: white supremacy, white originality, and white historicity. These mythologies are designed to bolster the hegemonic power of the North and now are focused on creating a Southern clone: replicas in ‘exotic’ locations that are designed to ultimately mirror cultural industries of Europe and the U.S. Eurocentric ideology is fundamentally dependent on the propagation of canonical figures that sustain control across global cultural sites. This allows for the interpretation of cultural exchanges to be seen primarily through Eurocentric modes of articulation. Negating difference by ultimately setting the Western modernism as norm, a grand Eurocentric construction of art history and cultural management is created and marketed in the form of a mirror South. Is it enough to move from one stage-managed “Southern” location to another or place the Southern puppets in mock conversation when an excessive and seductive Art Empire, which ultimately holds court at Venice, continues to pull the strings?

Eurocentric visual culture helps to maintain colonial and neo-colonial hierarchies through the control of representation as it projects a form of imperial benevolence that sustains traditional power relationships. Those of us who are concerned with issues relating to the North-South cultural divide need to examine just how much of the art produced in the South is aimed at Southern audiences and who composes these Southern audience. What is the ratio of North–South image flow? What is presented by whom? And under what conditions? How could South-South exchanges challenge these asymmetries when they continue to circulate between institutions modeled on the Northern art world, funded by Northern sources, and often marketed to Northern tourist audiences—or Southern audiences performing modernity by aping Western aesthetic tastes?

I would argue that it is therefore logical, indeed necessary, to analyze artistic production not just in geographical or racial terms, but in terms that fundamentally seek to investigate how power works and who is ultimately speaking for whom. Unhinging the stereotype, challenging the canon, and contesting the hegemonic perspectives of the West has for many years been a constant site of conflict for post-colonial activists, academics, artists, and freedom fighters. It’s only through direct anti- and post-colonial struggles that developed throughout Asia, Africa, and the Americas—especially during the highly charged Cold War years of the 1960’s and 70’s—that we begin to witness the Eurocentric dominance over the image and text being contested. This opening has been achieved mainly by those with an understanding of what it means to be positioned as ‘other,’ who speak from a subaltern perspective, a space of difference.

There is a danger in grounding a critique merely in the assertion of cultural difference from the West. Imperialism has systematically innovated, expanded, and applied visual technologies—and created institutions through which images could be critically positioned and consumed—not only for the power of surveillance and control, not only to erect models of colonial subject formation, but also in order to create the ‘other’ as historically and temporally distant from the European. In the emperor’s court, this distance is maintained today by displaying artists from the Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean primarily within ill-defined, sweeping geographical contexts—rather than according to political frameworks, aesthetic tendencies, historical currents, or other meaningful curatorial criteria. Art galleries, universities and museums (and crucially reproductive print media, archives, and collections) safely incorporate art from the South precisely through assimilating it to depoliticized categories (including, sometimes, the “South”) that deflect our vision from historic and contemporary forms of institutional and structural violence.

The adoption of a “post-race” position goes much further than simply reducing art to a market position. It leaves much of the harsh, violent reality of Western imperial power invisible, once again erasing the dark side of cultural progress. The cynical cults of diversity, cosmopolitanism, and the professional artist-other underwrite the Art Empire by producing a contaminated knowledge, a sanitized and “Enlightened” inclusiveness ultimately based—like an earlier Enlightenment universalism—on the conviction of superiority. We must ask: Does the South exist as a location? Or is it rather a set of conditions, a product of systemic violence and ideological domination? Who can claim the right to represent this condition? To whom? And on what basis?