Olu Oguibe: 'A Brief Note on Internationalism'
In: Global Visions: Towards a New Internationalism in the Visual Arts. Edited by Jean Fisher. London: Kala Press in association with the Institute of international Visual Arts, 1994, pp. 50-59.
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It would be wrong to expect that the disparities and inconsistencies in international culture brokering, especially as practised in the West, would disappear because the very space and institutions which perpetrate and perpetuate them, simulate situations of dialogue. There are deeper questions, more disturbing than discourse has named so far, which underlie inconsistencies in the presentation and appreciation of cultural products in the West's international arena.
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It is possible to see in the discourse of a new internationalism, as has emerged lately in alternative spaces of dialogue in the West, an initiative of openness in international cultural practice. But, in truth, what we are witnessing is a cyclic repetition of situations which in the past showed equal, even greater promise, but eventually failed to overwhelm the deep-seated and firm structures which we interrogate. The mirages of cultural tolerance which surface ahead of all such dialogue, like most cultural phenomena in the West, seem to follow the same thirty-year cycle as fashion and music, within which they speedily fade away, only to reappear. In Britain, for instance, there was a period of great excitement in the area of cross-cultural exchanges and initiatives from the 1950s to the early 1970s. Not only was the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) established, but also several other, even more effective projects were led by young cultural practitioners and theoreticians which would eventually define the nature and specificities of cultural production in Britain.
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Thirty years on, however, these historical landmarks are erased in established narrations of cultural practice in Britain. Memory being short, therefore, it is conceivable that the new generation of practitioners and theoreticians, who did not witness that moment in history, perceive themselves as pioneers in cultural dialogue and tolerance.
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In a sense, certain key points are missing from prior discourses of cultural internationalism, and these omissions, I believe, contribute to the eventual collapse of each epoch of dialogue and activity. The first of these, to me, is the failure so far to arrive at a clear and shared understanding of what we mean by internationalism. So far this has been assumed, to the convenience of certain cultures and spaces, and to the detriment of others.
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Little subsequent debate has departed from, or challenged the above, clearly late-modernist, understanding of internationalism, hence the call for a 'new internationalism'. One would suggest that with the current avalanche of pluralist awareness, many societies are perhaps too preoccupied with the daunting project of self-interrogation and renarration within their own borders to extend this critical disposition to debates on internationalism. So far little has been done to de-centre internationalism and its discourses; that is to say, to rephrase them, to refrain from discourses which only run at a tangent from western/modernist internationalism and in so doing fail to undermine its self-centring project, and to direct attention to a recognition of internationalism as denoting all practices of cultural exchange and interaction between peoples of all nationalities, in the Americas, Africa, Asia, the South Seas, and so on. Rather than direct attention to the reality of a pluralism of internationalisms, inter-nationalism being in itself a concept transcending national boundaries and one encoded in the physically and conceptually itinerant nature of the artist, much discourse seems to accept a monolithic Internationalism: some supernatural heroic phenomenon issuing from the impeccable ingenuity of the West and marked with a capital 'I'.
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It is important to note, as I did earlier, that in western definitions of internationalism, artists of colour repeatedly fail to feature.
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Beyond occasional acts of tokenism, like the featuring of Rover Thomas and Jimmy Pike (both viewed by the Australian art establishment as indelibly marked by their aboriginality) in the 1990 Venice Biennale, indigenous Australian artists remain on the fringes of the establishment from which space they continue to wage a battle across the borderline. It may not be entirely coincidental that the same Biennale saw the appearance of Anish Kapoor, an artist of Indian descent, at the British Pavilion, and that of black Africans at the back of the Italian. The politics of Kapoor's acceptance, it has been argued, indicates not radical change in the disposition of the British mainstream, or the beginnings of a true redefinition of internationalism in the West. In fact, the more coincidental event of his Turner Prize in 1991, with black British author Ben Okri's winning of the Booker Prize for fiction, and the award of the Whitbread Prize for Literature to Caribbean writer Derek Walcott, set off a wave of paranoia in Britain and occasioned fears that English culture was under threat from outsiders. The introduction not so long ago of the category 'ethnic', as a qualifier for all cultural production from artists and communities of non-Occidental origin, was a deliberate ploy to reinforce the boundaries which seclude those artists from the arena of western internationalism. The register is meant not only to evoke provincialism of the most parochial form, but equally to impose a time frame which dislodges its object from modernity. And that which lags behind in the crypts of pre-modernity cannot be considered appropriate for internationalism.