Rasheed Araeen is an artist and founding editor of the celebrated journal Third Text. In this interview he talks about the significance of globalisation for the arts, and the political significance of the artist.

1. Shifting Geographies of Art

Lorenzo Marsili: We are now witnessing an explosion of interest in the cultural production of the "former-third world", of which the recent craze around Indian or Chinese contemporary art is an example. This dynamic, even if not devoid of a commercial logic, seems to be part of a general geographical restructuring, which some may praise as a potential new multipolarity of the art world. I have three questions on this: Would it be possible to understand the current stage of cultural globalisation as a kind of replication/fragmentation of the periphery/centre relation, with a host of inter-connected “urban global hubs” pitted against a local and excluded “outside” (“New Delhi” versus the Indian “periphery”)? To what extent do these global hubs collaborate in the diffusion of an essentially hegemonic and homogenising trans-national artistic consensus, and to what extent can they instead contribute to the emergence of a genuinely alternative and de-centred discourse? You have strongly criticised multiculturalism for inducing “non-white” artists to wear their cultural mask, to parade their identity card of “otherness” and “happily dance in the court of the ethnic King Multiculturalism”. And we have seen an early exploitation of “Chineseness” or “Indian-ness” in the blockbuster exhibitions that first engaged with artists from these countries. But can we argue that this seems to be changing with the growing maturity of cultural globalisation? China is managing to establish a very competitive, partly independent and home-grown “art system”, and I don’t know your opinion on the latest show of Indian art at the Serpentine… --------------------------------- Rasheed Araeen: The basic issue you have raised here is of historical nature and it can only be evoked or dealt with historically. To be specific, it involves looking at the history of ideas produced by art, not any art but that which emerged as part of human progress and advancement fundamental to modernity that has its roots in European enlightenment. Art sometimes followed its prescribed root, other times it revolted against its rationality; resulting from this conflict between the European rationality of progress and free artistic imagination has been a movement of idea that nevertheless did produce a body of knowledge whose critical examination led to the narratives of art history. What is this body of knowledge and how it was produced and by whom and how it was spread globally offer us an answer to most of your questions. The problem here is of the spread of this knowledge under and with colonialism. Not that there was something wrong with this knowledge but it became a civilising tool in the hands of the coloniser. In turn, the colonised did accept, though grudgingly, what appeared to be a promise of better life. However, this acceptance and what followed as a collaboration between the coloniser and the colonised did not produce what was the basic promise of modernity: universal human freedom, self-realisation and equality. What in fact modernity offered was an un-resolvable contradiction of colonialism; it could not be realised so long as colonialism was there. While centre-periphery paradigm, central to colonialism, was reinforced, philosophically or ideologically, by the gap between the European Self and its colonised Other, the struggle of anti-colonialism was or should have been to confront this gap. This gap could have been filled only when the coloniser and the colonised were tied together in a struggle that liberated them both from colonialism. But, as the anti-colonial struggle became a tool in the hands of a particular class which was produced, nurtured and nourished by the colonial regime and which was in pursuit of its own power, the ideology of anti-colonialism collapsed into the illusions of the independence of postcolonial nation states. While the former colonies of the West are now independent states, colonialism is still there. It has taken a different form; a benevolent form which covers the centre-periphery gap by collapsing it within a discourse that is open to all but not on the same basis. With this has in fact emerged a postcolonial surrogate ruling class in the so-called Third World with its surrogate intellectuals. Those intellectuals who could not be absorbed by the agendas of these nation states, migrated to the West where they now occupy an important place, both outside and inside the academe, as part of the postcolonial discourse. Although this has created an enormous body of useful knowledge, most of this knowledge only provides a critical elaboration to supplement what had already been there within the liberalism of Western humanities. In other words, postcolonial knowledge is trapped within and legitimised by the institutional power that continues to perceive the Other not as an integral part of the Self – and vice a versa – ¬but the one who can be accepted in its progressive discourse only paternalistically. The Other is now in fact accepted into what can be shared by both the Self and the Other, so long as what divides them is not challenged and transformed into a liberated space – a space that is occupied by both on the same and equal terms. Although what you call ‘cultural globalisation’ is part of the demand of global capital for continually unending innovation and production of new things, the successful entry of the products of other cultures, with their own different identities, into this scenario has been promoted and legitimised by the postcolonial surrogate class and its intellectuals. It is this collaboration between the centre and periphery that has produced the multiculturalism of ‘cultural globalisation’, in which Chinese and Indian artists are now allowed and are celebrated. As both the Chinese and Indian industrial products are integrated into the global capital and its exploitation of globally available cheap labour, the gap between the exploiting centre and the exploited periphery has now collapsed into this common goal. And culture is used to cover this up, producing global spectacles of art biennales and art fairs in which the colonial desire and fascination for the Other is put on display and is consumed like any other exotic commodity. However, what I have described here is only part of the story. But a dominant part which is visible, recognised and globally celebrated. There is another part which is somewhat invisible, unrecognised or suppressed. It involved those who understood the true purpose of anti-colonial struggle, for whom it was not merely the question of obtaining the self-rule as the ultimate end. The self-rule was only a stepping stone into the continuity of a historical process, beyond the so-called independence of postcolonial nation states, that should have led to the liberation of both the perpetrators of colonialism and its victims from what has now become the colonial ideology of neo-colonialism and its worldview that now prevails and dominates the world. But this process was halted or high-jacked by those who became the rulers of the postcolonial world. Those who claim to have once struggled against the colonial regimes are now in fact complicit with the ideology of neo-colonialism.

2. Art And/As Subversion

Lorenzo Marsili: You have written that art has a historical responsibility, a subversive function. This journal has often called for just such awareness on the part of artists: can I ask you what you mean with these expressions, and how “subversion” can operate in the field of visual arts today? You write that the only option open to an artist today is the commodity market, transforming the artist into a producer of commodity. I have two questions. - This is a call for the restructuring of art institutions and the art system more generally; how radically do you want to pursue this critique, and what are its main targets? - Secondly, to what extent are artists or cultural figures personally responsible for sustaining and legitimising a certain system of cultural mercantilism? If I want to hear Žižek speak on the end of capitalism I need to pay ten pounds. You have been very active in founding pioneering cultural journals. In 1987 the project of Third Text was born with, amongst others, the objective of resisting Western “control” of the art world and cultural production more generally. In what way does the changed paradigm of cultural globalisation call for a change of political strategy for an anti-hegemonic cultural project? ------------------------- Rasheed Araeen: Art is part of a historical process that should lead to a better society; and the responsibility of art lies within this process. It must continue maintaining this process, not only through new ideas and innovations but they must involve a vision that leads to a transformation of society. This transformation can take place by subverting what is an obstacle in its way. Art as a ‘subversive’ force was in fact fundamental to the radical avant-garde. But this subversion became pacified once it entered the art institution with a demand to be recognised and legitimised as art. It is a difficult and unavoidable paradox, un-resolvable if art must maintain its status as art. And we haven’t yet found a way out of this paradox. The problem here is the individualism of the artist, whose main aim is only to strive for an individual success. Such a success does make an idea visible and distribute it in society. But by the time it reaches society and is consumed by it, it is no longer a subversive idea. In fact, the institutionalisation of the avant-garde has today turned it into any other product promoted by the sensationalism of the mass media, and consumed by the public the way it consumes other things of the consumer culture. Its ‘subversion’ is now the same illusion by which capitalism operates and by which it makes the public buy and consume its useless products. Art is therefore no longer performing its historical responsibility, as it is trapped not only in the artist’s inflated ego but the demands of a consumer society that puts the artist high up on a pedestal of the unique subject different and isolated from its own masses. Unless art enters and reinforces the creativity of the masses, it cannot be a liberating force for society as a whole. Art now needs a new strategy which liberates it not only from the demands of consumer culture but its entrapment within the art institution. The role of art institutions cannot be denied in the process that connects an individual’s creativity with the public, but this role has now become subordinate to the demands of art market for which art is like any other precious commodity. What we therefore also need now is the liberation of art institutions from this subordination, so that they can perform the role for which they are established in society. The point I want to make now is about art institutions particularly in Europe – as your publication is concerned with Europe. It seems they have not yet come to terms with what is in fact embedded within their own structures as part of the legacies of colonialism; and this has prevented them from recognising the fact that societies of Europe are no longer white societies but have become multiracial societies, particularly as a result of postwar immigration of people from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. What we found in both Paris and London, in particular after the war, were integrated multiracial art communities in which artists of different racial or cultural backgrounds pursued the same goal within the movements of modernism and the avant-garde. Where are their achievements? European art histories do not even mention, let alone recognise, any of these achievements as part of Europe’s own histories or achievement. I would in fact go further to say that these institutions have actively suppressed the knowledge of these achievements; and have instead turned to the promotion and celebration of what could be considered by them outside the movements of modernism and the avant-garde. This brings back me to your first question about the ‘explosion of interest in the cultural production of the “former-third world’, to say that the art institutions in Europe are in fact behind what you call ‘cultural globalisation’. Why are these institutions promoting what are no more than the spectacles of exoticism of other cultures, while suppressing what their own postwar multiracial societies have produced in art? Why is ‘cultural globalisation’ more important for these institutions than what was necessary for the internal transformations of European societies? The achievements of the postwar multiracial societies of Europe was in fact an allegory, that which provided a historical model for the postcolonial transformation of these societies. But the suppression of this achievement shows that Europe is perhaps not yet ready or unwilling for this transformation. The critical role of Third Text should therefore remain in removing those obstacles which halt or stop historical processes of society’s social transformation; in particular to expose what is suppressed as knowledge. What Third Text faced, and has been facing since its emergence in 1987, was an extremely difficult task. It was the task of both confronting and negotiating both the postcolonial conditions responsible for ‘cultural globalisation’ and the institutional power that produced and legitimised them. This involved many compromises; sometimes even against our own objectives. But these compromises were necessary. Without these compromises Third Text would not be there, still operating after twenty two years of its existence. However, we have not capitulated to the dominant view and become one of its postcolonial functionaries. Third Text hasn’t achieved all its objectives, but we have not given up the hope.