ESSAYS

Thinking Back on Global

Conceptualism

By Rachel Weiss Posted on May 1, 2015

Rachel Weiss, curator, writer and professor at the School of the Art Institute of
Chicago, was invited to MoMA to speak about the exhibition Global Conceptualism:
Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s, which she co-organized in 1999 with Jane Farver
(who also came to talk on the subject), Luis Camnitzer, and an international team of
curators: Okwei Enwezor, Reiko Tomii & Chiba Shigeo, Claude Gintz, László Beke,
Mari Carmen Ramírez, Peter Wollen, Terry Smith, Margarita Tupitsyn, Sun Wan-
Kyung, Gao Minglu and Apinan Poshyananda. Weiss and Farver (whose talk can be
accessed here) were asked to reflect on the exhibition—its challenges, failures and
successes—fifteen years after it was seen at the Queens Museum in New York.

Installation view of the Global Conceptualism exhibition with works by Sung Jeung-keung, Gu Wenda, Wu
Shan Zhuan and Geng Jianyi, Queens Museum, 1999. Image courtesy of Queens Museum
I think the most basic issue that we dealt with in organizing Global Conceptualism
is one that hasn’t changed much in the years since—how to reconcile the process
of exhibition-making with the messy assembly that any project with global reach
necessarily entails. Curating usually has a premise of connectedness—series,
progressions, resonances, echoes—meaning that an exhibition narrates something
and adds up to something. It’s about asserting why things should be seen together.
But curating globally—at least the way we experienced it—meant accepting a very
different kind of aggregate. This was exacerbated, more then than today, probably,
by the fact that there’s a natural tendency to read something unfamiliar in terms of
its likeness to something known: so our primary task was to present a lot of
unfamiliar work as much as possible on its own terms, rather than as a corollary to
the conceptualist history that was already well established.

Our basic starting point was the sense that Conceptualism had been an extremely
supple cultural tool, able to contend with the volatile social and political
circumstances that existed in many parts of the world in the postwar period.
Therefore what we wanted to do with the exhibition was look at a broad array of
places and moments in order to see how art had answered those circumstances.
The show argued that there were many different modernities in all those different
places, and that Conceptualism arose variously across those locales and from
those modernities.

Underlying all of this was an intuition about the particular suited-ness of

Conceptualist practice to undertake such ambitious tasks. We suspected that this
came from Conceptualism’s interest not only in ideas, as is often claimed, but in
their transmission. Ideas in themselves could be just another version of the object
of art, even if a dematerialized one: but ideas in motion immediately pushed to the
fore questions about who receives them, and what happens as a result.

The Term “Conceptualism”

However, those ideas—especially their transmission and the people to whom they
were conveyed—were very different from one place to another, dependent on
obvious factors like cultural and political histories but equally on the facts of
infrastructure (communications technologies, for instance, or means of travel and
transport—something as basic as air routes—or information sources and channels)
and so even the one connective tissue in the project—namely, the idea of
Conceptualism—had to be an extremely accommodating container. There was no
unanimity on how the word was used, if it was even used at all: it sat differently in
relation to artistic and aesthetic precedent and in relation to the “mainstream” (in
some cases artists were eager for affiliation, in some cases they were adamantly
opposed to it, and in others they were indifferent to the whole question). This was
no less complicated a landscape than the one in which we ask questions about art
overall; in a global context are we on any kind of solid ground if we assume that the
term carries enough intrinsic meaning to make “art” comprehensible as art, no
matter the context? We had an intuition about Conceptualism, and we had another
one about what it might look or feel like if so many different and often-unconnected
strands of artistic activity were brought together, but I think that was about all that
we had any solid sense of when we decided to do the show.

We started out with a pretty basic premise—we could call it anti-colonialism 101,
rejecting the geographical limitations of how Conceptual art was usually mapped.
As we got further into it we shifted into a more postcolonial position, no longer
centrally focused on simple dynamics of exclusion and more interested in
difference. This happened basically because the works that the curatorial team
were bringing to us didn’t fit any unitary definition. For instance, we had begun with
an assumption that Conceptualism, as a protagonistic force, did its most important
work in public space, retaking control there against the repression of military rules,
etcetera. But it became clear very quickly that our understandings of public and
private space—derived almost entirely from experiences in the US and Latin
America—didn’t hold for lots of other places. We knew about apartment art in
Moscow, but we also knew about the bulldozer show,1 and so when I was doing
preliminary research in Prague and Budapest, one question I asked a lot was about
works in public space. I quickly realized that the question was irrelevant for most of
the artists I was talking to since they had viewed public space as totally coopted
and corrupted, and for them the space of dissent had been private and hermetic.2
So gradually our position as the conceptualizers of the project became less about
the map and more attuned to particularities.
Installation view of the Global Conceptualism exhibition with works by Antonio Dias, Hélio Oiticica, and Oscar
Bony, Queens Museum, 1999.

It was certainly argued at the time that what we wound up with was a compendium
rather than an exhibition—meaning, I guess, that the show was too baggy to make
any clearly focused point. And that’s probably the basic disagreement about it on a
meta-level anyhow, because we were pretty clear from the get-go that a sharply
thematized exhibition just wasn’t a viable approach and that attempting to make
everything fit into any kind of neat schema would fail, by definition, to capture the
diverse range of practices, aesthetics, meanings and ambitions that Conceptualism
had been the site of. Some recent comments by Victor Burgin are useful here to
understand the idea we had about the exhibition as narrative: “A historical event,”
he says, “is a complex of fragmentary and often contradictory representations—
archival, fictional, psychical, and so on. Hollywood depictions of historical events
tend to coat such representational complexes in a sticky layer of unifying ideology,
a mix of consensual categories, stereotypical crises and predictable narrative
conclusions. To show the event ‘as it really was’ is not an alternative. It never ‘really
was’ any one thing—past and present alike are sites of contestation where radically
different perspectives collide.”3

Structure of the Curatorial Team

This brings me to the question about the structure of the curatorial team. The
horizontality of the team—an approach that was then taken up in some other big
international shows in the next years—was a completely obvious choice for us. We
did it that way for a couple of reasons. First, the three of us felt that it was basic to
the ethic of the show and the whole idea of the project that there should not be a
strong centralized narrative. If our goal was to look at how Conceptualism worked
in all those places, then we had to allow each narrative to take its own shape. We
saw our role as, first of all, convening, then looking for the threads that developed
between the various sections—looking after the emerging shape of the whole. But
it was always clear that the show would be a loose confederation rather than a
unified body. The other reason for the collaborative curatorial structure was simply
that the three of us had no expertise in a lot of the ground we wanted to cover, and
it was obvious that others were much better suited to the job. So the structure of
the team was our way of building an exhibition that did not, in its form, betray its
political commitments.

The decision we made to install the show by geographic section rather than
thematically was a related structural/philosophical issue. It boiled down to the
same question: was our point to assert that conceptualism grew into a shared
language, or that it was the specificities in how it arose and played out that
mattered most to us? Because so many of those “local” histories were still
basically unknown—both in NY and even in their home sites—it would have been
premature to install the show according to thematic or topical affinities, which
inevitably would have reinforced the dominance of the work that was already
known, with all the new material being consigned to some kind of offshoot status.

The Global

It’s worth talking a little about the word “global” here. We debated a lot about using
it because, if I remember correctly, at the time globalization was being talked about
as a process that produced ubiquitous sameness when, in fact—and especially in
the cultural sphere—that sameness was real only on the most superficial levels.
The alternative would have been “international,” but that word was still too
weighted down with colonial and imperialist connotations—for example, as in
“international style.” Both terms seemed to indicate a kind of geographical
flattening that was the opposite of what Global Conceptualism was meant to be
about. We wanted to signal a different kind of relation, which was neither made up
of vectors all pointing from the same few places out to all the other places, nor
fatally relativist—and although we were uncomfortable with its implications of
comprehensive coverage, “global” seemed the better compromise.
Global Exhibitions after Global Conceptualism

It might be useful at this point to reflect on some of the projects that have taken up
from where we left off, to see how they’ve pushed further and begun to work out
some of the cans of worms that we left open. Those challenges are—to list the
most important ones—how to go beyond simply expanding the map, to work
through what it actually means to have all those different models on the table and
accept that they don’t fit together neatly but that they still do belong together; to
look at the interconnections—both interpersonal and temporal—among the various
artists and works and moments; and finally, how to deal with the inevitable
canonization effect when fresh bodies of work enter the international, not global,
exhibition system.

The first issue, namely, of curating all that difference, turns out to be a challenge to
the idea of an exhibition, at least of an exhibition as an essay or a thesis. It also
suggests a more fragmented kind of expertise and authority on the part of the
curator. The second, about linkages, begins to create a more dynamic mandate for
the exhibition, as opposed to the more static portrait that we were able to
construct. And the third one suggests a need for a further iteration of institutional
critique, in which the trajectories or life cycles of works and histories themselves
become more transparent. I’ll try to address these three questions by looking at a
few shows that I’m aware of, which start from a premise related to our own.

These go in two different directions— exhibitions interested in sketching a ‘global’

picture, and ones committed to re-reading recent art histories—and, especially,
conceptualist ones— in the name of rescuing neglected but crucial legacies. Of the
former, the general approach seems to be—as it was for us—to define “a globalism
which acknowledges global links, but insists on the differences among movements
‘spurred by local conditions and histories.’”4 And with regard to the latter, these are
projects that arise from an urgent sense of loss, and of the need to recover,
reclaim, or reactivate histories that have been systematically lost or hidden. Not
surprisingly, those projects have cropped up in places still very much impacted by
the societal traumas of the second half of the 20th century—dictatorships,
malignant state socialisms, totalitarian regimes, the forced amnesias of
neoliberalism in Latin America, and so on.

Century City, at the Tate [Modern] in 2001, argued for the centrality of cities in the
emergence of modernity, and therefore selected nine cities in Africa, Asia, the
Americas, and Europe that have “acted as crucibles for cultural innovation.”5 Each
of the sections of the exhibition focused on “flashpoints generated by artists and
other cultural practitioners.”6 Century City’s curatorial structure was like what we
used in Global Conceptualism, framing each city as the site of “one of many
modernisms” and assigning each to a curator who could work from firsthand
knowledge of it. Because they were looking at cities rather than art movements, I
think they had a more aerated platform, which in turn made it possible to move
more easily among a lot of different kinds of cultural production—artworks, sure,
but also posters, books, photojournalism and documentary, and so on. It seemed
to me at the time that that kind of flexibility gave a less preconditioned kind of
space for looking at global complexity and particularity.
Catalogue of the exhibition Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis, edited by Iwona Blazwick
(London: Tate Publishing) 2001

There also seems to be a connection to the Walker Art Center’s 2003 How
Latitudes Become Forms, which was a kind of remix bringing together Szeemann’s
“Attitudes” with Global Conceptualism’s approach to latitudes. The central trope in
that show was what Philippe Vergne called “the reinvention of difference,” taking
up Saskia Sassen’s idea that the world of so-called global cities is one in which the
shape of the world economy and the influence of new communications
technologies have “not only reconfigured centrality and its spatial correlates, but
have also created new spaces for centrality.”7 So what we shared in this case was
a core interest in developing a different kind of map—not just a more expansive
one, but one in which the parts related to the whole in a different way— in order to
understand artistic production.

Catalogue of the exhibition How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in a Global Age, edited by Philippe Vergne with
Douglas Fogle and Olukemi Ilesanmi for the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center) 2003

That show, like Global Conceptualism, also presupposed a broadly political

investment as its baseline. Vergne asserts that “The key idea of Szeemann’s
exhibition was without a doubt liberation. . . . echoing the liberation movements
that emerged across the world at the end of the 1960s.” Vergne situated the works
within “an aesthetic of thirdness [a term associated with film and cultural theory]
that explores how cultural practices driven by political and cultural emancipation
can equally commit to aesthetic strategies.”

I didn’t actually see Latitudes, so I’m working off the catalogue here, but there were
a few things that seem worth noting. First, the language around global differences
and political baselines felt a lot more confident—like these were no longer nearly
such contentious things to claim as they had been a few years before. And like
Century City, Latitudes looked much more broadly across genres than we ever did,
incorporating film, performance and online works to, again, sketch difference
across multiple dimensions and expressive orbits.

In both cases, it seems that curating happened in a kind of constellation—

something that has become much more common since then—in which there were
relatively distinct areas of expertise that were applied to relatively distinct areas of
the exhibitions—even to the point that there weren’t extensive primary essays in
either catalogue.

The other direction I mentioned is that of shows that have set out to build counter-
narratives that recapture lost art histories. Okwui Enwezor’s 2001 project The Short
Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945–1994 is key here,
bringing a little-known “local” history to light—that of Africa—and situating it very
pointedly in relation to dominant accounts. Eric Hobsbawm’s book The Age of
Extremes was a key text for us. Hobsbawm reads the global history of what he
called the “short century” with an eye to the cultural dimensions of the massive
political and economic upheavals that it saw. Okwui’s show adopted a similar
methodology, using the format of an exhibition to narrate a broadly cultural history
of African liberation movements in the second half of the 20th century. In The Short
Century, he developed the arguments he had sketched in Global Conceptualism,
exploring different forms of African modernity, contesting the claim that it was
simply a variant of Western (and colonial) modernity. He also tied those modernities
intimately to the independence and liberation struggles, and the revolts of that
period, identifying them as the “twin projects from which the text of African
modernity after WWII was fashioned” and which contributed to “an African critical
subjectivity that is both a political ethic and a cultural ideology.” The heterogeneity
of material that he included in the exhibition mirrored his larger point about the
complexity of African modernity and also asserted linkages between aesthetic,
ideological, political, and other sectors.
From 2006 to 2008, Florian Zeyfang and Lukasz Ronduda’s 1, 2, 3…Avant gardes
project was shown in different iterations in Warsaw, Stuttgart and Bilbao. It looked
at experimental Polish films and their influence on different generations since the
1920s and was spurred by the curators’ belief that those works, which had been
the subject of bannings and prohibitions and were mostly unknown because of
that, could form an important historical platform for a lot of the work that they saw
being produced in Poland more recently. This, incidentally, seems to me one of the
richest parts of their curatorial project, since it was so committed to putting
historical works into dialogue with the present while preventing the inadvertent
canonization of those historical works—by “canonization,” I mean their de-
activation by prematurely settling on a definitive interpretation. I’ll say a little more
about this issue of canonization in a moment.

Catalogue of the exhibition 1,2,3 ...Avant-Gardes: Film / Art between Experiment and Archive, edited by
Łukasz Ronduda and Florian Zeyfang (Warsaw: Centre for Contemporary) 2007

So that was one way they pushed the question further. Another was by looking
closely at interactions and networks among artists—which they structured in such
a way as to illuminate “local references in an international network of ongoing
cooperation.”8 This was something we had struggled with: how to present the
various links among artists as a way to contextualize their work beyond the simple
fact of national or regional origin. We were interested in the many anomalies that
we came across—for instance, the fact that Petr Stembera and others working in
Prague were in close communication with Chris Burden in California but were
hardly connected at all to their counterparts working underground in Budapest or
Warsaw. That was an aspect of “globalism” that proved really difficult to translate
into an exhibition format, since it was much more of a hypertext than a text.

A related project, with some of the same team members, Subversive Practices: Art
under Conditions of Political Repression: 60s–80s. South America/Europe, was
organized in 2009 by the Würtembergisher Kunstverein. Iris Dressler and Hans D.
Christ led a curatorial team that worked prismatically on the various sites included
in the show in order to create a multiperspectival whole. This, again, was a project
inspired by the disappearance of a past, focusing on Conceptual art practices from
the 1960s to the ’80s that were generated under conditions of military dictatorship
and of Communist and Socialist regimes in South America and Europe. It explored
artistic practices that not only called into question the traditional conception of art,
the institution, or the relationship between art and the public, but that were
simultaneously posited against the existing political systems of power, emphasizing
the “heterogeneity and divergence of resistive artistic practices.”9 This show was
an outgrowth of the “Vivid Radical Memory” project based in in Barcelona (2006–7),
which was an attempt to catalogue and digitize information on “politicized”
Conceptualism in the same two regions.10
Catalogue of the exhibition Subversive Practices: Art under Conditions of Political Repression: 60s-80s / South
America / Europe, edited by Hans D. Christ and Iris Dressler (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz) 2010

One aspect of “Vivid Radical Memory” that seems really important to me was the
fact that curators, researchers and artists from different generations participated—
some who had been active in the ’60s and then a lot of young scholars. It was
pretty evident in the dynamic at the VRM meeting that the histories being reclaimed
functioned differently for different parts of the delegations. For the “historical
participants,” there was a heavy dose of vindication attached to the occasion,
while for the younger contingent the project felt much more forward-directed,
allowing for more open-ended thinking about what those pasts might have to offer
to the present.

“Vivid Radical Memory” and Subversive Practices traced their genealogies through
a line of efforts to broaden the historiography of Conceptual art. Those efforts
mattered to them because they saw in them a strand of dissent that was little
known and which provided an important alternative to the classic profile of “the
dissident” that had been constructed in the West and internalized in the East. In
that sense, their most important contribution is probably the archiving function that
both put at the center of their projects. Much of the documentation of the works
they studied had been lost, or was in precarious condition, or was forgotten in
individual artists’ archives. And meanwhile, after 1989 the growing interest among
institutions from the West in procuring some of those works had begun a process
of transfer of whatever archival materials there were into the hands of those
institutions and therefore out of reach for researchers in those regions. So, both
projects expended a lot of effort to “exhume” archival holdings, conserve and
stabilize and digitize them—even reconstructing some works that had been lost.

The repercussions of Global Conceptualism that I’ve been most aware of are in
Latin America, where there has been a succession of projects which have built on
each other.

This line began with _La era de la discrepancia: arte y cultura visual en México
1968–1997 The Age of Discrepancies: Art and Visual Culture in Mexico 1968–1997,
organized by Cuauhtémoc Medina and Olivier Debroise in 2007. The period
covered in the show began with the massacre of student protestors at Tlatelolco,
just before the Mexico City Olympics. The curators chose that as their starting
point because, as they saw it, 1968 inaugurated a period of greatly increased
cultural repression and much more intense resistance to it on the part of artists.
Catalogue of the exhibition The Age of Discrepancies: Art and Visual Culture in Mexico 1968 – 1997, edited by
Olivier Debroise (México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México: Turner) 2006

The show ended with the Zapatista uprising, which, as the curators put it,
“proposed a creative form of ethnic resistance to global capitalism.”11 But unlike
1968, 1994 didn’t have immediate ripple effects on cultural production. That took a
couple of years, so the show’s purview extended to 1997, when the “cultural
outcome of the crisis of 1994”12 had become visible. So the bookends were
periods of heightened creative dissent, moments with historic implications for
Mexico.
Like the other shows I’ve mentioned, The Age of Discrepancies was a project of
recovery, insisting on the importance of a lost national history of art—a project
made even more necessary in that moment, the curators argued, because of the
insertion of Mexican artists into globalized circuits. In their words, it was “a
renegotiation of peripheral genealogies,”13 by which they meant both internal and
external “peripheralization,” since the works they were interested in had been
sidelined first of all by the heavy-handed nationalist writ of Mexican state cultural
policy. Their goal was to effectively counter what they called the “reigning
ignorance of local cultural histories,”14 reflected in the absence of important local
artists from even local museums and collections.

As I mentioned, the curatorial team of The Age of Discrepancies did extensive

archival work, locating and rescuing artists’ archives. After extensive debate, they
also decided to reconstruct key works that had been destroyed. The overall idea of
the project was that it should serve as a broad platform, assembling and making
accessible an archive of documents, images, and videotaped interviews, for use by
future artists/scholars. It’s worth noting that this project, alone among the ones I’ll
mention, was organized under the aegis of a university, so it was able to take on a
much more expansive educational role than any of the others.

As with Global Conceptualism, the curators of The Age of Discrepancies looked at

“political, aesthetic and ideological dissent” as a unified field, thereby closely tying
Mexican Conceptualism to leftist politics, especially in the aftermath of 1968. The
history of independent groups was a central axis of the show, featuring the
mechanisms of production and distribution that had been invented by the artists
themselves. This meant that they paid a lot more attention to networks among
artists—including both national and international collaborations—adding to the
complexity of the argument they were making about that period of “Mexican”
production.

It’s also worth noting that Mexico barely figured in Global Conceptualism, and that
The Age of Discrepancies was partly a retort to that exclusion from our own
supposedly inclusive project.

The other large-scale project about Latin American Conceptualism I should

mention is Perder la forma humana: una imágen sísmica de los años ochenta en
América Latina, organized by the Network of Southern Conceptualisms for the
Museo Reina Sofia in October 2013. The network is a self-organized collective of
around 25 researchers spread across South America and Mexico. They’ve been in
existence for several years, having grown out of the Vivid Radical Memory project
in Barcelona, but this was their first major exhibition.

Catalogue of the exhibition Perder la forma humana : una imagen sísmica de los años ochenta en América
Latina, (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía) 2012

Perder la forma humana was not about Conceptualism per se, but rather about
responses—mostly artistic, but not entirely—to the military dictatorships, states of
siege and internal wars throughout South America during the 1980s. The title
references the fact that the recourse to the body was a primary artistic and political
support. They started with the 1973 coup against Allende in Chile, which
inaugurated an era of genocidal politics that reached across the continent and
brought to a brutal close an era of revolutionary hopes and expectations. The end
point was—as with The Age of Discrepancies—the 1994 Zapatista uprising, which
marked the opening of a new era of mobilizations and activisms on a global level.
Again, these were histories that had been suppressed or badly distorted over time:
it was significant that many of the researchers on the team were actually the
children of people who had lived firsthand the realities of that brutal period that
they were recovering.

The show made a couple of main arguments—first of all, about the centrality of the
new kinds of self-organized congregations, assemblies, affinity groups,
collaborations, and so on that emerged at the time in response to the closure and
militarization of public space. They also contended that, in the face of rampant,
state-sponsored violence, those artists devised new ways of doing politics, with
much of the project of devising new subjectivities taking shape around some form
of an unruly self, What interested them were the ways that work in the 1980s,
unlike earlier periods of artistic resistance, had rejected the traditional structures
and discipline—both ideological and aesthetic—of left-wing politics in order to
develop a more expansive, affective, and polyglot aesthetic register.

I think that Perder la forma humana solved a couple of important problems that had
plagued Global Conceptualism. First of all, and like some of the other shows I’ve
talked about so far, they were not so exclusively attached to the idea of art, such
that everything in the exhibition had to be defensible in those terms. They were
more interested in the experiences that those societies had had, and how people
had responded. Art was important to them as a way in which people fought back,
but it was not the only way they were interested in—and hence their inclusion of
Paraguayan arete guasu ritual masks, which have been continually updated for
centuries by Guaraní Indians to reenact the various depredations, since the
conquest, that the tribe has endured, resisted and survived. The show also
included the work of a Chilean photojournalism collective, which provided an
important, alternate source of information about the realities of the Pinochet
regime. So the universe they sketched in the show was one in which the artists
were not separated out from the very broad coalitions that were actively
strategizing ways to resist. In fact, one of the most interesting points in the show
was the disagreement between artists and the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo over
the visual strategy of the siluetas—which set out pretty clearly the sharp political
difference between visualizing presence versus absence.15 In the case of iconic
images like the siluetas, which persisted in several iterations over the course of
many years, the exhibition organizers also undertook to show the shifting forms
that those images took over time, which in turn indicated the ways that the political
discourse was evolving.

The curatorial strategy was also sensitive to the different statuses of the objects
presented across the spectrum: from art to politics, from planned to improvised,
from art to information, from authored to collective, from public to private spaces,
and so on. In view of this, the organizers decided that the display should make
continual shifts in scale, density and medium, offering a viewing experience that
created a real sense of restlessness. It was a kind of visual corollary to the overall
geography of the exhibition content—at once episodic and atomized, comprised of
small disturbances that happened sometimes with very little concrete presence,
and at the same time there was a kind of buzzing, ongoing continuity that formed a
tentative but politically significant sense of common purpose. This is something
that might have relevance also in thinking about what might be different in
exhibitions wanting to be global in nature—recognizing that art exists differently in
different places, has different relations to non-art objects, that sometimes there
may be much less distinct or determinate boundaries around it.

Perder la forma humana’s organizers were also very tuned in to the affective
registers of the works, probably in part because these histories were so personal
and vivid for them—and this affected their approach to materializing them in the
form of an exhibition. So they thought about the progression of the exhibition’s
narrative in almost theatrical ways, attentive to the rhythms they set up between
the traumatic works, for instance, and the defiant ones—slowing down the pace of
viewing at some moments and speeding up in others, working with contrasts in
lighting and sound and, I think maybe most importantly, avoiding any shallow
triumphalism about what any of those interventions had actually accomplished.
The show’s subject was societies that had been profoundly traumatized, and while
the artistic interventions that had been conceived and staged at the time—and
then recuperated in the exhibition—provided spaces of possibility, or protagonism,
or refusal, the show was being organized some decades on from that time, and
acknowledged that its job of reflection also had some mourning work to do.

Canonization And finally, I want to go back to what I called the “canonization”

issue. Some years ago, art historians in the southern cone were becoming
increasingly unhappy with the fact that Tucumán Arde, which was included in
Global Conceptualism, had become the obligatory (and often, sole) reference for
artistic activism during the 1960s in Latin America.16 Subsequent to Global
Conceptualism, it was also included in numerous other exhibitions, including
Documenta XII. The historians’ concern was basically that a project that had been
a complicated and highly contextual political action had been compressed and
truncated into the status of an artwork in order to be translated into an exhibition
context. As Miguel López, one of the curators of Perder la forma humana, put it,
this created a gradual erosion of its real meanings, part of a “standardization of
radical experiences in order that they may establish an appropriate exchange with
centralized discourses.”17 In light of this phenomenon, López, Ana Longoni, and
some others organized Inventario 1965–1975: Archivo Graciela Carnevale, a show
that “introduced itself as a questioning of the process of legitimization and
institutionalization of ‘political art.’”18 Maybe the most important thing to signal
here with respect to all this is that, as these local histories are gradually
incorporated into the ones that are not considered to be minor—minor, that is, in
the sense of minor literatures—it’s crucial to keep the historicization of those works
in continual dialogue with practitioners on both sides of that divide, because their
legitimization and institutionalization keeps raising new sets of questions in both
settings.

It’s interesting to me that Global Conceptualism has resonated in these two pretty
distinct directions—on the one hand global shows, and on the other the
recapturing of histories— and that those track to particular preoccupations in
different sectors of contemporary arts discourse. In places where there has been
extreme insecurity of legacy, loss or evacuation of pertinent histories, and so on, it
opened a door for reconsidering certain radical legacies in the context of a present
that is mightily interested in those as living heritage. On the other hand, in places
that have confidently narrated the histories of their own choosing, it seems that
Global Conceptualism might have been useful for its experiment in who gets the
rights of authorship. For me, personally, I think the most powerful lesson has been
about how intensely it can matter to people, even so many years later, that we took
a chance and made an exhibition with so little certainty and so much elasticity—for
better and for worse. Maybe that’s the real takeaway: that these accounts of the
past are received in such various and unforeseen ways might be, in itself, reason
enough to continue devising new ways to tell them, to see what can be sparked in
the process.

1. The Bulldozer exhibition was held on September 15, 1974 in the Cheryomushki district on the outskirts of
Moscow. Aiming to exploit a loophole in government regulations, the group of exhibiting artist was led by the
Neo-Expressionist painter Oscar Rabin and Aleksandr Glezer, a poet and collector of unofficial art. For more
information, see Laura J. Hoptman and Tomáš Pospiszyl, eds., Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern &
Central European Art since the 1950s (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2002), pp. 67–77.
2. For a recent analysis of this tendency, see Klara Kemp-Welch, Antipolitics in Central European Art: Reticence as
Dissidence Under Post-Totalitarian Rule, 1956–1989 (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013).

3. Victor Burgin, “Other Criteria,” Frieze no. 155 (May 2013): p. 206; http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/other-
criteria/

4. Frazer Ward, review of the exhibition in Frieze no. 48 (September¬–October 1999);

http://www.frieze.com/issue/print_back/global_conceptualism_points_of_origin_1950s_1980s

5. Iwona Blazwick, ed., Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis (London: Tate Publishing, 2001), p.
8.

6. Ibid.

7. Philippe Vergne et al., How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in a Global Village (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center,
2003), p.18.

8. EXHIB. CATALOG P. 8, ‘INTRODUCTION’ BY LUKASZ RONDUDA, FLORIAN ZEYFANG

9. Iris Dressler, Introduction, in Subversive Practices: Art under Conditions of Political Oppression, 60s–80s, South
America/Europe, Hans D. Christ & Iris Dressler, eds., (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2010) p.38.

10. For more information on the project, see http://www.vividradicalmemory.org/

11. Olivier Debroise, The Age of Discrepancies: Art & Visual Culture in Mexico, 1968-1997 (Mexico City; UNAM,
2006), p29.

12. Ibid, p30.

13. Ibid, p26.

14. Ibid, p26.

15. As a way to make those who had been disappeared visible, thousands of protestors drew silhouettes of the
human body and posted them in public spaces throughout Buenos Aires.

16. Tucumán Arde was a wide-ranging activist project undertaken by a collective of artists and activists based in
Buenos Aires and Rosario, which undertook to circulate and display ‘counter information’ that exposed the lies
of the military regime.

17. Miguel López, “How Do We Know What Latin American Conceptualism Looks Like?” Afterall 23 (Spring 2010),
http://www.afterall.org/journal/issue.23/how.do.we.know.what.latin.american.conceptualism.looks.likemiguela.lopez

18. Ibid.