As Kaiama Glover once reminded me, part of the definition of the noun resilience is not only “the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness”66https://www.dictionary.com/browse/resilience but also the ability to return to that shape that one, or the object, was in before the difficulty, or injury, occurred.7

A recent instance involved attacks on Professor Mary Rambaran-Olm around—but not only around—her review of a recent book. In the midst of this a white woman who is implicated in the matter notifies people that she is not responding because she is going on vacation—writing, “Trying that ‘self care’ thing Audre Lorde was talking about and that.”

Part of anything that I want to name as renewal has also got to be a refusal of inclusion into what is. Real renewal has to be reimagining and engaging other ways of doing one’s work. In relation to the North American university, the against in my title was my attempt to name a relation, to name proximity and friction. We might refuse to be renewed only in order to return to the same structural position. Because as Dylan Rodriguez writes, “Despite and as a result of showcase diversity measures, "research universities" continue to be fortresses of epistemic and administrative white supremacy/antiblackness/coloniality.”

Commodification of any kind of human activity is surely not a solution, at least not an anti-capitalist solution. It is no news that what we need to change is the system itself and redefine the concept of value and labour. The task is to de-commodify work and divorce it from being the source of our livelihood. So, the point of my critique of autonomy and invisibility of artistic labour then might seem just another academic exercise in splitting hairs, but the ultimate goal is to contribute to social transformation, one that leads us beyond capitalism and the compulsion to work. The larger social movement around Universal Basic Income offers some interesting solutions in terms of how to achieve a detachment of work from income by offering a reasonable standard of living to all. It has become – in the past months and due to the impending economic crisis exacerbated by the global pandemic – a more and more feasible and credible solution. In this case, the whole argument to understand art as a form of work I propose, is simply to recognise art as a type of human activity that anyone can do and to demystify its attachment to essentialising notions of creativity that turn art into a religious cult that is presumably the domain of the talented and gifted and controlled by the rules of the Western institution of art. Nonetheless, until an emancipated understating of art becomes our reality and while we must engage in eliminating the capitalist compulsion to work to live, we should in the meantime demand wages for art work.

Today, the verb “curate” can be applied to just about anything. The rise of social media, with ascendant platforms like Facebook, Tumblr, Svpply, and Pinterest, has lead to an increased awareness of how we present the things we like and the objects and brands we associate ourselves with. We now carefully choose just the right image and just the right product to display, building up an aggregate identity of small judgments. Choice as a creative or intellectual act was before the province of the curator. Now, it’s possible to curate everything from a Facebook photo album to a Pinterest fashion moodboard, bookshelf selection, or pop-up shop of artisanal food products. It was not always thus.

While Duchamp’s readymade granted enormous sovereignty to artists, it also endowed curators with an awesome power to decide which artworks could become comprehensible as art by being exhibited; in this way, the production of art was subordinated to the realm of exhibition-making and curation. And yet, over the past decade or so we find a similar process underway in the contextual framing of our experience of life itself—now formed by curatorial decision-making processes that arbitrate between a mass of goods and experiences based on their aesthetic effects. When artists confronted the advent of mechanical reproduction, their response brought about the invention of an entirely new kind of art—abstract art. Today, when artists seeking the freedom to work as they please do so by employing curatorial methodologies in their work, and when curators themselves seem to be the proven beneficiaries of Duchamp’s contextual break, should it not be the task of the curator to pose these questions concerning sovereignty and contextual freedom? If we accept that the artist’s compromised position within the exhibition and within the strategic deployment of global contemporary art is primarily a contextual problem of political containment, whereby artworks are reduced to scraps of content, then perhaps the curator is in a position to slice through this knot.

When his readymades entered the space of art, Duchamp effectively rearranged the contract between the exhibition and the work of art into what we now accept as the status quo, liberating the artist from the laws of traditional taste by breaking open a space within the exhibition for artists to work—or, more precisely, to think. In a wily chess move, the presentation of industrial objects as art freed the artist from manual labor and allowed simple spatial and temporal arrangements within an exhibition to release a dynamic cosmology in which the ontological and epistemological foundations of art itself could be simultaneously made and unmade. This advanced the position of the artist enormously; he or she became free to do and exhibit anything, and the institution was thus expected to respect the will of the artist by staying out of the way. But there was a high price to pay for the total sovereignty Duchamp gained for the artist, and this is only becoming clear almost a century after Duchamp exhibited his fountain: Duchamp’s liberated artist could only appear when sanctioned by an art institution. In other words, the basic condition allowing the artist to produce whatever he or she pleased was that the liberated artistic gesture must only appear in sanctioned spaces of art. This has likewise given enormous authority to art institutions, which are in turn just as responsible for producing art as artists themselves. From a white cube in New York to a remote Nepalese mountaintop, the sanctioning forces of the art world are the sole enabler of art, but also the artist’s ball and chain.

LI: Though you have been one of many public advocates for the acknowledgment of our varied stories to be told, you still remain one of the very few Black curators and professors working in contemporary art—both as a curator and as a professor—in Toronto and in Canada. But numerous articles recently have high-lighted this strain on marginalized professionals that become sole beacons of support to countless marginalized students or mentees, which I know is your experience because I happen to be one of those students that was vying for as much of your time as possible. What are your strategies of being able to support, and care for, an onslaught of people wanting your time? How do you manage that demand?AF: That’s a huge question. In order for the work that I want to see out there, and that my communities want to see, we have to become credentialized. To make sure that we will continue to centre Blackness, I have to work very hard to make sure that folks who want to be credentialized become credentialized, because the space of academia, like the space of the art gallery, has its gate- keepers. They have particular notions of who belongs in these spaces, and what can be said in these spaces, and for me it’s important to open that up, to make sure that what Black folks need to say can become speakable within both of these sites. But what’s also been really important to me in the work I do, particularly since I came to OCAD, is to have a community of folks outside of the arts whom I am accountable to and who hold me accountable, so that I still grasp the material realities of life, so that I don’t go off into the rarefied space that both academia and the arts can take. A lot of my care—and really what matters is a particular type of deep care—and support comes from folks who are interested in supporting the arts, who understand the role of the arts in my life, and in their lives, but who don’t exist in the arts. Their perspectives give me balance, and hold me down to always make sure that I’m real in terms of my desire for things, meaning that I don’t end up being seduced by the notion of singularity either. They remind me that [this work is] not just for some of us—it’s for all of us—which means that I have to really work hard on trying to care from my heart and not trying to care from my head.

Like many of the Revolution’s projects and programmes, the Bienal de La Habana began as sheer improvisation. Its first director was provided by temporarily assigning Beatriz Aulet, an official at the Dirección de Artes Plásticas, to the post. The Centro existed in name only, without a plan, infrastructure or facilities: in fact, one of Aulet’s first tasks was to drive around the city looking for possible exhibition venues. There was no curatorial strategy. Logistical challenges of every sort were nearly overwhelming, and so although the Centro’s mission was to deal with the art of the Third World, for the first edition of the Bienal in 1984 it concluded that the selection would have to be limited to the regions of what José Martí had called, nearly a century before, ‘Nuestra América’ (‘Our America’). 13 Although it was contemporaneous with an explosive rejuvenation of contemporary art in Cuba, the Bienal’s initial ideology and rhetoric emanated from a somewhat older generational perspective, in both political and aesthetic terms, defined by an old-fashioned identity politics mixed with the strident cadences of early revolutionary rhetoric. Eliseo Diego thus appraised the global situation in the introduction to the first Bienal’s catalogue as follows: The incommunication between the peoples of the Third World has been a catastrophe encouraged by the vicious intentions of decrepit imperialisms, already in a critical moment of corrupt decomposition. The Cuban Revolution has proposed, with unyielding resolve, to break every barrier between brothers, to reintegrate the dispersed. Because of this, the first Bienal will be not only an important artistic event, but also a fact of historical significance that will have incalculable, and comforting, consequences for the future of all. 14 The simple act of bringing works together from across Latin America and the Caribbean had a resonance that may be difficult to grasp from afar: the Bienal de La Habana was providing a forum taken for granted in Europe and North America, but practically nonexistent in its own precincts. That first show included – astonishingly – around 2,200 works by 835 artists from 21 Latin American and Caribbean countries. These artists had been identified through a mix of official and institutional contacts in countries that Cuba was politically close to, and personal contacts with artists – both in-country and in exile. This process, which relied heavily on a database of contacts provided by the Casa de las Américas, 15 had yielded a patchwork of state-sanctioned (which generally meant aesthetically conservative and/or politically doctrinaire) works, alongside the productions of some of the region’s most innovative creators, such as Artur Barrio, Paulo Bruscky, Leda Catunda, Mario Cravo Neto, Felipe Ehrenberg, León Ferrari, Beatriz González, Antonio Martorell, Ana Mendieta, Liliana Porter, Regina Silveira and Gerardo Suter. The show was, therefore, as uneven as it was unruly, with works of every conceivable sort jumbled together in the improvised space of the Pabellón Cuba and spilling over into the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes. The massive quantity of works had taken organisers completely by surprise. The Pabellón had been converted for the occasion from an open-air pavilion to one with a hastily improvised system of temporary walls that created, as artist and writer Luis Camnitzer, noted, ‘a multi-level maze with pleasant wooden bridges that allowed for different viewing distances from works in different formats’. 16 The display was organised loosely according to formal criteria rather than by country, and the staging was described as elegant, economical and unobtrusive. 17 The Museo Nacional, a more formal and conservative institution, hosted a more conventional display arranged according to medium (drawing, painting and so forth). Within each grouping, works were hung according to the nationality of the artist, rather than according to any visual or conceptual logic. Thus, as Camnitzer observed, ‘the arrangement… ultimately kept the viewer in a very traditional relationship to the work of art’. 18 The organisers were nonetheless generally pleased with the results, especially in terms of the enormous convocation of artists, which signalled what could become one of the project’s most important contributions. As Federico Morais put it, ‘there is an ability to create affects [afectividad] in the air here; a very direct and simple way of speaking and discussing’. 19 Following the 1984 event, Llilian Llanes Godoy, an architectural historian and professor at the Instituto Superior de Arte, 20 was appointed Director of the Centro Wifredo Lam. Although she had not previously worked with contemporary art (her specialisation was early twentieth-century Cuban architecture), Llanes came from the cultural sector, and she brought other key attributes – among them a genius for organisational work and, especially, for navigating the extremely tricky Cuban political landscape and protecting the space of the Bienal. 21 Her vision for the Bienal was more innovative in social than artistic terms. While the exhibition was to be, basically, a cognate of other biennials, except with different artists, she envisioned the Bienal overall as a meeting place, both between the artists and the life of the city and among the artists themselves. From the start, she undertook an energetic campaign to link the Bienal to the CDRs (Comités de Defensa de la Revolución, key institutions mediating between the highest and lowest levels of power), and to build ties with various governmental agencies. Her efforts yielded widespread cooperation and support from the Ministries of Culture, Tourism, Exterior Relations and Armed Forces, and even the Central Committee of the Communist Party got involved in the Bienal in one way or another. There had been a massive audience of 200,000 visitors, mostly habaneros, at the first Bienal, and Llanes’s strategy produced 300,000 for the second, with 5,000 people on the opening night alone. During the opening week in November 1986, the city’s municipalities threw parties every night in honour of the exhibiting artists, and a huge crowd gathered at a gala open-air salsa concert organised by the Bienal and free to the public, starring Chico Buarque, Pablo Milanés and Mercedes Sosa. Conceiving of the Bienal as a social as well as a project space yielded political benefits, and it produced an arena that was as much about cultural exchange as it was about the display of art. Llanes had quickly assembled the small group that comprised the centre’s staff, inviting Gerardo Mosquera, already the most prominent and influential art critic on the island, to lead the Research Department.22She also brought in a group of recent graduates in art history and related disciplines from the university, including José Manuel Noceda and Silvia Medina de Miranda, to work with him and the other department heads. 23 The Centro was structured simply, with the Research Department made responsible for the curatorial work, and the more logistical and design- oriented tasks divided into departments for Promotion (headed by Nelson Herrera Ysla), Information and Documentation, and International Relations. 24 Llanes pursued an admirably risky personnel strategy, taking chances on unproven young scholars and heading her curatorial department with a figure who was able to challenge her in intellectual and artistic terms, and who was, moreover, known for being uncompromising.

Since its inception in 1984, the Bienal de La Habana has followed a trajectory that culminated culturally and curatorially in the third edition in 1989, and which peaked in other terms (institutional solidity, organisational professionalism, international recognition) somewhat later. The case for 1989 as the most important of its editions stands on the extent and adventurousness of the research that went into it, the freshness of its curatorial propositions, the extraordinary energy of the event, the richness of the dialogues that it established and its timing, opening a few months after the Paris exhibition ‘Magiciens de la Terre’ (‘Magicians of the Earth’), which claimed to be ‘the first world-wide exhibition of contemporary art’. 01 The third Bienal is a groundbreaking, if relatively unknown, moment in the history of recent exhibition-making. Opening on 1 November 1989, it put into practice some ideas about curating large international exhibitions that have since been recognised as key innovations. Firstly, it dispensed with the idea of an exhibition segmented into national presentations, thus breaking the mould established by the Venice Biennale in 1895. It also introduced a broadly thematic approach and rejected the established practice of awarding prizes for individual or national displays. Moreover, the integration of a major international conference into the Bienal’s structure represents a decisive step towards conceiving of biennials as discursive environments, in which the actual display of artworks is part of a much broader project of research and knowledge production. The third Bienal was one of the first exhibitions of contemporary art to aspire to a global reach, both in terms of content and impact, and it was the first to do so from outside of the European and North American art system, which had, until then, undertaken to decide what art had global significance. It was a wide-ranging, heterodox and rambunctious affair, comprised of shows, discussions, social spaces and both planned and fortuitous encounters. Its large central exhibition was offset by dozens of smaller displays and events organised under the rubric of what the curators called núcleos (nuclei), thematic organising principles that tackled discrete aspects of contemporaneous cultural production in the Bienal’s focal regions of Latin America, Africa, Asia and the Middle East. The Bienal’s shows presented a varied array, setting conceptually-based works exploring art and its contexts alongside polemical and, in some cases, latter-day modernist assertions of local identities, for instance. The works were made by a range of producers that included not only some very young artists and some legendary in stature, but also doll-makers, admirers of Simón Bolívar and children inventing their own toys. The conference organised as part of the Bienal included contributions from highly influential cultural theoreticians and yielded a debate, both formal and impromptu, that was remarkable for its richness and energy. All of this was held together under the loose thematic umbrella of ‘Tradición y Contemporaneidad’ (‘Tradition and Contemporaneity’), 02 and all of it was put together with a budget and infrastructure that were, at most, miniscule. Unlike a more traditional biennial, in the Havana event the main exhibition was not positioned as the showcase around which the other activities revolved: instead of that kind of radial model, it consisted of a field of activity in which the discursive and ancillary events figured prominently. This more dispersed structure, along with a high degree of public access and participation, were signature features of the Bienal in 1989. The third Bienal was also a key moment in terms of Cuban cultural history, opening at the end of a decade that had seen the rise of an extraordinary movement of young artists in Havana, and amidst an escalating confrontation between them and Cuban cultural authorities. Moreover, the week that the Bienal opened was the week that the Berlin Wall fell, placing the event at the fulcrum between the political landscape that had given rise to it and the ominous, unknown territory that lay ahead. The Origins When the great Cuban painter Wifredo Lam died in 1982, Fidel Castro convened a meeting with his top cultural officials. The subject was the creation of a centre in Lam’s name. 03 Cuba’s most famous artist, Lam had been accepted into Surrealist circles in Paris in the late 1930s. While Western art history had mostly defined him as a follower of that school, his work had a different meaning in Cuba, where it was regarded as having turned the tables by taking a Western artistic language as raw material and putting it at the service of something profoundly Cuban. ‘I refused’, Lam once said, ‘to paint the chá-chá-chá.’ 04 Lam had lived in Europe for nearly all his adult life but had maintained friendly relations with the revolutionary government in his homeland, and so the Revolution could still, plausibly, claim him as its own. His ancestry was a distillation of Cuba’s ethno-cultural history (his mother was born to a Cuban mulatto man and a Congolese former slave, his father was a Chinese immigrant and his godmother was a santería priest) – an ‘exemplary synthesis’, as Llilian Llanes Godoy, the director of the Centro Wifredo Lam in 1989 was to put it, ‘of our drive for a universality based on a profound reinvigoration of our roots and traditions’. 05 At the time, Cuba was emerging from the ‘grey’ 1970s, a repressive period of extreme conformity to the Soviet model that, among other things, had yielded political and cultural confrontations between orthodox and more liberal cadres of the Revolution’s leadership. 06 These were at times quite intense, and, even before the spasms of censorship in the 1970s, intellectuals had found themselves marginalised, as ideological aspersions and denunciations had been sprinkled across the revolutionary period. Sabá Cabrera Infante and Orlando Jiménez Leal’s short documentary film P.M., which portrayed Havana’s nightlife, was not allowed to be screened publicly when it was made in 1961, and in 1965 the UMAP re-education camps (Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción, or Military Units to Aid Production) were established to rehabilitate dissidents and ‘social deviants’, including Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh-Day Adventists and homosexuals. Independent cultural venues were closed, most notably the newspaper supplement Lunes de Revolución, which from 1959 to 1961 had grouped together a dynamic and rebellious mix of young writers, artists and musicians who considered themselves the Revolution’s cultural arbiters, but whose vanguardist internationalism and tendency to see the writer as critical social conscience came into increasing conflict with the Revolution’s evolving ideas of culture as a popular and collective activity. A complicated web of discourses anathematising critical interventions into ‘extra-artistic’ matters, such as social ills and political errors, eventually resulted in a landscape in which criticism by artists and intellectuals was discouraged, suppressed, repressed and punished, occasionally with severity. 07 All of this, together with the Mariel exodus in 1980 (during which in six months around 125,000 Cubans left for the US with the permission of Castro’s government), had been an international embarrassment for the regime. The Centro Wifredo Lam was to be the banner under which Cuba would broadcast the diversity of its cultural landscape to the world and, in that, its reconquest of its own identity. The Bienal de La Habana, which the Centro would organise as its primary task, was a key initiative in a new political strategy for the Ministry of Culture; more broadly, it would reposition the country in the international arena. The Bienal was intended, in conjunction with already-prestigious Cuban festivals of cinema, dance, jazz and books, to place Havana at the centre of the Third World map. Although there had been earlier projects organised to showcase art from the Third World (including pan-Arab and pan-African events, along with many biennials and salons throughout Latin America), 08 the Havana project was unprecedented for the extent of its global ambition, whilst notable as a resolutely local effort. It aimed at nothing less than creating, for the art and artists of the entire Third World, a space of respect and stature equal to that granted artists in the developed West. It would replace the historical cultural dependency of the Third World with a ‘new international cultural order’ by creating transversal circuits of communication. 09 As Llanes Godoy, Director of the Centro from 1985 to 1997, put it, ‘I was convinced that the really serious problem in the Third World was that we concentrated too much on the vertical relation, and that instead we had to concern ourselves with each other.’ 10 The Bienal also played a key role in the development of visual arts in Havana, raising the blinkers of Cuba’s isolated cultural environment. ‘Thanks to it,’ the Cuban art historian Magaly Espinosa has explained, ‘we have had the opportunity to encounter, first, the work and thought of the most advanced Latin American artists, art critics, curators and visual theoreticians, and, second, to contrast it with our Eastern Marxist-Leninist formation.’ 11

New York that delivered an implicit critique of the host institution.Or of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s 1991 Every Week There Is SomethingDifferent, set against a backdrop of seismic shifts in recent Americanhistory (who could ignore, for instance, that the .rst Gulf War wasat that very moment changing the rules of politics and war weekly, if1. Art history has been exceedingly slow to account for the importance of theI\LMFMXMSREWEGYPXYVEPJSVQ%RHMJMXWIIQWZMXEPXLEX[I½REPP]XEOIEHIUYEXIaccount of the history of exhibitions, the goal is less about simply creating a newSFNIGXJSVEVXLMWXSV]ERHQSVIEFSYXYRHIVXEOMRKVIEPHMWGYWWMSRWEFSYXXLIVSPIand repercussions of the exhibition. See Bruce Altschuler’s The Avant Garde in Ex-hibition: New Art in the 20th Century 2I[=SVO,EVV]2%FVEQW ERHFromSalon to Biennial: Exhibitions That Made Art History, vol. 1, 1863–1959 2I[ =SVOERH0SRHSR4LEMHSR4VIWW  ±4ST(EHH]%R-RXIVZMI[[MXL6MGLEVH,EQMPXSRF],ERW9PVMGL3FVMWX²TateMagazine RS  1EVGL%TVMP   LXXT[[[XEXISVKYOQEKE^MRIMWWYIpopdaddy.htm.;,%8-7%2)<,-&-8-32#Elena Filipovic

It goes without saying that, without artists and artworks, the exhi-bitions of the sort we are discussing would not be possible (and curatorswould be, quite simply, out of a job).

Many artists now make no distinction between their work inside and outside the gallery, and even highly established and commercially successful figures like Francis Alÿs, Pierre Huyghe, Matthew Barney, and Thomas Hirschhorn have all turned to social collaboration as an extension of their conceptual or sculptural practice. Although the objectives and output of these various artists and groups vary enormously, all are linked by a belief in the empowering creativity of collective action and shared ideas.

In 1971 we began FILE Megazine. Specialized audience magazines and newspapers and especially underground papers mushroomed in the late Sixties. The notion of lifestyle created a sudden blossoming of special interest groups. In the art scene, too, and especially in Canada, artists’ publications became a connective tissue allowing us to see ourselves as existing, as an existing art scene with real artists you could take pictures of. This was, then, the only way to see ourselves, to know ourselves. FILE started as a response to the networking then actively pumping images, manuscripts, ephemera through our mail slot and collecting in our archives. Now we needed a way to recycle this material back through the system it reflected, to allow a self-image, or the possibility of self-image. The first issue of FILE in April 1972 featured Vincent Trasov as Mr. Peanut in front of the Toronto skyline photographed by David Hlynsky. East meets west. This is not to say that FILE was a form of artists’ communication. No, rather a means to see oneself as a part of this configuration of personalities, that is, as a component of a “scene.”

As an artist writing about museums by artists, about my own history, which is a story beginning in 1968, a Canadian story with elaborately Canadian characters dreaming the Canadian dream of one community, that is a network of communities, sea to sea, in that reticent evocation of collective consciousness which seems our national destiny; as a Canadian artist then, wanting a Canadian art scene just like in New York, or London, or Paris in the thirties; as a Canadian artist typically unable to picture the reality of a Canadian art scene except as a dream projected upon the national landscape as a sea-to-shining-sea connective tissue; that is as a dream community connected by and reflected by the media; that is, authenticated by its own reflection in the media; as such a Canadian artist desiring to see not necessarily himself, but the picture of his art scene pictured on TV; and knowing the impossibility of an art scene without real museums (the Art Gallery of Ontario was not a real museum for us), without real art magazines (and artscanada was not a real art magazine for us), without real artists (no, Harold Town was not a real artist for us, and we forgot that we ourselves were real artists, because we had not seen ourselves in the media – real artists, like Frank Stella, appeared in Artforum magazine); as such an artist desiring such a picture of such a scene, such a reality from sea-to-shining-sea, then, it was natural to call upon our national attributes – the bureaucratic tendency and the protestant work ethic – and working together, and working sometimes not together we laboured to structure, or rather to untangle from the messy post-Sixties spaghetti of our minds, artist-run galleries, artists’ video, and artist-run magazines. And that allowed us to allow ourselves to see ourselves as an art scene.

We might counter-argue that this failure cannot be explained entirely with reference to hegemonial political conditions, but that institutions as agents did not manage to constitute or mobilize the (sub-)publics necessary to oppose the closure of an institution under political pressure, and which might by their very existence legitimate the direction of the program. Since most curators are only employed on short-term contracts they often do not build the stable relationships with a local public that are prerequisite for a political project. The demand for the creation of a politicized public or counter-public contained in Charles Esche’s concept of the institution as “part community center” was never fully realized, or as Alex Farquharson writes in his contribution to the present issue of this journal, New Institutionalism “fails to engage much more than a relatively small, invited knowledge community.”[42]

On the other hand it is claimed that a “ubiquitous biennale culture” has created a whole generation of independent curators who have adopted experimental modes of handling various forms of display and models of work and who import this attitude to institutions quite independently of artistic practices.[30] The term New Institutionalism is sometimes also used to describe the more recent development that these independent curators have increasingly moved into management positions in art institutions.[31] The close relationship of New Institutionalism to individual curators is linked to what has elsewhere been described as a ‘curatorial turn,’ referring to the phenomenon that the curator increasingly plays a “creative and active part within the production of art itself.”[32]

Curatorial Activism” is a term I use to designate the practice of organizing art exhibitions with the principle aim of ensuring that certain constituencies of artists are no longer ghettoized or excluded from the master narratives of art. It is a practice that commits itself to counter-hegemonic initiatives that give voice to those who have been historically silenced or omitted altogether—and, as such, focuses almost exclusively on work produced by women, artists of color, non-Euro-Americans, and/or queer artists. The thesis of my forthcoming book, Curatorial Activism: Towards an Ethics of Curating, takes as its operative assumption that the art system—its history, institutions, market, press, and so forth—is an hegemony that privileges white male creativity to the exclusion of all Other artists. It also insists that this white Western male viewpoint, which has been unconsciously accepted as the prevailing viewpoint, “may––and does––prove to be inadequate not merely on moral and ethical grounds, or because it is elitist, but on purely intellectual ones.” THAMES & HUDSON

In the era of globalization, museums are caught in a paradox: on the one hand, the need to make their functions and policies evolve towards a geopolitical revisionism informed by postcolonial and decolonial perspectives; on the other, the risk of imposing a new geo-aesthetic expression of the Western model and perpetuating a colonial cultural domination.[xxix] For instance, in a few decades we will have no protection at all in terms of having issues of restitution occur regarding modern and contemporary artworks if attention is not paid to the way non-Western artworks are currently acquired by Western museums.[xxx] Tate Modern attempts to resolve part of the problem by organizing international curatorial exchanges and partnerships with local organizations in Kabul, Lagos, or Amman.[xxxi]

Some Theoretical and Empirical Aspects on the Decolonization of Western Collections

For Western museums of modern and contemporary art, the shift towards a decolonial approach of their acquisition practices was clearly triggered not by the Independences, but much later by the globalization phenomenon which accentuated the imbalances and therefore called for non-Eurocentric policies. The different examples discussed show that the idea of decolonizing Western museums art collections (implying at least two aspects, the theoretical one and the empirical one) is a very complex issue worth further consideration. However, this decolonial challenge cannot be limited to acquisition policies and should be considered in the various sectors and missions of museums, whether those are acquisition policies turned toward non-Western artists and areas, collection displays with new narratives, the programming of temporary exhibitions of artists previously marginalized, or museum policies at large such as the recruitment of non-Western/non-white staff (not just as guards or cleaners) or education programs specifically oriented toward the deconstruction of dominant discourses.

Conversely, in China for instance, newly founded museums are compulsively acquiring Impressionist canvases. Less about a desire to include the European avant-garde in the discourse of Chinese art history, it is more the strong use-value of these artworks that is sought after, in order to be appealing for tourism, following the “impartial economic logic [saying that] The ‘success’ of museums is determined by the number of visitors they attract.”[l] Beyond the stakes of the market, what are the epistemological interests in owning these masterpieces? The question can be applied to any museum in the world collecting art from another part of the world, which is seen as marketable or exotically stimulating (pick one). It seems urgent to rethink the role and the mission of art museums before the globalization phenomenon, which follows the modern one, creates homogenized spaces and narratives where we would see almost the same kind of artworks and discourses whether we are in Rio, Houston, Shanghai, London, or Abu Dhabi.

According to Joaquín Barriendos Rodríguez, the concept of global art, supposedly synonymous with openness, total inclusion, and the free circulation of goods and people, is nonetheless the expression of the coloniality of power.[xxxvii] Therefore, the way museums acquire artworks from all over the world and the financial partnerships in which they are contracting to complete this task must be analyzed. Inasmuch as museums drastically lack public funding, they must turn to the private sector to get their project funded. But at what price? In his article “Making Museums Moral Again,” art critic Holland Cotter pointed out that, “Some museums [the MET, the Guggenheim] were urged to stop taking money from ethically dubious corporate or personal sources, including board members who deny that climate change is underway. Others were called out for condoning, if not actively supporting, inhumane labor practices, like those imposed on migrant workers building new Guggenheim and Louvre franchises in Abu Dhabi.”[xxxviii]

The term private money resonates because in many spheres of the art world, particularly after the financial crises of 2008, private money is perceived as negative, even malevolent, in part because financial speculation is seen as the cause of the ever-inflating art market, and in part because the excessive wealth of the 1% has once again transformed the art world into a favored playing field for the super-rich, where artworks function as über-luxury goods.[xxxvi]

Finding a cure to the colonial wound is a difficult task, as Sarat Maharaj underlined it. He identified a postcolonial pharmakon, at once “poison and remedy,” to cure binarisms, and a postcolonial panacea, which would be a strategy of inversion of power relationships.[xxvii] But pharmakon and panacea are in conflict. Indeed, by overthrowing power relationships, the panacea recreates a binary system that the pharmakon then tries to treat, creating an infinite vicious circle. It was demonstrated at the Third Guangzhou Triennial in 2008, where, by attempting to overthrow postcolonial power relationships, the curators (a team including Sarat Maharaj), were in the end pushed into counterproductive binarisms: Asia vs. the West, postcolonialism vs. “post-postcolonialism.” Therefore, if theory should be treated cautiously insofar as it can either be distorted or increase a failure: how can an art collection concretely be decolonized? Where to begin? What are the concrete issues that institutions are facing?

Nonetheless, this apparently recent incursion of decolonial thinking into museums was in fact preceded by a sister thought, the postcolonial theories, which have abundantly served curatorial discourses in the West since the 1990s[xv] and are to be found in art institutions under various forms, which refer more or less explicitly to them. They can be found: - in the adoption of a geopolitical revisionism in acquisition politics;- in the rewriting of new scenarios for the displays of their collection (by adopting a non-Eurocentric point of view);- in the search of more horizontality in their relationships/partnerships with institutions and individualities from the Global South;- or in their statements, with the use of rhetoric borrowed to postcolonial thinkers and writers (to date, Édouard Glissant is the main one[xvi]).

To decolonize museums collections would also mean adopting a moral and ethical position regarding the way artworks are acquired in order to make “Museums moral again,”[xi] assuming not that they have been “moral” once, but rather that their mission is to provide moral and ethical perspectives on our collective cultural and artistic memories.

n academia, decolonial thinking and methodologies have been developed by scholars such as Anibal Quíjano, María Lugones, Walter Mignolo, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ramón Grosfoguel, or Linda Tuhiwai Smith[i] who are attempting to stray from the Western canon of thinking and to produce a radical alternative knowledge that takes “seriously the epistemic perspective […] of critical thinkers from the Global South thinking from and with subalternized racial/ethnic/sexual spaces and bodies.”[ii] Rather than an anti-European critique, it is about adopting “a perspective that is both critical of Eurocentric and Third World fundamentalisms, colonialism and nationalism.”[iii] In the context of museums, to decolonize would mean, “resisting the reproduction of colonial taxonomies” and “vindicating radical multiplicity.”[iv] It would start out by recasting modernism, insofar as this paradigm is bound up with European imperialism and coterminous with Eurocentrism. Indeed, according to the decolonial thinking, museums will not be able to decolonize their practices if they stick to the old taxonomies and values of art history as it was built during the past centuries. If we follow Dipesh Chakrabarty’s prescription for the discipline of history, Europe should be provincialized and a transcultural approach of art history is much needed.[v] It would mean “going beyond an ‘inclusive’ move to question the foundations upon which the notion of modern has been constructed.”[vi]