Essay

By Carol Solomon

The world is shrinking, paradoxically becoming ever more interconnected and fragmented through the forces of globalization. This process, understood in all its complexity, has spawned a culture of mobility that is characterized by an ease of travel, new communication technologies, the rapid flow of goods and ideas, and most profoundly, the movement and migrations of people (either by force or by choice) and its corollary, deterritorialization. These transformations have had wide-ranging effects that are political, economic, and social. Globalization has also caused significant changes in contemporary art.

Cultures and identities, once conceived as fixed and stable, are now understood as fluid and metamorphic, experienced “as worldly, productive sites of crossing: complex, unfinished paths between local and global attachments.”1 Artists engaged with issues of identity re-contextualize their cultural inheritances as they move across borders. They inhabit an in-between space, where meaning is much more freely explored and negotiated. It is an unmoored condition experienced by an increasing number of people in our fractured and transient world. Homi Bhabha speaks of this as a “third space,” which refers to the interstices between colliding cultures, a liminal space where “the process of cultural hybridity gives rise to something different, something new and unrecognizable, a new area of negotiation of meaning and representation.”2 Artists at work in “the third space” speak of a creative edge that derives from the very condition of being in a place that simultaneously is and is not one’s home.

Edward Said, who so eloquently wrote of the sense of loss and estrangement experienced by the exile identifies a creative edge that springs from this condition of displacement and its “pleasures” and advantages. “Seeing ‘the entire world as a foreign land,’” Said remarks, “makes possible originality of vision. Most people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions…”3 Out of this awareness, meaning and new forms of representation arise.

Mapping Identity explores issues of cultural identity in a global society. It presents the work of eleven artists of widely differing cultural backgrounds, who negotiate the terrain of displacement, exile, diaspora, hybridity, cosmopolitanism, and the state of the in-between. These issues, informed by the writings of major cultural and postcolonial theorists – Edward Said, Stuart Hall, Homi Bhabha, and others – figured prominently in the art of the 1990s and the opening years of the new century. They remain current today.

Because of the mobile forces of globalization, art has undergone a period of rapid internationalization in recent decades. Systematic changes are occurring in the production, circulation, and evaluation of art. International exhibitions and biennials, now staged in all corners of the world, provide an ever-growing platform for artists from locations traditionally relegated to the “periphery” of dominant, mostly Western, centers of artistic production. New art prizes have been created in order to give international exposure to artists from locations such as India, the Middle East, and Africa. These artists challenge the traditional hierarchies and canons of aesthetic practice and authority. Inflected by local traditions, they speak with a plurality of voices, projecting the heterodox vitality of a new avant-garde. It is a transitional moment in the history of art, which adumbrates a cosmopolitan world culture.

The artist today finds herself much more on the move and a more moveable force, able through technology and travel to connect with wider audiences and artistic networks. Direct access to major global centers of art activity, power, and funding is ever more possible. If they have not been displaced by force, many artists are by choice adopting a more nomadic lifestyle and no longer remain in their places of origin. They move, either temporarily or more permanently, very often in order to study. Many maintain simultaneous residences, with routine intercontinental travel between their native lands and the adopted cultures to which they have moved voluntarily or fled. They acquire temporary artistic residencies, which for many become a lifestyle of privileged artistic nomadism. Their art renegotiates the relationship between the several cultures they inhabit but avoids unifying or ranking them. These transcultural artists, represented here by eleven distinguished contemporaries, have set themselves the task of mapping identities.

 

Footnotes
  1. James Clifford, “Mixed Feelings,” in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, eds., Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, Minneapolis, 1998, 362.
  2. Jonathan Rutherford, “The Third Space. Interview with Homi Bhabha,” in Jonathan Rutherford , ed., Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, London, 1990, 211.
  3. Edward W. Said, “Reflections on Exile,” in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Cambridge, MA, 2000, 186.

Carol Solomon and Janet Yoon