Third Text, Vol.

23, Issue 5, September, 2009, 605615

Which Histories Matter?1

Anthony Gardner

ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER CRISIS

At the risk of adding to the cottage industries of crisis and self-pity, I have to admit to finding it hard not to be pessimistic about the states of art practice and discourse in recent years. The desires for radical cross-cultural engagement that propelled the second wave of biennialisation during the mid-twentieth century the hope that drawing practitioners together from the globes so-called peripheries could forge new paths of connection and new internationalisms in art, stretching from 1950s So Paulo through Sydney in the 1970s to La Habana in 1984 have seemingly been expunged by the spectacular return of grand tours or the expediency of art as a sideshow to the Olympics. Criticality is now little more than a hollow catchphrase for our creative economies (though whether it was ever anything else remains open to question), while opportunities for writing contemporary art history critically or criticism historically have become increasingly rare, eviscerated along with other disciplines in the humanities by the corporatisation of universities, or beholden to artists and institutions demanding to edit even non-commissioned texts before granting reproduction rights for images or quotations. Independent art analysis, and perhaps art analysis in general, would appear to have been asphyxiated in the name of accountability, resulting in a condition with which many of us would be familiar these days. This is the intellectual retreat to the consolations of the well known and well rehearsed, and to sources whose qualitative value can be easily measured because they are cited so often. Witness, for example, the recitation of a familiar roll-call of names from recent European philosophy Jacques Rancire, Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy, Chantal Mouffe, Antonio Negri in innumerable English-language essays and books, catalogues and even artists statements worldwide. For all their obvious importance, these are the proper names of theory, the buzzwords or ciphers that stand for the limits of intellectual endeavour at the exclusion of Mandawuy Yunupingu, Valeri Podoroga, Rastko Moc nik and other equally significant figures whose perspectives remain largely marginalised in contemporary art discourse. In a similar vein, we can think of the yearning in
Third Text ISSN 0952-8822 print/ISSN 1475-5297 online Third Text (2009) http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/09528820903184864

1. The ideas formulated in this response have benefited enormously from conversations with a range of people in numerous sites across the globe. In particular, I wish to thank Rex Butler and Robert Leonard in Brisbane, Blair French and Reuben Keehan in Sydney, and Leon Wainwright and Huw Hallam in the UK for their generous debates about whose histories and which histories still matter in contemporary art.

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2. Evident in such important collections of essays as Nina Mntmann, ed, Art and Its Institutions: Current Conflicts, Critique and Collaborations, Black Dog Publishing, London, 2006; and Gerald Raunig and Gene Ray, eds, Art and Contemporary Critical Practice: Reinventing Institutional Critique, Mayfly Press, London, 2009. 3. Similar analyses of provincialist hierarchies in contemporary art emerge in Leon Wainwright, New Provincialisms: Curating Art of the African Diaspora, Radical History Review, 103, winter 2009, pp 20313. 4. See, for example, John Clarks extensive analyses of differing modernities in Asia and their effects on global histories of art: John Clark, Modern Asian Art, Craftsman House and G+B Arts International, Sydney, 1998; and John Clark, Histories of the Asian New: Biennales and Contemporary Asian Art, forthcoming; or the similar remodellings in Kobena Mercer, Cosmopolitan Modernisms, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2005.

such otherwise vibrant discourses as Europes new institutionalism to reanimate the North Atlantic canon of institutional critique from the 1960s and 1970s, returning to the all-too-seminal line-up of Michael Asher, Daniel Buren, Hans Haacke, Robert Smithson et al so as to revive arts critical possibilities today.2 This reinvestment in the Western art canon may be a source of comfort for some historians and critics, fearful that the hegemony of their heritage may be corroded by the (always imminent) decentralisation of arts genealogies. It is, more accurately, a form of intellectual containment or, better still, intellectual protectionism in which the geo-cultural status quo is reinforced amid some of the more insidious threats of globalisation. Third Text has not necessarily been immune from this drive to defuse the connections, as well as tensions, between different histories and knowledges of art traced within contemporary practice. The compartmentalisation of art by region or nation that has resurfaced in recent issues of the journal the Balkans in 2007, Socialist Eastern Europe in 2009, and Turkey and the very special British issue of 2008, to name a few paradoxically risks binding the highlighted debates and art works strictly to regional contexts and relevance, even as it disseminates awareness of those contexts to an international readership. Old boundaries are thus potentially redrawn so as to demarcate one region or culture from another, provincialising art according to familiar maps and borderlines rather than recognising how such contextual histories can leach across divisions and become entangled in unexpected and complex ways.3 Rasheed Araeens call for responses in this issue arguably follows a similar intent, for the historical avant-garde is made both to epitomise the failures of artistic modernism and to proffer alternative prospects for reimagining art to come. This is, of course, a story of recuperation and regeneration familiar from Walter Benjamin, Peter Brger and their antagonists in the American magazine October, relayed through an equally familiar return to the European canon of art as the basis from which, or so Araeen claims, humanity can move forward. However pressing his provocations may be, then, Araeens recourse to an avantgarde beleaguered by Europes First Great War remains strangely self-limiting, reinforcing the well-worn perception of European history as both the worlds devil and its saviour, and blinded to the realities of other modernities and other histories that can be traced from other locales.4 This is not to deny the absolute significance of the politics of memory today, and especially within attempts to rethink the cultural conditions of the contemporary. Yet, while I bear great sympathy for Araeens calls for action, returning to specific histories of the avant-garde remains somewhat problematic, for it still leaves open the question of which histories serve as the basis for legitimate critique, and thus which avantgarde, or even whose avant-garde, can guide new engagements with art. What knowledges and histories lie dormant outside Araeens, if not necessarily Third Texts, conceptual frames? And how can these be remobilised as a font for contemporary collective action not just within a specific region but in ways that can bring still-marginalised histories together within truly global conceptions of art practice and art writing? This was Third Texts original brief back in the 1980s. It remains an exceptionally pressing concern today, as evidenced by the ever-growing

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push to conceive cosmopolitan and global art histories, especially in an English-language academe made even more self-conscious in the wake of postcolonialism.5 Moreover, it is a concern already shared by numerous artists worldwide, including Lia Perjovschi from Bucharest and Tom Nicholson from Melbourne, two artists whose work I want to sketch out in the following pages. Both artists have remobilised dissident aesthetics and potentials that do not belong to the avant-garde espoused by Araeen; they have instead sought to develop art historical constellations that destabilise geo-cultural hierarchies and may thereby open out alternative paths for the move forward that Araeen proposes.

REMOBILISING DISSIDENCE
The first such constellation is Lia Perjovschis Contemporary Art Archive/Center for Art Analysis, or CAA (19852007), a long-term project developed in the Romanian town of Oradea, then based in the Bucharest apartment shared by the artist and her partner Dan, from which it became a mobile work travelling across continents and national borders.6 Since the early 1990s in particular, the CAA has hosted indepth discussion projects that repeat the form and structure of discussions staged by nonconformist artists throughout Central and Eastern Europe from the 1960s to the 1980s. This was the phenomenon of Apartment Art, or Apt-Art, in which underground or dissident gatherings, exhibitions and discussions were held in the relatively private environment of the home rather than the public space of the city or a museum. It was, in other words, a means of creating a quasi-public sphere that refused to conform to Communist party ideology, but could only viably do so through a clandestine informality that did not raise the repressive force of Communist authorities.7 The content of the CAAs more recent conversations has been slightly different from those in late Communist Apartment Art, however, for they have generally involved discussions between people from disparate cultures about the canon of art history, its inclusions and exclusions (especially as based on nationality and gender). These debates were often congenial, sometimes abrasive, but always highly charged, with reference points drawn from presentations by invited scholars and artists, as well as the archive of books, videos, journals and exhibition catalogues that filled the Perjovschis home texts donated to the Perjovschis by art institutions around the world and which were often far too costly for most of the CAAs participants to own, given Romanias relatively low average monthly wage. These debates also informed the self-determined concept that the Perjovschis used to describe their artistic methodology. This was the idiosyncratic theory of dizzydence, a mix of aesthetics and politics that the Perjovschis defined in the following way: as a retracing of dissident pasts, within the dizzying array of received discourses to which contemporary art seemingly must cater so as to be deemed relevant in our globalised age.8 The backbone of both dizzydence and the CAA was thus the meeting of ideas, the possibility for informed debate and the catalysing of new conceptions of art through that debate. Differences of opinion and of art historical knowledge were thereby foregrounded at the CAA through the
Open Studio , 1996, photo courtesy: Lia Perjovschi Curators from Austria, Germany and Romania in CAA , 2005 photo courtesy: Lia Perjovschi

5. For example, James Elkins, ed, Is Art History Global?, Routledge, LondonNew York, 2007; Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Toward a Geography of Art, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2004; or the special issue of the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art on World Art History, 9:12, 2009. 6. Interview with Dan Perjovschi, Bucharest, 30 November 2006, authors notes. 7. Alla Rosenfeld and Norton T Dodge, eds, Nonconformist Art: The Soviet Experience 19561986, Thames & Hudson, New York, 1995 8. Interview with Dan Perjovschi, op cit; see also Kristine Stiles, ed, States of Mind: Dan and Lia Perjovschi, exhibition catalogue, Duke University Press, Durham, 2007.

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Open Studio, 1996, photo courtesy: Lia Perjovschi

Curators from Austria, Germany and Romania in CAA , 2005 photo courtesy: Lia Perjovschi

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9. I go into this aesthetic of remobilisation in greater detail in Anthony Gardner, Aesthetics of Emptiness and Withdrawal: Ilya Kabakov and Actually Existing Democratization, in Transforming Aesthetics, eds Jill Bennett et al, forthcoming; see also Charles Green and Anthony Gardner, The Second Self: A Hostage of Cultural Memory, A Prior, 16, spring 2008, pp 22847. 10. Interview with Tom Nicholson, Melbourne, 14 August 2008, authors notes.

participants vocal exchanges, testing how different local histories conflicted or corresponded with each other across temporal and spatial borders, or whether various cultural politics including dizzydence itself could be effectual in actuality rather than in theory. On the one hand, then, it was through the connections made between the CAAs discussants, both in its Bucharest home and through Perjovschis worldwide forums, that points of contiguity, difference and correlation began to emerge between peoples, their frames of knowledge and opinions. It was through these conversations that awareness of cultural histories could bubble back to the surface of thought, ensuring profound, inter-cultural connection and friction between audiences worldwide. On the other hand, while aesthetic politics of dissident Apartment Art and its remobilisation as dizzydence provided the frame for these debates, the conflicts over their efficacy or viability beyond Romania were continually destabilised, undercut by uncertainty and their inherent and forceful fragility. Rather than a stable, canonical frame through which to present contested histories a circumstance that arguably subtends Araeens formulation for moving forward Perjovschi presented something more complex: a will to refuse her practice, or indeed marginalised nonconformist practices in general, a kind of art historical hegemony, even as she drew the spectres of dissident pasts back into shadowy presence. Such globally mobile revenants have been significant throughout Europe since the 1980s, but most particularly in the wake of communist repression (we can think of the work of Ilya Kabakov, the Ljubljana-based art group IRWIN or Paris-based Thomas Hirschhorn in this regard, for example).9 Yet it would be wrong to brand such spectres as these as strictly European phenomena. For a number of artists in Australia, contemporary art histories can also be traced through dissident local pasts, albeit in different manifestations from those lurking in Perjovschis apartment. One example of this can be found in the work of a Melbournebased artist, Tom Nicholson, and its hauntings through the media of the meeting and the march. Since 2003, Nicholson has proposed, and occasionally staged, collective actions that seek to retrace significant or potentially revolutionary events from various cultural histories. In Marches for a May Day, Sydney (2005), Nicholson organised two banner marches to be held on consecutive days at dawn through the streets of Eastern Sydney. The two routes were slightly different. The first approximated the shape of the national border constructed between Cambodia and South Vietnam in 1954, a line retraced across the Sydney street directory and then the city itself, from Waverley Cemetery to the beachside suburb of Bronte. The second route roughly charted the shape of the border between Cambodia and Vietnam imposed in 1975 at the end of the Vietnam War.10 Nicholsons banners were thus suspended within arbitrary approximations in Australia of the shifting divisions between artificially constructed nations in Asia. This suspension within the arbitrary was matched in at least two other ways. The first relates to the images on the banners, which were derived from Jacques-Louis Davids commemorative painting of Marats last breath, suspended in oil and canvas between survival and death. Nicholson translated the image of Marats face from the horizontal to a fronto-parallel plane, drawing and redrawing Marats visage by hand and computer to create twelve

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distinct pixellations of Davids revolutionary image. These banners were subsequently presented in a range of contextually rich locations, highlighting the historical and interpretive polysemy of the banner march itself. Four were displayed atop Melbournes Trades Hall building in 2005, suggesting correlations between Nicholsons marches and the trade union movements that neoliberal governments in Australia and elsewhere have consistently sought to eradicate; another wound its way along a gallery floor, like a trademark scroll of felt by the artpolitician Joseph Beuys, but in a way that made Nicholsons image of the revolutionary unviewable. The banners processions through Sydneys streets and cemeteries met with other contextual histories too. They at once alluded to the procession of religious (and, Nicholson has noted, particularly Catholic) icons through the public domain, or the photographs borne by family and
Tom Nicholson, Marches for a May Day , Sydney, 2005, lambda print, 136 125 cm, photo courtesy: Christian Capurro and courtesy of the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne and Sydney

Tom Nicholson, Marches for a May Day, Sydney, 2005, lambda print, 136 125 cm, photo courtesy: Christian Capurro and courtesy of the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne and Sydney

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11. Ibid 12. Ibid 13. This polysemy is, of course, also charted most famously in Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans Steven Rendall, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1984. 14. Terry Smith, World Picturing in Contemporary Art: The Iconogeographic Turn, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, 6:2, and 7:1, 20052006, p 27 15. On the history of Coranderrk station, see the important accounts presented in Diane Barwick, Rebellion at Coranderrk, Aboriginal History Inc, Canberra, 1998; and Jane Lydon, Eye Contact: Photographing Indigenous Australians, Duke University Press, 2005, Durham, BC, pp 33 72 especially. 16. Interview with Tom Nicholson, op cit

friends of the recently deceased (a sight most familiar in recent years from news reports from Palestine, Iraq or Latin America).11 For some viewers, the marches have recalled the pompous processions of state power under European communism, while Nicholsons walks through the Western Australian town of Kellerberrin, where he held a residency in 2004, were interrupted by white locals asking whether he was all right, because only Indigenous people would walk across country. The custom for Kellerberrins other residents was to drive to their destination, even if that destination were just down the road.12 That something as simple as a public act of walking can bring such dissonant perspectives together, informed as they are by varying aesthetic and cultural customs, may clearly raise problematic viewpoints, as in the case of Kellerberrin.13 For Nicholson, however, such conjunctions can also spark potentialities, drawing together often isolated pasts dissident and not, forgotten and canonical in ways that question the frames of global art histories in much the same way as Terry Smith has argued: namely, [to] think difference and connection at once so as to capture the complexities of the relations between them.14 It is important to note, though, that whereas Smith has insisted on capture, Nicholsons meetings of history are fragile and inconclusive so that the surety of any one perspective or historical frame is perpetually suspended in doubt. This was especially clear in another work of Nicholsons from 2005, called 2pm Sunday 25 February 1862. Here, Nicholson presented a series of posters proposing a march toward Acheron, a country town in Australias south-east. What was unclear, however, was whether this proposal was a memorial to, or a call to re-enact, a moment in Australian colonial history that was of great yet forgotten importance. This was the long march made by Simon Wonga, William Barak and other Aborigines from the Wurundjeri peoples (together with the Scottish missionary John Green) in the early 1860s from Wurundjeri to Taungurung country. A number of factors made this historical action remarkable. First, it was made in defiance of the Australian Aboriginal Protection Boards demands that the Wurundjeri people stay where they were, locked in a prison camp run by the Protection Board. Second, the crossing of borders between different peoples countries sparked the development of a new, transcultural nation in the nineteenth century what is called the Kulin nations of people from many different lands across the south-eastern tip of Australia. And third, this act of marching across borders ultimately led to the establishment of one of the few success stories from any region of the former British Empire: the semi-autonomous camp at Coranderrk, where the Indigenous peoples were able, with relative prosperity, to conjoin their laws and practices with those of the settlers (that is, until the slow asphyxiation of Coranderrk by settler authorities toward the end of the nineteenth century).15 Regardless of whether his action was a memorial, a proposal for an event long past or a call for re-enactment, Nicholson intended for his proposal never to be actualised. If its retracing of dissidence in Australia suggested a foundation in the past for future transcultural relations, then that foundation had been ghosted by decades of neglect, retraced in turn by long histories of racist actions, and eroded by what Nicholson calls the negligible intervention of the poster.16 If the poster proposed a
Tom Melbourne Nicholson, and Sydney 2pm Sunday 25 February 1862 , 2007 (detail), charcoal drawing, stack of 2000 off-set A1 printed posters, framed photograph and found book with charcoal markings, dimensions variable, in Regarding Fear and Hope, curated by Victoria Lynn, Monash University, Museum of Art, Melbourne, photograph courtesy: Christian Capurro and the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery,

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Tom Nicholson, 2pm Sunday 25 February 1862, 2007 (detail), charcoal drawing, stack of 2000 off-set A1 printed posters, framed photograph and found book with charcoal markings, dimensions variable, in Regarding Fear and Hope, curated by Victoria Lynn, Monash University, Museum of Art, Melbourne, photograph courtesy: Christian Capurro and the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne and Sydney

17. Lydon, op cit, pp 60

meeting and a march by Wonga, Barak and their families, then that projected march was not to come, but nearly a century and a half too late. Nicholsons proposed meeting-point of different temporalities, actions and cultures thereby remained suspended, open and precarious, an uncertainty reinforced by disputes about the actual date of this dissident act. (Some accounts suggest it took place in 1862, others in 1865, while more recent historical scholarship has suggested that the march took place in 1860. All of these texts have, however, been consulted by the artist, who knowingly plays on the ambiguity of dates and records here, destabilising historical certainty once again.)17 In a similar vein, and again in 2005, Nicholson returned to another moment of transcultural possibility, pasting up thousands of posters across Melbourne during the night over the course of ten nights. The work, entitled Action for 2pm Sunday 6 July 1835, proposed a public meeting at a site that the Indigenous peoples of the Wathaurung country call Beangal, and that non-Indigenous people know as Indented Head. This was the location where a convict by the name of William Buckley (pictured on the poster), together with some of the Wathaurung people with whom he scandalously lived for thirty-two years after escaping from prison, met with Melbournes so-called founder, John Batman, to negotiate new non-violent relations between Australias settler and

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Indigenous populations. Again, Nicholson announced a meeting of potential transcultural politics from the past that both could and could not be for the future: that could provide an alternative conception of contemporary social and race relations, but which was proposed for 1835; and that could be seen by the public in the morning going to school or to work, but which could just as easily be torn down or pasted over before a broad public saw the announcement. At stake, then, was a desire to test the possible tensions between the spectres of dissident histories of the Wathaurung and the whitefellas, or of the Kulin and the Greens at Coranderrk and their evanescence in the present, a stake that Nicholson made especially clear in a time-lapse photograph of him pasting up a pair of posters as a trace of these haunting happenings in the middle of the night.
Tom Nicholson, After Action for 2pm Sunday 6 July 1835 , 2005, Lambda print, 130 100 cm, photograph courtesy: Christian Capurro and the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne and Sydney

MOVING FORWARD FROM THE EDGE

The question to ask now is: What actually emerges from Perjovschis and Nicholsons practices? Each remobilises forgotten or nonconformist

Tom Nicholson, After Action for 2pm Sunday 6 July 1835 , 2005, Lambda print, 130 100 cm, photograph courtesy: Christian Capurro and the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne and Sydney

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18. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans Peggy Kamuf, Routledge, New YorkLondon, 1994 19. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Universalism and Belonging in the Logic of Capital, Public Culture, 12:3, 2000, pp 66872, 676

histories from their specific local contexts: for Nicholson, proposals for past collective action, especially between settler and displaced peoples in Australia; for Perjovschi, a reframing of Apartment Art from latecommunist Romania. Each draws these histories together with established canons of art or situations familiar from other cultures, so as to test the possible connections and frictions that can emerge through contiguity. For Perjovschi again, this has comprised dialogues and vigorous disputations within the CAA, so as to re-evaluate the multiple trajectories of arts histories according to the perceptions presented by people from different locations worldwide. For Nicholson, the concurrence of his banner marches and proposed meetings refuses to divorce local trade union movements from the image of Marat or processions of sacred and secular icons. Moreover, if the collective march of workers cannot be thought of in isolation from other historical contexts, as suggested by their retracing of imposed borders between countries, then perhaps we cannot isolate them from other historical marches, such as the Wurundjeris defiance in crossing borders so as to develop the Kulin nations and their collective autonomy. Perhaps of greatest importance, though, are the possibilities for contemporary art history that emerge from these artists works. This is not just in terms of the contiguities within each singular practice but, in the spirit of their methods, between each singular practice, even when (as in this instance) the artists may know little of each other. What might it mean to think of the Bucharest-based Perjovschi and the Melbourne-based Nicholson together? The responses or, rather, the further questions may span a continuum from the broad to the relatively specific: Is it possible to consider the defiance of Australias colonial norms such as the coexistence of the Wathaurung and Buckley, or the development of Coranderrk alongside distinct actions of dissidence toward the communist state? Is the conjunction of these histories a sharing of singular contexts, or a levelling of histories for the sake of correlations between art from disparate parts of the globe? What might this contiguity reveal about the afterimage of previously distinct discourses, of postcommunism and postcolonialism, and the correlations or ongoing frictions between them? And why are these spectral returns so insistent now? For Jacques Derrida, these remainders from the past were also reminders of sorts: a reminder that, despite the implosion of Europes Eastern Bloc, alternatives to a triumphalist neoliberalism were still possible, that new politics could still emerge to counter historys putative end. These were what he called the spectres of Marx, lurking within and through the globalisation of North Atlantic capital.18 For Dipesh Chakrabarty, these remainders and their reframing of dominant social power and its construction of history were already considered by Marx: they were, Chakrabarty suggested, spectres within Marx.19 For the artists in this response, however, these hauntings are perhaps better understood as spectres after Marx, or the effects of different notions of Marx. They are the ghosts of nonconformism to communist repression and of workers collective actions for new conditions of labour. Indeed, these spectres are not just after Marx, but spectres before Marx (as with William Buckley) or well beyond Marxs conceptions (as with Wonga, Barak and the persistence of the Kulin peoples). They are the revenants

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of displaced pasts from displaced peripheries, drawn together beyond the periods and places to which they have hitherto been confined. At the same time, though, we should remember that these spectres neither speak for each other the best ghost stories, after all, always have their own elements of surprise nor do they speak over each other. Unlike proposals to move forward by returning to the avant-garde canon, the practices of Perjovschi and Nicholson are too precarious to insist on any inherent stability in arts histories past and thus to come. While these practices present contiguities between specific local histories and other cultural contexts, the disputes, the delays and the surfeit of possible referents through which these spectres return undermine any stable solidity in perspectives of history. This is not a weakness within or between these artists, though, but may be a significant strength. For what these contiguous histories may present is a fragile chorus of memory that, though recounting different pasts in diverse languages, can potentially come together to pierce the increasingly amnesic conditions of global neoliberalism. In the process, they may also reveal a hint of what knowledges still lie within art, how we are to push them forward, and thus what contemporary, critical and truly global art histories have the potential to be.