it has a sense of passage. Culture, even multi-culture, is to-ing and fro-ing in the sense of translation: when you translate you move back and forth. There is always restlessness, as you can never find a direct equivalent. That kind of cultural translation is very much present in contemporary work. And what it means, really, is to put the viewing subject, the reading subject at the position where different systems of signification and meaning-making can intersect. When you are in the moment of that intersection, there will always be ambivalence, ambiguity. I think that is very important.
SdB: Do you think that since the exhibition Les Magiciens de la terre in 19892 – which was very much criticized – there has been much progress in how non-Western artists are shown?
HB: Well, the question is, what are West and non-West today, amongst younger artists working in the area we are talking about? If you see an artist like Y.Z. Kami, a Persian artist, he is very interested in Sufi ideas and meditation.3 But when you look at his work, you see large portraits of Americans (a truck driver, a college girl), which are part of a meditation camp. After they come out of the process of meditation, he takes a photo. So, there are Sufi ideas about the everyday rapture of religious ecstasy in the portraits, but they remain part of American everyday life. The icon you see is of an American sophomore student, but with a certain light. Is this West, is this non-West? One of the portraits has the look of a Bellini Madonna, who always looks away from the child. She has that kind of askance, oblique look and yet she is in this Gap-looking sweater and jeans. Is this West, is this non-West? I think what artists do, what they help us to do, is to go beyond these categorizations, to show how the system of world knowledges is deeply intersected.
With Brian Jungen’s work you have something very close to what I have been talking about. What is so interesting is how he takes the totemic icons of contemporary so-called Western youth culture and reshapes them. He re-fabricates them, translates them into things, which do not simply represent, which are not imitations of the motifs of certain aboriginal totemic icons. They are something much more complex, because in the process of transformation, they are continually mobile and itinerant. They are works, which, even at the level of pattern or design, are continuously restless and moving. He reconstitutes the Nike shoes in a kind of totem object of a different cultural milieu, but that mask or that totemic icon is also a reflection of the way in which the culture and authority of those aborigines is made consumable, both within the culture itself and for those outside. So it is not a discourse between two cultures at all. It is continually a discourse of two different kinds of cultural iconicity, opening up a whole third area, even a virtual area of representation, which questions or interrogates the larger question of object, culture, consumption and fetishization. That is what I think was happening.
ZG: Brian Jungen’s work revels in the cultural crossovers….
HB: Let’s not use the word “crossovers”, let’s try to find a word. They are more like cultural intersections. It is not as if something comes and “crosses over” into something else, it is more that cultures abut on one another. There is a kind of internal struggle. As Walter Benjamin in his essay on translation says of the word “brot” and the word “bread”, it is not as if one word says hospitably to the other “Come, come. You can replace me with you.” He says there is a struggle, and that struggle is what we have to confront in translation. That’s what makes the thing alive.
ZG: Coming back to your earlier point that Jungen’s works are not simply a transformation of one thing into another: they do comment back on the commodification of both cultures.
HB: It’s indeed a commodification of both and also a comment on them – what it means to identity within a culture or from outside, so they dramatize the internal and the external. They open up that axis.
ZG: Jungen talks about how, when North America was first colonized, the First Nations artists and craftsmen incorporated the objects the settlers had brought with them into their cultural production, for practical and for resistant reasons. Yet, once anthropologists arrived and started collecting “pure” examples of First Nations art and put that in museums, that fixed what First Nations art could and should be for people outside of that culture, but also for the people making it. In his work, Jungen seeks to free up these traditions, revealing them to be more fluid than has previously been thought. Is there not always, however, an unavoidable arrestation when a work of art enter an institution? Despite his increasing interest in working outside of the museum context, Jungen’s works now form part of several major collections, including those of the Tate and the Vancouver Art Gallery. Whilst these are not anthropological or ethnographical museums and whilst – hopefully – his work will not be taken to exemplify that of a whole community of First Nations’ artists, how can it escape the reduction to a stable and authoritative representation once presented within an art institution?
HB: I want to take this question first at a slightly more philosophical level and then move on to the question of institutionalization. I think it is one of the paradoxical and yet very powerful characteristics of aesthetic objects – which can be anything you would care to keep and show in that way and anything which seems to produce an aura and an affectivity beyond the instrumental – that it ignites or sets off two kinds of responses from the viewer.
One, we are still enough the children of our own times to want to understand them, to have knowledge of them in relation to a history. The newer they are, the more challenging they are. We want some sense of: this is what happened before them, this is what is happening after them. That historicist impulse. And museums don’t simply institutionalize that. Museums can do all kinds of curatorial things. But to some extent, one of the most common fixities of work in a museum is to produce a framework, where the work is presented in relation to a historical narrative, a developmental one, or – as in Les Magiciens de la terre – more a juxtapository narrative, putting one work next to the other, or an evolutionary narrative. All these narratives – let us call them epistemological narratives – always have a tendency to some extent to fix the work for a period of time. Not necessarily because the curator or the institution wants to give the work a stolid, heavy canonicity, but simply because you’ve got to put some object before the work and you’ve got to put some object after the work; the space is restricted, the meaning is more contained. So it is a relational fixity. That is one thing.
However, there is another counter-instinct that we have with aesthetic works, a cross-axis, because aesthetic objects perform. They appeal to us and address us in an affective way. It is that anti-historicist or counter-historicist narrative, it is that present moment of capture or identification, the experience, the phenomenological contact and contract with the work, that blasts it open from knowledge as continuum, and creates for us another notion of time. It creates a “now time”, a time that Walter Benjamin beautifully describes. He says, to articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it the way it really was. It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. That’s what I wanted to say, that every work leaps out of this framework of fixity, or this epistemological narrative, to address us and say “Well, you know that about me, but now what do you make of me?” It’s not transcendent – I don’t want to talk about it as if it were some spiritual, abstract thing – it really is the fact that the structure of art objects, the structure of representation, even when it’s in a glass box, is moving. Because it does not have a notion of an embedded referent. When it appeals to you, the experience of actually standing in front of that work makes the more epistemological, museological knowledge irrelevant. It is a different kind of knowledge, because it asks you to understand it in terms of this passing, fleeting moment. You have to make your own reading of it.
I think that when we talk about fixity and movement, we have to bear this in mind. Otherwise we can talk very moving about how works that try to break the framework or break the boundaries simply become consumerable again. But what I’m trying to say is, yes, something about them becomes consumerable,
