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  • The Accidental Tourist

    THE ACCIDENTAL TOURIST
    by Jan Verwoert

    frieze, UK
    May 1 2006

    In these days of cultural complexity it's important to ask 'what is
    local' and 'what does it need'?

    The other day I had lunch in the new restaurant da Karlo near where I
    live on Karl-Marx-Allee in Berlin. They serve Italian food and play
    Brazilian music, and the waiters speak Spanish. With a good view of
    the Stalinist architecture of the Allee, I read an essay by a French
    filmmaker who recounted how, when he first saw a Jonas Mekas film, he
    didn't understand a word of the American voice-over, which was spoken
    with a Lithuanian accent, but still loved every minute of the movie.

    As my pizza Napoli arrived, to the strains of a melancholy samba
    tune, it struck me that it is precisely these moments of cultural
    interference that I look for in art.

    By 'interference' I don't mean to evoke the notion of 'diversity'
    that the advertisers and ideologues of the 1990s seized on as
    a way to brand urban consumer culture as the earthly paradise
    of capitalist liberalism. I'm thinking more of those accidental
    moments when different voices and languages overlap at the opening
    of an exhibition or during a break at a conference, or when different
    meanings clash in an art work or a text, or in your mind when you try
    to piece together memories of a show, discussion or journey. No doubt,
    simulating such moments of cultural complexity has today become a
    routine affair for art professionals. Yet what routines cannot procure
    are interferences. They have to occur of their own volition, and when
    they do, they don't necessarily make sense. Take the constellation
    of a defunct Soviet Modernism, a sad samba, a book about American
    underground cinema and a pizza Napoli. This could be a perfect or a
    meaningless moment (or both). It could be a typical Berlin moment,
    but then it could also occur in any place with a socialist past where
    they serve pizza.

    This is also why I believe that the genius loci of a particular
    city can be an important factor but never the sole reason for the
    occurrence of magical moments. Who knows, special things could also
    happen when in some out-of-the-way place a motley crew of characters
    from various countries meet at an exhibition, conference, art school
    or residency. In fact, even when they take place in a metropolis,
    gatherings of international artists and intellectuals can feel
    distinctively marginal in exactly the same way as they would if
    they had happened somewhere 'provincial'. I remember, for instance,
    the experience of a panel discussion in the Guggenheim New York as
    being not substantially different from that of a seminar in a disused
    convent in Cork. With about 20 people listening on both occasions,
    the discussion was marked by a similar amount of interference, some
    of it white noise with people talking at cross purposes, but some
    of it very inspiring when the improvised discourse suddenly threw up
    terms that made it possible to agree or disagree in a meaningful way.

    I have had this experience in many places, and it makes me think about
    the close relationship between internationality and marginality. It
    seems to me that internationalism in art today is primarily about
    mediating eccentric positions from different cultural contexts in
    front of a small local audience. The common ground for this new
    internationalism could in fact be a feeling of marginality shared by
    artists and intellectuals from various countries. What I appreciate
    about this international discourse is that through its fickleness it
    is a counterpoint to what happens if a local or national art scene
    is left to focus on itself for too long. The outcome is usually that
    the members of such scenes feel forced to defend the position they
    took up years ago in a never-ending trench warfare. To keep on the
    margins of such pointless local quarrels and instead look for a more
    open exchange with like-minded people in an international discourse
    has always seemed preferable to me.

    Discussing such ideas of internationalism and marginality with a
    small group of artists and writers in the garden of an art school
    in a suburb of Yerevan, Armenia, the sociologist Hraech Bayadyan
    made a good point. He described how the post-Soviet condition had
    changed the social status of the intellectual from being that of a
    dissident to that of a marginal figure. While the political regime
    still occupied itself with dissidents (and both censored and sponsored
    them), new capitalism simply marginalizes intellectual labour as
    economically unprofitable and thus pushes it into oblivion. I argued
    that if this marginal position is not recognized inside the country,
    it would be in an international discourse. Bayadyan countered this by
    saying that such recognition only make a difference when it affects
    local struggles. He saw his task therefore as being to translate
    international discourse into Armenian and thereby try to bring up to
    date a language that had suffered a time-lag through being displaced
    by modern Russian. This position made me wonder about how, on my part,
    a flirtation with the international may also always imply an escape
    from a commitment to the local. Still, I have difficulty figuring
    out what the local could want from me. Writing this in Umeå, Sweden,
    with everything outside covered in deep snow, while back in Berlin
    spring and another biennial have just arrived, I come to no conclusion.

    Jan Verwoert is contributing editor of frieze. Although based in
    Berlin he teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts Umeå and the Piet Zwart
    Institute Rotterdam.

    http://www.frieze.com/column_single.as p?c=315

    --Boundary_(ID_wa3QJb6FFwXVsjrVaGvxaQ)--
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