ISSN: 0845-4450 Issue 31
The profound shift in the way art is taking place in the context of globalization is notable in the relationship between art and everyday life, between artists and political life, and between artists themselves. Globalization changes the nature of capital, the way in which national governments govern, and the experience of everyday life. George Yudice, in The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era, argues that culture in the era of globalization is a resource. For Yudice the expediency of culture is destructive and productive for social justice, citizenship, and histories: on the one hand everything is commodified, including local cultures for export, and on the other the new expediency has enabled new expressions of global citizenship and responsibility. On the one hand, “culture is being invoked to solve problems that previously were the province of economics and politics,” and on the other “the reciprocal permeation of culture and economy, not just as commodity—which would be the equivalent of instrumentality—but as a mode of cognition, social organization, and even attempts at social emancipation, seem to feed back into the system they resist or oppose.” The changes in the meaning of art—its value, function, and publicity—take place when the images, stories, and histories from which it draws are part of a global culture industry and part of a political trade in symbolic power. One of the most significant forms of this shift in the production and dissemination of art can be seen in the way artists create connections to other artists across localities—following Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, the way in which artists enact or perform global citizenship among the multitude, reappropriating control over space and thus designing the new cartography. Of course, their book Empire does not think about art and culture per se but about political and economic flows and the biopower of the multitude to generate, reappropriate and to move. And so, we add cultural flows (as per Appadurai) and think about artists’ collectives as global citizenship practices. Through shifting and mobile forms of collectivity and connectivity, artists are negotiating the social and political failures of nations, generating new forms, reappropriating cities, and transversing borders.
Our contribution to Public 31: digiopopo outlines a project we are beginning to research about artists’ collectives and global citizenship. In particular, we are interested in the ways in which artists are forming collective projects across localities, the use of new technologies to facilitate and become material for such projects, and how the projects themselves materialize the local as a theatre of publicity. Since its inception in 1986, Public Access has been interested in tracing the changing claims for and against the idea of publicness and public art and the collective has made or facilitated projects that reflect on and intervene in the privatization of public space (through artists’ projects, talks, and the publication of Public). As long-standing members of the Public Access collective, we recognize that a historical shift has taken place since the 1980s from the vocabularies of identity (including national, gender, racial), virtuality, and digital divides to collectivity, connectivity, and digital differentials. In Toronto where Public Access is based and in Canada where the artist-run centre system is a long-established institution of cultural citizenship, we can see that this shift in vocabularies has a concomitant shift in the formation of artists’ cultures—from organizations and imaginaries of national, international and transnational orientation to mobile, fluid and transient collectivities that claim a global imaginary and a translocal practice. What follows is a description of our project and links to some of the artists’ collectives whose work we are researching.