Borderline Conversations:
Artistic Collaboration and Creative Agency in the Global Village
by Marcelino Stuhmer
The shift from the position of the artist as producer to the artist as collaborator in the construction of social knowledge not only lends towards consensual representations of … reality but also redistributes agency in the production of social meaning.1
Nikos Papastergiadis
The concept of the “global village” first comes from Marshall McLuhan’s book The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962). While his “global village” is hopelessly optimistic, today’s “global village” is controlled by the schemes of domination through globalization. Globalization left to its own devices is highly discriminatory, intensifying what really divides people in culture: economics, education, race, and power. As June Johnson, author of Global Issues, Local Arguments, states, “The idea of the world’s cultures drawn together in a “global village” raises questions about equal representation, reciprocal sharing, enriched diversity, and mutual understanding”2 McLuhan foresaw the interconnectedness of future communication through electronic media. However, the downside of McLuhan’s vision regarding the “global village” was not recognizing the hierarchical, socioeconomic pitfalls. Exhibition curator and artist Nirmal Raja conceptually frames Reimagining the Global Village as “a vision for a more connected world beyond. It addresses what is currently weighing down our planet and the global community – issues of refugees at borders, ruptures in cross-cultural communication, and the ever-present cloud of climate change are all addressed with the very human act of making.”3 Making, in this case, is giving oneself and one’s collaborator creative agency in the production of artistic and social meaning. Raja’s ambitious exhibition aims to explore the production of meaning through global conversation, such as the collaboration between international artists, and between artists and international communities.
It is impossible to consider this exhibition about international collaboration without weighing the collective, tragic, and traumatic experience of the ongoing Covid-19 global pandemic that closed international borders around the world. A year and a half into the pandemic, and vaccines are in high demand. It is as one could have predicted: The richest countries have the vaccines, and the poorest countries are waiting desperately for any international surplus. This power structure is based clearly on a hierarchy of nations that tie contemporary global capitalism and neoliberal economics to the imperialist globalization of the past. Many of us spent March 2020 through much of 2021 without seeing family and friends. The loss of physical connection and the isolation of the pandemic is why the virtual world of the internet has taken an unprecedented role in shifting us even further into a virtual realm where communication, employment, education, and exhibitions are forced to be remote. It is in this virtual zone where artists connect within the global community in order to continue making.
Rhizome: Horizontal Modes of Communication, Collaboration, and Organization
Philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Felix Guattari co-authored A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972-1980). They used the term “rhizome” to discuss horizontal modes of communication that exist in between, or in the liminal. “Rather than narrativize history and culture [through hierarchical binary dichotomies] the rhizome presents history and culture as a map or wide array of attractions and influences with no specific origin or genesis, for a rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things interbeing, intermezzo.”4 “A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles”5 write Deleuze and Guattari. A rhizomatic interpretation of the structure of cyberspace is a map of horizontal networks as opposed to the vertical, hierarchical structures of society. According to data about the worldwide digital population, the internet remains inaccessible to 40.5 percent of the world’s population.6 Although this number does continue to drop, corporations and governments have had a strong influence on our access to information by asserting financial and political controls over the internet. Where the internet is available, social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram have millions of users. Tens of thousands of artists are showing their work to the world, and gaining a local and even an international network of followers.7 Artists at any level can connect potentially with millions of their users, including other artists, curators, and collectors. Networking on social media makes many of the projects in the exhibition possible, from using Zoom or Google Meet to using Facebook or Instagram as a platform for collaboration, artistic exchange, and curatorial research. The ability to network across borders through digital platforms has exponentially created opportunities for international artistic collaboration. On a community level, equitable, rhizomatic modes of organization and institutional alliances have been a feature of many collectives that came together during the anti-globalization and anti-racist movements.8 The same can be said of many international artist collectives and international artist collaborations that formed on the internet. The “global village” that the exhibition has created serves as an example of this rhizomatic network, and the increased creative agency and visual and virtual discourse led by artists around the world.
Artistic Collaboration in the Exhibition
The exhibition focuses on three forms of international artistic collaboration: artists that collaborate with other individual artists across international borders, artists that collaborate with specific global groups or communities across international borders, and international global artist collectives that make artworks through collective action and mediated processes. Each artist involved in a collaborative must be willing to share authorship, define and create the visual and conceptual characteristics of their collaboration, and be willing to allow physical separation to become part of the process and part of the underlying meaning. The practices, aesthetics, concepts, processes, materials, and politics of the artists that are in the exhibition are wide ranging. There is work addressing climate change, the empowerment of women, immigration and migration, expressions of home, conceptual experiments with language, and aesthetic responses to collaboration.
Many of these collaborative approaches and conceptual concerns are socially oriented in which interaction and conversation are at the center of the collaborative discourse. “Call and response” is one method of collaboration that is prevalent among several artists in the exhibition. Tanya Gill (USA) and Marcia Teusink (UK) created this type of dialogue of what they called “precarity and collapse” in their collaborative paintings, collages, and assemblages. The artworks were mailed back and forth, and developed in stages by each artist until complete. Unfortunately the pandemic stalled their process because of the inability to find certain materials. Another project that used this form of “call and response” was the collaboration between artists William Andersen (USA) and Maryam Hosseinnia (Iran) who live in Kuwait, where 70 percent of the population is foreigners. They started a public Facebook group called “Where’s Home?” in which they communicated with over 250 followers, posing questions about perceptions of home and collecting personal photographs from the participants. The collected images and text were then printed on long vertical pieces of fabric to be hung from the ceiling as an installation. Postcolonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha uses the term “Conversational Art” that “seeks to transform the distance between art and its audience … by changing our sense of the ‘space’ of the artwork itself; … such art does not merely recall the past as social cause or aesthetic precedent; it renews the past, refiguring it as a contingent ‘in-between’ space, that innovates and interrupts the performance of the present.”9 It is this concept of bridging differences where conversation, communication, and mediation across international borders align with global artistic collaboration. In terms of form, concept, or political intent, these important considerations are steps toward how the collaborators move forward beyond the conversation and toward the aesthetic, and physical act and process of making. Considering the complexity of verbal and visual language, the act of making creates a space for the here and now, for a collaborative art that exists between art and life, authorship and viewership, private and public, and representation and being.
Lost in Translation: International Artists Collaborating Across Borders
One of the collaborative teams in the exhibition that is exploring dialogue and language is Argentine-American artist Santiago Cucullu (Milwaukee) and Argentine writer Martín Ayos (Buenos Aires). Their work is based on a conversational and collaborative use of the Spanish language. Aphorisms to Use During Invisibility was first shown in 2015. To commence the project, aphorisms (short poetic, mysterious, and witty statements) were written in Spanish by Ayos. They were then selected by Cucullu, who had Mexican graffiti writers airbrush the aphorisms on the backside of snow camouflage jackets in a stylized cursive font. Latin-American car culture is the vernacular that Cucullu and Ayos work with. The meaning and concept of the original Spanish text, the transformation of text as image, and the jacket as a marriage between image, text, and object are all important layers within the piece, and within its aesthetic and conceptual discourse. This touches upon the displacement of language and how language can also be a sort of home or refuge. Cucullu states in a Zoom interview, “One thinks in the language they were born in. In the space, the two elements of the languages, the visual and the written … move forward independently. The [snow camouflage] jackets themselves have a kind of military issue … the material itself represents invisibility. The language of the aphorisms is poetic and not concrete; since [Ayos] writes in free verse, the emphasis is on the images that they form.”10 Two sample Spanish aphorisms written by Ayos include “Volvere cuando he borado mis huellas,” which translates as “I’ll return when I’ve erased my tracks”; the other addresses their collaboration in a poetic way: “La nieve ha desecho el lenguaje y todo es fictioicio bajo el sol,” which translates as “The snow has undone language and everything is fiction under the sun.”11 The painted jackets are transitory and in the end somewhere “in-between” in terms of authorship. Within this conceptual framework, there is a fascinating artistic, linguistic, and geographic separation between Ayos and Cucullu, and it is the jackets themselves that physically and metaphorically embody that distance.
It is impossible to consider this exhibition about international collaboration without weighing the collective, tragic, and traumatic experience of the ongoing Covid-19 global pandemic that closed international borders around the world. A year and a half into the pandemic, and vaccines are in high demand. It is as one could have predicted: The richest countries have the vaccines, and the poorest countries are waiting desperately for any international surplus. This power structure is based clearly on a hierarchy of nations that tie contemporary global capitalism and neoliberal economics to the imperialist globalization of the past. Many of us spent March 2020 through much of 2021 without seeing family and friends. The loss of physical connection and the isolation of the pandemic is why the virtual world of the internet has taken an unprecedented role in shifting us even further into a virtual realm where communication, employment, education, and exhibitions are forced to be remote. It is in this virtual zone where artists connect within the global community in order to continue making.
Rhizome: Horizontal Modes of Communication, Collaboration, and Organization
Philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Felix Guattari co-authored A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972-1980). They used the term “rhizome” to discuss horizontal modes of communication that exist in between, or in the liminal. “Rather than narrativize history and culture [through hierarchical binary dichotomies] the rhizome presents history and culture as a map or wide array of attractions and influences with no specific origin or genesis, for a rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things interbeing, intermezzo.”4 “A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles”5 write Deleuze and Guattari. A rhizomatic interpretation of the structure of cyberspace is a map of horizontal networks as opposed to the vertical, hierarchical structures of society. According to data about the worldwide digital population, the internet remains inaccessible to 40.5 percent of the world’s population.6 Although this number does continue to drop, corporations and governments have had a strong influence on our access to information by asserting financial and political controls over the internet. Where the internet is available, social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram have millions of users. Tens of thousands of artists are showing their work to the world, and gaining a local and even an international network of followers.7 Artists at any level can connect potentially with millions of their users, including other artists, curators, and collectors. Networking on social media makes many of the projects in the exhibition possible, from using Zoom or Google Meet to using Facebook or Instagram as a platform for collaboration, artistic exchange, and curatorial research. The ability to network across borders through digital platforms has exponentially created opportunities for international artistic collaboration. On a community level, equitable, rhizomatic modes of organization and institutional alliances have been a feature of many collectives that came together during the anti-globalization and anti-racist movements.8 The same can be said of many international artist collectives and international artist collaborations that formed on the internet. The “global village” that the exhibition has created serves as an example of this rhizomatic network, and the increased creative agency and visual and virtual discourse led by artists around the world.
Artistic Collaboration in the Exhibition
The exhibition focuses on three forms of international artistic collaboration: artists that collaborate with other individual artists across international borders, artists that collaborate with specific global groups or communities across international borders, and international global artist collectives that make artworks through collective action and mediated processes. Each artist involved in a collaborative must be willing to share authorship, define and create the visual and conceptual characteristics of their collaboration, and be willing to allow physical separation to become part of the process and part of the underlying meaning. The practices, aesthetics, concepts, processes, materials, and politics of the artists that are in the exhibition are wide ranging. There is work addressing climate change, the empowerment of women, immigration and migration, expressions of home, conceptual experiments with language, and aesthetic responses to collaboration.
Many of these collaborative approaches and conceptual concerns are socially oriented in which interaction and conversation are at the center of the collaborative discourse. “Call and response” is one method of collaboration that is prevalent among several artists in the exhibition. Tanya Gill (USA) and Marcia Teusink (UK) created this type of dialogue of what they called “precarity and collapse” in their collaborative paintings, collages, and assemblages. The artworks were mailed back and forth, and developed in stages by each artist until complete. Unfortunately the pandemic stalled their process because of the inability to find certain materials. Another project that used this form of “call and response” was the collaboration between artists William Andersen (USA) and Maryam Hosseinnia (Iran) who live in Kuwait, where 70 percent of the population is foreigners. They started a public Facebook group called “Where’s Home?” in which they communicated with over 250 followers, posing questions about perceptions of home and collecting personal photographs from the participants. The collected images and text were then printed on long vertical pieces of fabric to be hung from the ceiling as an installation. Postcolonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha uses the term “Conversational Art” that “seeks to transform the distance between art and its audience … by changing our sense of the ‘space’ of the artwork itself; … such art does not merely recall the past as social cause or aesthetic precedent; it renews the past, refiguring it as a contingent ‘in-between’ space, that innovates and interrupts the performance of the present.”9 It is this concept of bridging differences where conversation, communication, and mediation across international borders align with global artistic collaboration. In terms of form, concept, or political intent, these important considerations are steps toward how the collaborators move forward beyond the conversation and toward the aesthetic, and physical act and process of making. Considering the complexity of verbal and visual language, the act of making creates a space for the here and now, for a collaborative art that exists between art and life, authorship and viewership, private and public, and representation and being.
Lost in Translation: International Artists Collaborating Across Borders
One of the collaborative teams in the exhibition that is exploring dialogue and language is Argentine-American artist Santiago Cucullu (Milwaukee) and Argentine writer Martín Ayos (Buenos Aires). Their work is based on a conversational and collaborative use of the Spanish language. Aphorisms to Use During Invisibility was first shown in 2015. To commence the project, aphorisms (short poetic, mysterious, and witty statements) were written in Spanish by Ayos. They were then selected by Cucullu, who had Mexican graffiti writers airbrush the aphorisms on the backside of snow camouflage jackets in a stylized cursive font. Latin-American car culture is the vernacular that Cucullu and Ayos work with. The meaning and concept of the original Spanish text, the transformation of text as image, and the jacket as a marriage between image, text, and object are all important layers within the piece, and within its aesthetic and conceptual discourse. This touches upon the displacement of language and how language can also be a sort of home or refuge. Cucullu states in a Zoom interview, “One thinks in the language they were born in. In the space, the two elements of the languages, the visual and the written … move forward independently. The [snow camouflage] jackets themselves have a kind of military issue … the material itself represents invisibility. The language of the aphorisms is poetic and not concrete; since [Ayos] writes in free verse, the emphasis is on the images that they form.”10 Two sample Spanish aphorisms written by Ayos include “Volvere cuando he borado mis huellas,” which translates as “I’ll return when I’ve erased my tracks”; the other addresses their collaboration in a poetic way: “La nieve ha desecho el lenguaje y todo es fictioicio bajo el sol,” which translates as “The snow has undone language and everything is fiction under the sun.”11 The painted jackets are transitory and in the end somewhere “in-between” in terms of authorship. Within this conceptual framework, there is a fascinating artistic, linguistic, and geographic separation between Ayos and Cucullu, and it is the jackets themselves that physically and metaphorically embody that distance.
Santiago Cucullu and Martín Ayos, Aphorisms to Use During Invisibility, 2015
Collaborating in the Beyond: Individual Artist Collaborating with an International Community
In The Location of Culture, Homi K. Bhabha writes about living and working in-between cultures, and finding a semblance of home in the “beyond.”12 Bhabha writes, “We find ourselves in a moment of transit where space and time cross to produce complex figures of difference and identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion. For there is a sense of disorientation, a disturbance of direction, in the ‘beyond.’”13 It is in this same in-between space where artists in Raja’s exhibition collaborate across borders with communities. In the work of Pamela Longobardi, the flag becomes a symbol for freedom and inclusion for the refugees and migrants she worked with. They created flags for the stateless, for those who had no country they could call home. It was a flag for those in the “beyond.” The displacement of home is as tragic a concept as it is a reality. The enormity of this global struggle can be sensed in the scale of the work. Longobardi says in a Zoom interview, “I began sewing the first flag in the camp on Lesvos with refugees. But the actual collaboration involves … pieces made from the life vest material becoming the signal flag … to the social enterprise of Greek citizens and refugees called Lesvos Solidarity …. We made a flag, as a new nation of global refugees who didn’t have a particular country or flag, it was like a portable monument.”14
The Night Flag of Lesvos (Soteria), 2019, with its diverse fragments of colorful nylon fabric, shows the physical evidence and the collective human presence of the refugees’ urgency and creative agency in their coauthorship of the flag.
In The Location of Culture, Homi K. Bhabha writes about living and working in-between cultures, and finding a semblance of home in the “beyond.”12 Bhabha writes, “We find ourselves in a moment of transit where space and time cross to produce complex figures of difference and identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion. For there is a sense of disorientation, a disturbance of direction, in the ‘beyond.’”13 It is in this same in-between space where artists in Raja’s exhibition collaborate across borders with communities. In the work of Pamela Longobardi, the flag becomes a symbol for freedom and inclusion for the refugees and migrants she worked with. They created flags for the stateless, for those who had no country they could call home. It was a flag for those in the “beyond.” The displacement of home is as tragic a concept as it is a reality. The enormity of this global struggle can be sensed in the scale of the work. Longobardi says in a Zoom interview, “I began sewing the first flag in the camp on Lesvos with refugees. But the actual collaboration involves … pieces made from the life vest material becoming the signal flag … to the social enterprise of Greek citizens and refugees called Lesvos Solidarity …. We made a flag, as a new nation of global refugees who didn’t have a particular country or flag, it was like a portable monument.”14
The Night Flag of Lesvos (Soteria), 2019, with its diverse fragments of colorful nylon fabric, shows the physical evidence and the collective human presence of the refugees’ urgency and creative agency in their coauthorship of the flag.
Pamela Longobardi, The Night Flag of Lesvos (Soteria), 2019
Global Art Collectives and the Machinations of Globalization
The third category of international collaboration is Global Art Collectives. One such group participating in the exhibition is Global Art Project (GAP), originally organized by Carl Heyward and Akiko Suzuki. GAP is a membership-based international collaborative of mixed-media artists working in 12 countries. Heyward states, “Our affinity with Fluxus, Cobra and the Dada Art Movement is a recognition of the importance of being attuned to the collaborative future.”15 One of the works in the exhibition is the result of a collaboration between three GAP artists: Naomi Middelmann (Switzerland), Lawrence Philp (USA), and Ron Weijers (The Netherlands). The conceptual and aesthetic complexity of multi-artist collaboration is fascinating in the context of what the work must go through to be made. The three artists in order to collaborate have to contend with the machinations of globalization in that their work is dependent upon the international flow and movement of raw materials and goods across multiple international borders. Although the artwork is not inherently political, the cross-border collaborative process speaks directly to the impact of global international shipping as a means for completing the multi-author paper and string assemblage. The resulting work is a wonderfully haptic, fluid, and colorful exploration for the eye. There are four stacked sheets of paper that have been tied together with white string. Two sheets appear to have been treated with ink and/or watercolor. One sees brownish earth tones blended with warm, hazy red-orange hues. The visible pattern that the overlapping string makes around the paper resembles a geometric web. Allowing accidents to happen, a layered palimpsest captures the duration of the making of the work and details of the interaction of each artist’s participation. It is an exciting collaborative assemblage that speaks of travel, layering, packaging, re-use, and recycling. There is a sense that the artwork is a bit of a miracle that it made it to its destination.
The third category of international collaboration is Global Art Collectives. One such group participating in the exhibition is Global Art Project (GAP), originally organized by Carl Heyward and Akiko Suzuki. GAP is a membership-based international collaborative of mixed-media artists working in 12 countries. Heyward states, “Our affinity with Fluxus, Cobra and the Dada Art Movement is a recognition of the importance of being attuned to the collaborative future.”15 One of the works in the exhibition is the result of a collaboration between three GAP artists: Naomi Middelmann (Switzerland), Lawrence Philp (USA), and Ron Weijers (The Netherlands). The conceptual and aesthetic complexity of multi-artist collaboration is fascinating in the context of what the work must go through to be made. The three artists in order to collaborate have to contend with the machinations of globalization in that their work is dependent upon the international flow and movement of raw materials and goods across multiple international borders. Although the artwork is not inherently political, the cross-border collaborative process speaks directly to the impact of global international shipping as a means for completing the multi-author paper and string assemblage. The resulting work is a wonderfully haptic, fluid, and colorful exploration for the eye. There are four stacked sheets of paper that have been tied together with white string. Two sheets appear to have been treated with ink and/or watercolor. One sees brownish earth tones blended with warm, hazy red-orange hues. The visible pattern that the overlapping string makes around the paper resembles a geometric web. Allowing accidents to happen, a layered palimpsest captures the duration of the making of the work and details of the interaction of each artist’s participation. It is an exciting collaborative assemblage that speaks of travel, layering, packaging, re-use, and recycling. There is a sense that the artwork is a bit of a miracle that it made it to its destination.
Global Art Project: Naomi Middelmann (Switzerland), Lawrence Philp (USA), and Ron Weijers (The Netherlands)
Remnants of Memory, 2018
Hope through Internationalism
This exhibition provides hope through artistic collaborations that create the “global village” as a unique, rhizomatic global network, while sharing and balancing creative agency. Conceptual artist Dan Graham writes, “All artists are alike. They dream of doing something that’s more social, more collaborative, and more real than art.”16 The artists in the exhibition use visual language and verbal conversation to break down the barriers between citizens and non-citizens through interaction, communication, and participation. This particular group of artists brought together in this exhibition by curator Nirmal Raja unites people by collaborating with communities across borders, nations, politics, race, ethnicity, and class – to find social meaning – to celebrate and advance human freedom and creativity.
Notes
1. Nikos Papastergiadis, “Collaboration in Art and Society: A Global Pursuit of Democratic Dialogue, A Global Need for Collaboration” in Globalization and Contemporary Art, ed. Jonathan Harris, (Malden, MA, Wiley-Blackwell Press, 2011), pg. 286.
2. Johnson, June, Global Issues, Local Arguments. New York: Pearson Education, 2007, pgs. 237-39.
3. Nirmal Raja, Reimagining the Global Village, Exhibition Overview, 2021.
4. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis, 1987), pg. 25.
5. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis, 1987), pg. 7.
6. Joseph Johnson, “Worldwide digital population as of January 2021”.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/617136/digital-population-worldwide/, April 7, 2021.
7. Scott Reyburn, “A Pledge to Help Artists Becomes a Lucrative Lifeline”, NY Times, November 12, 2020.
8. Nikos Papastergiadis, “Collaboration in Art and Society: A Global Pursuit of Democratic Dialogue, A Global Need for Collaboration” in Globalization and Contemporary Art, ed. Jonathan Harris, (Malden, MA, Wiley -Blackwell Press, 2011), pg. 278.
9. Homi K. Bhabha, “Border Lives: The Art of the Present” in Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Eds. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood. (Blackwell Publishing: London, 2003). pg. 1110.
10. Santiago Cucullu and Martín Ayos, Zoom interview with Nirmal Raja.
11. Santiago Cucullu and Martín Ayos, Statement for Reimagining the Global Village, 2021.
12. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, (Routledge, New York and London, 1994), pg. 7.
13. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, (Routledge, New York and London, 1994), pg. 7.
14. Pamela Longobardi, Zoom interview with Nirmal Raja.
15. Global Art Project, Statement. https://globartproject.wixsite.com/globalartproject-art.
16. Claire Bishop, “The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents”, Artforum, February, 2006.
Bibliography
Ashcroft, Bill, Griffiths, Gareth, Tiffin, Helen, Eds. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. Routledge, London and New York, 1995.
Bhaba, Homi K.. The Location of Culture. Routledge, London and New York, 1994.
Bishop, Claire. “The Social Turn, Collaboration and its Discontents.” Artforum, February, 2006.
Bluemink, Matt. “The Web as Rhizome in Deleuze and Guattari.” http://bluelabyrinths.com, July 15, 2015. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis, 1987.
Dimitrakaki, Angela. “The Spectacle and Its Others: Labor, Conflict, and Art in the Age of Global Capital.”
Globalization & Contemporary Art, ed. Jonathan Harris, Malden, MA, Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.
Dixon, Violet K. “Understanding the Implications of the Global Village.” Inquiries Journal/Student Pulse, 1, Pg. 11, http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/a/id=1681.
Enwezor, Okwui. “The Post-Colonial Constellation: Contemporary Art in a State of Permanent Transition.”
African Literatures, Vol. 34, No. 4 (Winter, 2003), Published By: Indiana University Press, pp. 57-82.
Foster, Hal. “Arty Party.” London Review of Books, Vol.25 No 23 December 4, 2003, Page 8. Harris, Jonathan, editor, Globalization and Contemporary Art. Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.
Jacobs, Alan. “Why Bother with Marshall McLuhan? The Man, the Medium, and his Message.” The New Atlantis, https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications, 2016.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Signet, New York, 1964. McLuhan, Marshall. The Medium is the Massage. Ginko Press, Corte Madera, CA, 2001.
McLuhan, Marshall. War and Peace in the Global Village. Penguin, Toronto, 1968, reprint 2003.
McLuhan, Marshall and Powers, Bruce R. The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century, Oxford University, 1996.
Meban, Margaret. “Aesthetic of Social Interaction.” Art Education, November 2009, Vol. 62, No. 6. Nolan, Ginger. The Neocolonialism of the Global Village. University of Minnesota Press, 2018.
Papastergiadis, Nikos. Collaboration in Art and Society: A Global Pursuit of Democratic Dialogue, A Global Need for Collaboration, in Globalization and Contemporary Art, ed. Jonathan Harris, Malden, MA, Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.
Ranciere, Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator. Verso, London, 2009.
This exhibition provides hope through artistic collaborations that create the “global village” as a unique, rhizomatic global network, while sharing and balancing creative agency. Conceptual artist Dan Graham writes, “All artists are alike. They dream of doing something that’s more social, more collaborative, and more real than art.”16 The artists in the exhibition use visual language and verbal conversation to break down the barriers between citizens and non-citizens through interaction, communication, and participation. This particular group of artists brought together in this exhibition by curator Nirmal Raja unites people by collaborating with communities across borders, nations, politics, race, ethnicity, and class – to find social meaning – to celebrate and advance human freedom and creativity.
Notes
1. Nikos Papastergiadis, “Collaboration in Art and Society: A Global Pursuit of Democratic Dialogue, A Global Need for Collaboration” in Globalization and Contemporary Art, ed. Jonathan Harris, (Malden, MA, Wiley-Blackwell Press, 2011), pg. 286.
2. Johnson, June, Global Issues, Local Arguments. New York: Pearson Education, 2007, pgs. 237-39.
3. Nirmal Raja, Reimagining the Global Village, Exhibition Overview, 2021.
4. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis, 1987), pg. 25.
5. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis, 1987), pg. 7.
6. Joseph Johnson, “Worldwide digital population as of January 2021”.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/617136/digital-population-worldwide/, April 7, 2021.
7. Scott Reyburn, “A Pledge to Help Artists Becomes a Lucrative Lifeline”, NY Times, November 12, 2020.
8. Nikos Papastergiadis, “Collaboration in Art and Society: A Global Pursuit of Democratic Dialogue, A Global Need for Collaboration” in Globalization and Contemporary Art, ed. Jonathan Harris, (Malden, MA, Wiley -Blackwell Press, 2011), pg. 278.
9. Homi K. Bhabha, “Border Lives: The Art of the Present” in Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Eds. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood. (Blackwell Publishing: London, 2003). pg. 1110.
10. Santiago Cucullu and Martín Ayos, Zoom interview with Nirmal Raja.
11. Santiago Cucullu and Martín Ayos, Statement for Reimagining the Global Village, 2021.
12. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, (Routledge, New York and London, 1994), pg. 7.
13. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, (Routledge, New York and London, 1994), pg. 7.
14. Pamela Longobardi, Zoom interview with Nirmal Raja.
15. Global Art Project, Statement. https://globartproject.wixsite.com/globalartproject-art.
16. Claire Bishop, “The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents”, Artforum, February, 2006.
Bibliography
Ashcroft, Bill, Griffiths, Gareth, Tiffin, Helen, Eds. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. Routledge, London and New York, 1995.
Bhaba, Homi K.. The Location of Culture. Routledge, London and New York, 1994.
Bishop, Claire. “The Social Turn, Collaboration and its Discontents.” Artforum, February, 2006.
Bluemink, Matt. “The Web as Rhizome in Deleuze and Guattari.” http://bluelabyrinths.com, July 15, 2015. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis, 1987.
Dimitrakaki, Angela. “The Spectacle and Its Others: Labor, Conflict, and Art in the Age of Global Capital.”
Globalization & Contemporary Art, ed. Jonathan Harris, Malden, MA, Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.
Dixon, Violet K. “Understanding the Implications of the Global Village.” Inquiries Journal/Student Pulse, 1, Pg. 11, http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/a/id=1681.
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about the writer
Marcelino Stuhmer is an Associate Professor of Fine Arts in Painting at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. His creative work includes painting and drawing, video and immersive art installations, but he also writes fiction, essays, and critical reviews. In his visual work he focuses on creating narratives that mask and mark personal and collective memory, history and identity. Stuhmer’s own practice has long been an investigation into his own sense of displacement as a first-generation Dutch-Indonesian-American. Stuhmer earned a BA in English, a BFA in Painting from the University of Utah, and received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and did artist residencies at Skowhegan in Maine, The Atlantic Center in Florida, and at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. His artwork has been exhibited nationally and internationally at the Playstation at Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam; Galerie Jade, Bergamo, Italy; Essl Museum of Contemporary Art, Klosterneuburg, Austria; Chicago Cultural Center; Art in General, New York City; and Vox Populi, Philadelphia; among others. Awards and recognition include Best International Artist at Arte Laguna International Prize in Venice, Italy; Mondrian Foundation Exhibition & Publication Grant, Amsterdam; and the Royal Prize for Painting in the Netherlands. His work was featured in New American Paintings, and reviewed in Artforum, Chicago Tribune, Newcity Chicago, Chicago Reader, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Artblog, and Philadelphia Weekly, among others. Stuhmer is also a writer of fiction and science fiction within his narrative based video works, photo installations, and cinematic artist books. He has also published critical reviews and essays in the late New Art Examiner and the contemporary art review website Title-Magazine.com. In 2016, Stuhmer wrote the catalogue essay “Corneliu Baba: Entering the Mad World of the Late Works”. It was the first English language essay published in over 20 years on the great Romanian painter (Corneliu Baba, 1906 – 1992). The essay was translated into Romanian and Bulgarian and included in a 2017 catalogue on Baba published by the National Museum of Bulgaria in Sophia. Stuhmer’s artist book I’ll be seeing you (2002), is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, Baltic Center for Contemporary Art, Tate Library and Archive London, Vanabbemuseum Library, Eindhoven, Jan van Eyck Akademie Library, Maastricht, among others.