Expanding Internationalism - A Conference on ... - Mary Jane Jacob

people comnented, was to polarize "here"/"there," "We"/"They," First
World/Third World.
All of these have been models of a kind of absorption
rather than dialogue.
"How," as the Chilean-Australian artist Juan Davila
asks, "can one avoid bringing to the European market new products"
Does therefore, "expanding internationalism" mean simply an
extension of the existing system, the desire of those inside the system to
extend it and of some of those outside it to "plug into" it, or a change,
or at least a challenge, to that system.
"The question here," as Jean
Fisher has written, "is not how do we make the artifacts of others "fit"
our institutions, what universalizing principles can we invent to
incorporate them into our exhibitions, but how do we interrogate and
dismantle the assumptions on which our institutions are based." I think
this has been a vital issue throughout 20th-century art, which bland terms
like modernism and postmodernism only cover up, :because it concerns the
social value and the efficacy of art. I would like to pursue this issue
by asking what it might mean in relation to a notion like internationalism.
Ponder the following statement by the British artist Richard Long:
":M:>untains and galleries are both in their own ways extreme, neutral,
uncluttered, good places to work .... "
Although the remark is a kind of
aside and probably came very naturally to Long, it is worth looking at
what is implied here: the remarkable link made :between mountains and
galleries, :between the "earth" and the "nruseurn," as a link :between the
"real" and "ideal" space in which both are assumed to :be neutral. The
tone of the statement, by which a kind of art-school assumption of the
availability of space and materials is projected outwards so that the
whole world is available as a tabula rasa for the artist (I :believe Long
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