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

Bernice Murphy
Assistant Director and Chief Curator
Museum of Contemporary Art
Sydney, Australia
The theme of international exhibitions interests me greatly, but of
course, I take a somewhat different approach from that of curators or
"exhibition makers," as the Germans call them, working in centers of
international art, and working out from a centrist approach.
That approach is
impossible to sustain, in my experience, if you attend to contemporary culture
in all its potential fonns, from international to local, and respecting both
ends of this spectrum (which means not being content with merely
internationalist or merely parochial conditions, but taking a more alert,
exploratory and inquiring attitude to contemporary culture in all of its
productive conditions) .
There are problems in attempting to tie art works and artists into
national configurations, when the processes of constituting work develop
according to dialectical operations of mind and experience that reach beyond
questions of nationality or geographic location. At times, when confronted
with the striking international connections and interactive influences that
may prosper in art, one is tempted to abandon the distinctions of nationality
altogether as too limiting or falsifying.
And yet, in this late-20th-century world that has in recent decades
been arrogantly mythified as a "global village," the more one works in
different parts of the world, even the Western world, the more one may
penetrate the insistently shaping powers of local traditions, local languages,
local decisions, and local priorities.
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