[Reader-list] Documenta XI - A response to Philip Pocock

[Shuddhabrata Sengupta]

This is a further statement on the postings about New Delhi Platform of 
Documenta XI.

As you will know the discussion till now has been archived on this list, and a 
digest of the various postings made by Monica Narula has been posted on 
nettime (www.nettime.org) on the 21st of May, 2001.

For us, the discussion on Documenta XI (Platform 2) has been but an instance 
of a more general discussion of matters pertaining to cultural politics. We 
have no special interest in either extolling or flaming Documenta. What 
concerns us here are conceptual and pragmatic issues that are of relevance to 
media practice and critical reflection on new media, digital culture and their 
relationship to our contemporary condition. Any event or festival or person or 
work that is discussed here needs to be discussed with only this in view. 
There are other lists that are more suitable for other purposes.

Day before yesterday, the list received a lengthy email from Philip Pocock, 
who has been active on the discussion on Documenta, in the form of a letter to 
Okwui Enwezor (the curator of Documenta XI). 

We believe in a free, frank and critical discussion on the list, and see no 
reason for the list being used to further personal agendas by anyone on the 
list against people outside it. Or, to see material from the list being 
selectively used to bolster these personal agendas. This is why we have 
responded in detail to Philip, and are posting relevant extracts of the 
response on the list, which we hope will help in carrying forward a general 
discussion on the serious issues of cultural politics which have been raised 
in the postings. We have no interest in becoming a forum for exhibiting 
personal affinities and animosities in the art world. This list has more 
important things to do!

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Dear Philip,

This is in resonse to your last email on the reader-list at sarai.net  regarding 
Documenta XI, (especially Platform 2 - held in Delhi recently). 

The arguments that you are making. If we could summarize them, are as follows 
(and correct us if in summarizing them violence is being done to any of them)

1. The implications of 'importing' and 'exporting' culture in and out of 
ex-colonial situations,
     (Is Documenta XI carrying with it the risk of carrying on a colonialist 
cultural agenda ?)
2. The cost of attending the platforms and the lack of new media technologies 
as alternative modes of      participation and dissemination
3. The institutional setting of the location of Platform 2 in Delhi - The 
India Habitat Centre
4. The paucity of local participation
5. The lack of local back up and research
6.  The lack of attention to local concerns - and to the
 "the spiritual dimension of truth which underpins india's identity even 
today"

We would like to respond to each of these criticisms, not in defence of the 
New Delhi Platform of  Documenta XI, but as observers who were present through 
a substantial section of the deliberations of the platform.

Incidentally, we happen to work at Sarai, which you have so generously 
commended in your posting, and far from actually being ignorant of Sarai, 
members of the curatorial team (Mr. Enwezor and his colleagues) were familiar 
with Sarai and with our work. A delegation from the curatorial team also 
visited Sarai and had detailed discussions with us and our colleagues after 
the days of Platform were over. We would, in the light of this, urge you not 
to be so misplaced in your enthusiasm for Sarai so as to argue on our behalf 
in a dispute that seems to have very little to do with Sarai itself, or the 
relationship between media practice in India, and elsewhere.

We are able enough to articulate our own positions whenever we need to, and 
with whomsoever we need to, and need no endorsements or interlocution. 
Ironically, your enthusiasm for us risks sliding into a 'first world' 
endorsement for the latest 'bright kids from the third world'.

We might add that your statement "some (were) able to afford entry into the 
Habitat Center" is specious. 
We were in fact  specifically invited to be present, but  the meeting  itself 
was open to the general public, anyone could have walked in and for free. You 
have quoted a posting on the list  to the effect that the meeting was in some 
senses closed to the public - "...but not the easiest space to enter if you do 
not have enough capital, cultural or otherwise." 

This statement must be seen in the sense that it was intended - which is a 
reflection on the fact that there is at present next to nothing in Delhi by 
the way of a democratic and accessible cultural/arts/exhibiton space which is 
open, non-elitist and public. This would have been the case no matter what 
venue was chosen by the orgainsers. But it cannot be construed to mean an 
argument against the holding of the excercise in itself. The elitism of 
insitutionalized arts spaces is a fact that we have to live with and contend 
with everywhere in the world. We would argue that this is the case in 
practically any city, anywhere. The same factors operate in London, or Lagos, 
or Lisbon, and a (necessary) scepticism about  the "elite" nature of a space 
in the posting being turned into a (gestural) protest against the event 
itself, in your quotation of it, is nothing more than rhetorical sleight of 
hand.

This is true, unfortunately, of your deployment of all of the quote - the fact 
that barring academics and artists, few people from the general public were to 
be seen - is again a reflection of the estrangement of discourse from the 
public sphere - in Delhi, and anywhere in the world. This is a fact that is 
not by any means of Documenta's making. And it is unfair on your part to 
suggest that this is in fact what is being said.

Now for your criticisms,
 
1. The Implications of 'importing' and 'exporting' culture in and out of 
ex-colonial situations,
     (Is Documenta XI carrying with it the risk of carrying on a colonialist 
cultural agenda ?)

This question brings with it a lot of baggage. Suppose, that an  international 
arts event located in Western Europe, (as Documenta is) chooses to pass over 
Asia, Africa and Latin America on the grounds that to present work from the 
so-called 'Third World' is to always render it exotic, then there would be no 
doubt much agonizing over the fact that yet again the West has chosen to 
ignore the Rest. This was in fact the case in the last Documenta (Documenta X, 
19XX). The curatorial decision to not enter into the realm of the 'exotic' 
even if unconsciously, was lambasted as "colonialist exclusion".

see xxxx for an interesting and balanced analysis of the curatorial agenda of 
Documenta X by Geeta Kapur an Art Theorist and Historian from Delhi.

This time it is the obverse, because the same international arts event, guided 
by a different vision is determined to look at discourse and cultural practice 
in Africa, South Asia, the Carribean (as well as Central Europe) the 
cri-de-coeur is that of resistance to  "colonialist appropriation". 

Both tendencies, the allegations of "colonialist exclusion" and "colonialist 
appropriation", assume that there are monolithic cultural entities in the 
ex-colonial countries that are waiting to be re-colonized by western 
imperialism. This assumption only creates the comfortable illusion that 
ex-colonial socieities (and their cultural lives) are hegemonous and bereft of 
contrarian conflicts within them.That the culture on the streets in say a city 
like Delhi, is the same as the culture in an institution committed to the 
classical Indian arts, or even to the cultural life breath of the modern 
Indian nation state. The culture on the streets in South Asia has no 
insecurities about its 'impure' and  cosmopolitan nature, it is as able to 
wear imitation western clothes with just as much ease, use English when and 
where necessary,  as it is able to be indifferent to imitation western food or 
to popular western music or Hollywood cinema. It has no reason to see 
"western" culture as colonizing. It sees it as yet another element in a global 
cultural space that all of us are jostling to refashion after our own 
concerns, needs, and desires.

The anxiety about the authenticity of "eastern" as opposed to western culture 
in India is better located in those indigenous elites who get a ready audience 
in new age-ist constituency that runs from california to california. Also, it 
puts all of western cultural practice within one (colonizing) bracket. While 
this may assuage the new age guilt of individuals within Western Europe and 
North America, it does nothing to actually illuminate the politics of a 
cultural encounter. Colonialism produced its victims both in the west and in 
the rest of the world. It needs to be recognised as a fact that the colonies 
of European powers were vast laboratories for the invention of new techniques 
of deploying power, which were then executed with alacrity 'back home'. 

We are shamelessly interested in the history of Europe and North America 
because we see our own history as being completely entwined with it. Equally, 
if we were European/North American today, we would be just as interested in 
the History of Asia, Africa and Latin America. The phenomenon of Colonialism, 
which is a particular instance of the general history of Capitalism, asks all 
of us to be equally concerned with the  distrubution and transmission of  
power right across the globe. To look for greater or lesser victims of this 
impersonal and fluid network of power is to priviledge this or that corner of 
history, and to pretend to greater or lesser claims to innocence, in a world 
in which we are all equally implicated in violence and equally capable of 
compassion. 

This is why we reject the notion that the meeting of artists and intellectuals 
from India, ex-Yugoslavia, Chile, Germany, South Africa, the United States, 
Nigeria, Tunisia, Israel, France and the United States was an excecise in a 
"colonial encounter". 


2. The cost of attending the platforms and the lack of new media technologies 
as alternative modes of      participation and dissemination.