[Reader-list] Digressions from the Memory of a Minor Encounter

[Monica Narula]

Digressions from the Memory of a Minor Encounter
Raqs Media Collective

The Manifesta Decade: Debates on Contemporary Art Exhibitions and  
Biennials in Post-Wall Europe,
Edited by Barbara Vanderlinden and Elena Filipovic, Roomade and The  
MIT Press, 2006

Once, not so long ago, on a damp, rainy afternoon in Paris, a stroll  
took us across the Avenue d’Iéna, from contemporary art to ancient  
and medieval Asian art, from the Palais de Tokyo to the Musée Guimet.  
There, standing at the far end of the ground-floor section of the  
Guimet’s permanent collection in front of a frieze from the Banteay  
Srei temple in Cambodia’s Siem Reap province, we felt the sharp edge  
of estrangement in something that also felt downright familiar.

The Banteay Srei frieze narrates a story from the Mahabharata, a  
Sanskrit epic. The story is of two brothers, the demons Sunda and  
Upasunda, whose tussle over the attentions of Tilottama, an Apsara—a  
heavenly courtesan sent by the gods to destroy them with jealousy—was  
the cause of their downfall. Like most others who grew up listening  
to stories in India, we knew it well, even if only as an annotation  
to the main body of the epic. But it wasn’t the details of the story  
that intrigued us that afternoon, nor the carved contours of Sunda  
and Upasunda’s rage, not even the delicacy of the depiction of  
Tilottama’s divisive seduction. Instead, standing before these stone  
images, made in a region roughly 3,500 miles to the east of where we  
live, in Delhi, and exhibited in a museum roughly 6,500 miles to the  
west, we felt compelled to think again about distance and proximity,  
and about how stories, images, and ideas travel.

The story of Sunda, Upasunda, and Tilottama was probably first told  
around 200 B.C. in the northwestern part of the South Asian  
subcontinent. Between the first telling of the story and the carving  
of the frieze in a clearing in the forests of Seam Riep in circa 967  
lay a little more than a thousand years and an eastward journey of a  
few thousand miles. Between its carving and our sudden encounter with  
it in Paris, there lay a little more than another millennium and a  
westward journey halfway across the world. These intervals in time  
and space were overlaid by an elaborate circuit that encompassed  
travel, conquest, migration and settlement, wars and violence, the  
clearing of forests, the quarrying of stone, slavery and indenture,  
skilled artisans, the faces and indiscretions of the men and women  
who would become the inspiration for jealous demons and divine  
courtesans, a few thousand years of history, the crossing of oceans,  
the rise and fall of several empires across different continents, and  
the repeated telling and forgetting of a minor story.

Contemporaneity, the sensation of being in a time together is an  
ancient, enigma of a feeling. It is the tug we feel when our times  
pull at us. But sometimes one has the sense of a paradoxically  
asynchronous contemporaneity—the strange tug of more than one time  
and place. As if an accumulation or thickening of our attachments to  
different times and spaces was manifesting itself in the form of some  
unique geological oddity, a richly striated cross section of a rock,  
sometimes sharp, sometimes blurred, marked by the passage of many  
epochs.

Standing before Sunda, Upasunda, and Tillottama in the Musée Guimet,  
we were in Siem Reap, in Indraprastha (an ancient name for Delhi, in  
whose vicinity much of the Mahabharata story is located), in New  
Delhi, in nineteenth-century Paris, and in the Paris of today. We  
were in many places and in many times. Sometimes art, the presence of  
an image, moves you. And you find yourself scattered all over the  
place, as a consequence.

How can we begin to think about being scattered?

Collections of objects from different parts of the world are indices  
of different instances of scattering. The minor encounter that we  
experienced in the Musée Guimet is one kind of scattering. It taught  
us that sometimes we encounter familiarity in the guise of  
strangeness and then suggested that we learn to question the easy  
binary shorthand of the familiar and the strange, as ways of thinking  
about ourselves, others, and the world. It suggested the possibility  
of other less polarized and more layered relationships between  
cultural processes. But this is not the only possible kind of  
scattering that the presence of images and stories echoing the  
familiar in uncanny ways provoke.

An increased intensity of communication creates a new kind of  
experiential contagion. It leads to all kind of illegitimate liaisons  
between things meant to be unfamiliar. The first thing that dissolves  
under the pressure of this promiscuous density of contact across  
space is the assumption that different degrees of “now” obtain in  
different places, that Delhi or Dar es Salaam are somehow less “now”  
than Detroit. The “nows” of different places leach into each other  
with increasing force. The realities of different contemporaneities  
infect each other. This condition generates active estrangement, a  
kind of nervous expulsion, a gladiatorial of repulsion scripted  
either through an orientation of contempt or of homage. Why contempt  
and homage? They permit the automatic assumption of a chasm between  
the beholder and the object of contemplation. The tropes of contempt  
and homage are an optic through which some perennially survey others  
and then evaluate them along an axis where the production of  
estrangement has to be resolved in terms of either positive or  
negative regard. The “survey” mode of understanding the world  
presumes a stable cyclopean and panoptic center of surveillance to  
which the gaze can never adequately be returned, ensuring that a  
meeting of visions will never take place on equal footing.

Like Sunda and Upasunda fighting over Tilottama, the more that  
different parts of the world come to be aware of each other’s  
desires, the more disputes there are over who has the greatest access  
to the contemporaneity both desire—the part of the world that has  
more confidence in itself or the one that has more of the élan of the  
“Other.” Key to this conflict of perceptions is a refusal to  
recognize that, like the sudden appearance of a Sanskrit story in a  
Khmer frieze in a Parisian museum to a collective of practitioners  
from Delhi, the relationships between familiarity and estrangement  
are compromised of many folds and cracks in space and time.  
Estrangement is only familiarity deferred or held in abeyance.

Rather than recognize the fact that familiarity and estrangement are  
only two non-distinct and contiguous instances of cognitive and  
affective transfer, this tendency to resolve the unfamiliar into the  
binary of the “like” and the “alien” needs constant mechanisms of  
reinforcement. The duality of contempt and homage is one such  
mechanism. In the first instance (contempt), the object of the survey  
is pinned down in taxonomic terms, explained away to require no  
further engagement, making impossible the blurring of the distinction  
between the surveyor and the surveyed. In the second (homage), the  
object is exalted beyond the possibility of an engagement. In either  
case, a difference, once identified, becomes a factor of cognitive  
and affective excision. This forecloses the possibility of  
recognizing that what is identified and estranged may in fact be  
disturbingly similar to what is familiar, even though it may be  
located in realities that are difficult to translate with coherence  
or consistency. It is the inability to recognize the face of a  
stranger when you look at your own reflection.

The amalgam of the sensations of familiarity and estrangement evokes  
a new register of a tense accommodation, a hospitality to the  
presence of the “strange” that is not without attendant unease to the  
“familiar.” In the end, this may guarantee the disavowal of mutual  
antipathy and the cultivation of some sort of cohabitation. We can  
change the framework of the story on the Banteay Srei frieze. Sunda  
and Upasunda can both survive by agreeing to stay within the  
framework of a generous but awkward polyandry. They can do this by  
learning to negotiate with Tilottama’s claims on both their desires,  
and displaying a little more effort at being open to unpredictable  
encounters.

What does a little more by way of encounter attain in the domain of  
contemporary art? An assessment of the amplitude of signals and the  
intensity of contact that marks our world today is still waiting to  
be made. One of the ways in which this could be undertaken would be  
for us to try and account for the implications of the growth in  
Internet-based connectivity on a global scale. The Internet, as we  
know it today, is barely a decade and a half old, and its expansion  
can be dated to as late as the mid-1990s. Curiously, the expansion of  
the Internet and the recent expansion in the number of biennials have  
been co-incident with each other.

Today, it is estimated that 13.9 percent of the world’s population,  
or 888,681,131 people, have some kind of regular Internet access. The  
majority of Internet users live in North America, Europe, Australia,  
New Zealand, and parts of East Asia (South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan,  
Japan, and Singapore). World Internet usage grew by an estimated  
146.2 percent from 2000 to early 2005, and the highest growth rates  
were in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. Chinese is  
the second most used language on the Internet, and a country like  
India experienced a growth of 684 percent in Internet usage, from  
five million people in 2000 to 39.2 million in early 2005. It means  
that some thirty-nine million people in India (through labor,  
education, correspondence, and entertainment) employ, use, rely on a  
medium that enables an exceptional level of global reach. Actual  
figures are probably significantly higher, as most people in India  
and other similar societies tend to go online not from the computers  
that they own (since not that many people 'own' computers) or even  
computers that they might access at work, but from street-corner  
cybercafés. No other platform of communication in world history can  
claim that it has attracted the attention of 13.9 percent of the  
world’s population in the span of ten years. Ten years is a very  
short time in the history of culture. It is the span between three  
Documentas or the time between the founding of the European biennial,  
Manifesta, and its fifth edition. If Internet usage continues to  
grow, at least at this rate, for the next twenty years, approximately  
seventy-five percent of the world’s population will have initiated a  
deeply networked existence in the time it takes to produce the next  
four Documentas. Nothing has prepared us for the consequences of this  
depth and density of communicative engagement on a global scale. And  
unlike previous expansions in communicative capacity (print, radio,  
cinema, television), this time, with the Internet and new digital  
devices, we see readers, who are also writers and editors, users, who  
are also producers, viewers, who are also, at least potentially,  
creators, entering a global space of cultural production.

While it would be simplistic to argue for a cause-and-effect  
relationship between the expansion of the constituencies served by  
the Internet and the growth in number of biennials and other  
international art events, it would be equally facile to dismiss the  
implications of the emergence of this vast augmentation in global  
communication for the contemporary art scene.

What are these implications? Firstly, the discursive communities  
around contemporary art, like the discursive communities in science  
or politics, are poised to undergo a significant transformation.  
Secondly, an increasing diversity of positions vis-à-vis the role of  
authorship, creativity, and intellectual property in the actual  
domain of global cultural practice are challenging the notions of  
bounded authorship that have dominated the concept of art production  
in the recent past. Both of these formulations need some elaboration.

The discursive framework of contemporary art, like any other domain  
of thought and practice today, can no longer be viewed as something  
that occurs only between an exclusive cognoscenti of curators,  
practitioners, theorists, and critics, residing in Europe and North  
America. Discursive networks can afford to practice an exclusionary  
mode of existence only at the risk of their own obsolescence. Every  
node in such a network survives only if it is able to affect a  
critical mass of new connectivities and be a conduit for new  
information about a very rapidly changing world.

In politics, it is impossible to conceive of a discursive framework  
that does not include an active interest in what is going on in the  
majority of the world. The realities of the Middle East, South  
America, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, and Central, South, and  
East Asia affect profoundly what happens in Europe and North America.  
The networks of global finance and trade or even of distributed  
production that characterize the world economy today would not exist  
as they do without the Internet. Similarly, the global production and  
dissemination of news is deeply tied into the substance of everyday  
politics. It is impossible to separate domestic politics in any major  
Asian or European country from, say, what is happening in Iraq today.  
To say this is to state the obvious.
But what is obvious in a discussion of the economy, the media, or  
politics is somehow seen as novel or esoteric in the realm of  
culture. This prevailing surprise about the fact that the  
“contemporary” is also “trans-territorial,” that “now” is “elsewhere”  
as much as it is “here,” as “strange” as it is “familiar,” is one of  
the symptoms of the lag in the levels of informed discussion between  
the domains of culture and of political economy. However, while it  
may still be possible for some to argue, from a perspective that  
privileges the present state of affairs, that a globalization of  
contemporary culture may imply an attempt to impose a specifically  
Western modernist agenda on a global scale due to the inequalities in  
articulative capacity, it would be impossible to sustain this  
argument in the long term. The momentum generated by different  
processes of cultural articulation set in motion in various local  
contexts all over the world indicate a reality of densely networked  
yet autonomous tendencies, movements, genres, styles, and affinities  
that are far more complex than those for which the discourse of =20
westernization allows. Even a cursory glance at the crosscurrents of  
influence in global popular culture, in music, film, cuisine,  
fashion, literature, gaming, and comics, reveals the inner workings  
of this web. We are in a world where cinema from Mumbai, manga from  
Tokyo, music from Dakar, literature from Bogotá, cuisine from  
Guangzhou, fashion from Rio de Janeiro, and games from Seoul act as  
significant global presences, rivaling, occasionally overshadowing,  
the spread and influence of their European and North American  
analogues. The trends in contemporary art practice and exhibition  
can, in the end, only be an echo of this banal generality of the  
everyday life of global cultural traffic and transaction.

The growing presence of art practitioners and works from outside  
Europe and North America within major European and North American  
exhibitions, and the realization that there are non-Western histories  
of modernity have had two ancillary effects. They have demonstrated  
that these practices, practitioners, and their histories have a  
significant global perspective, speaking to the world from their own  
vantage points, as they have done for a while. These two realities  
also have created pressure within non-Western spaces and by non- 
Western practitioners, curators, and theorists to lay claim to a  
global cultural space through the founding of contemporary art  
institutions, networks of practitioners, and exhibition circuits. One  
implication of this has been the proliferation of biennials and other  
international exhibitions of contemporary art in spaces outside  
Europe and North America and a corresponding increase in the  
discourse generated through and around contemporary art in these areas.

Another implication of this has been the nascent presence of the  
curator and the critic of contemporary art in Asia, Africa, and Latin  
America or who finds him- or herself located within or at a tangent  
to new Asian, African, and Latin American diasporas in Europe and  
North America. At first, this new curator may be someone who seems to  
speak only to and for his or her place of origin. He or she then may  
be perceived as working with other curators and artists within  
specific regional (but transnational) settings or with peers in  
similar contexts elsewhere in the world. Eventually, he or she will  
be seen as laying a claim to working with artists from everywhere,  
including Europe and North America. These claims, as and when they  
occur (and some are indeed occurring even now), will be based not on  
the operation of affiliations based on geo-politics, geography, and  
location, but on elective affinities of interest, taste, curiosities,  
methodologies, and concerns. This will coincide with the rise of  
institutional and non-institutional structures, spaces, and networks  
in contemporary art that have significant presences outside Europe  
and North America. These entities will become forums for discussion  
and exhibition as well as fulcrums that enable the leveraging of  
transregional contexts for collaboration and curating. The idea that  
contemporary art has to have a central location, privileging a  
particular history or cultural framework, will erode and give way to  
the idea that contemporaneity is best expressed within the logic of a  
flexible and agile network that responds to emergences and tendencies  
on a global scale. This means that the logic of spatial and cultural  
distance that operated as a perennial handicap for the non-Western  
curator, practitioner, or theorist is unlikely to remain of much  
significance. Likewise, the European or North American artistic  
practitioner or curator increasingly will be called upon to  
demonstrate his or her relevance in a multipolar world where European  
or North American origins or location will no longer operate as an  
automatic set of credentials. In a world that grows more used to  
being networked, curators and artists from different spaces will work  
together and in each other’s spaces, as a matter of course. In their  
everyday practices, they will question, challenge, and subvert stable  
identifications of spatiality and cultural affiliation. This will not  
necessarily mean better or worse art or discourse; what it will mean  
is that the terms “global” and “contemporary” will resonate in a host  
of different ways, so as to indicate the active presences of hitherto  
absent, silent, or muted voices and expressions.

The formulation regarding the challenge to the notion of bounded  
authorship as a result of the expansion of a global platform like the  
Internet is perhaps of deeper significance for contemporary art, even  
if it is at the moment less visible. The Internet has set in motion  
peer-to-peer networks and online communities that do more than share  
cultural intelligence: They also occasionally collaborate on the  
making of things and of meaning, often on a global scale, in a way  
that is at variance with mainstream protocols of intellectual  
property. This is most clearly visible in the global open-source  
communities, but the influence of the “open-source” idea has  
ramifications beyond software. This tendency is increasingly audible  
in the domain of a new global musical sensibility based on file  
sharing, remixing, and recycling of extant musical material, with  
scant regard to the admonitions either of the protectors of  
intellectual property or cultural purity. It is also present in peer- 
to-peer networks founded by scientists, legal scholars, philosophers,  
historians, and other social scientists who have used the internet to  
establish a new intellectual common that gains strength through  
regular usage, participation, and contribution, often in direct  
opposition to the hierarchies prevalent in institutionalized academic  
and intellectual life. These new communities of research and  
reflection are rapidly establishing today’s bridgeheads of inquiry,  
freed from the inherent conservatism founded on concerns for  
proprietary or commodifiable utility that ties production in academic  
institutions and research spaces to “safe” areas of inquiry through  
the instruments of intellectual property. Increasingly, these “open”  
spaces are the ones where science, philosophy, social theory are  
“hot,” more responsive to the world around them.

By foregrounding an emphasis on the commons and other forms of  
collaboration or non-property or anti-property arrangements, open- 
source practitioners and theorists (be they in software, music,  
science, or the humanities) have initiated a profound turbulence in  
cultural economy. The domain of contemporary art cannot remain immune  
to this turbulence, which exists all around it. It is perhaps only a  
matter of time before the ethic of sharing, collaboration, and  
“commoning” becomes commonplace within contemporary art, just as it  
has in other domains of culture. It is already visible, in a nascent  
sense, in numerous curatorial collaborations and artist-practitioner- 
technician-curator-theorist networks that transcend borders and  
disciplinary boundaries, that give new twists to the “publicness” of  
public art projects, and that raise vexing questions concerning the  
“ownership” of the ephemeral and networked creations and processes  
that they generate. The increasingly dense cross-referential nature  
of practices within contemporary art are also pointers in this  
direction, leading us to think of the space of contemporary art not  
as a terrain marked by distinct objects, but as one striated by works  
that flow in and out of each other or cohabit a semantic territory in  
layers of varying opacity. Crucially, a liberality of interpretation  
about what constitutes intellectual property and what devolves to the  
public domain will be central to defending the freedom of expression  
in art. Art grows in dialogue, and if intellectual property acts as a  
barrier to the dialogue between works, then it will meet with serious  
challenges that arise from the practice of artists and curators.

All this cannot happen without conflict and disruption. The domain of  
the sign is the playing field of a new cultural economy where the  
generation of value hinges on an adherence to the principles of  
intellectual property. Practices that are at variance with the  
principles of property in culture for a variety of ethical, social,  
intellectual, aesthetic, and pragmatic reasons increasingly, however,  
have perforated this domain. The likely consequence of all this is  
that the tasteful tranquility that marked the enterprise of aesthetic  
contemplation will find itself besieged by disputations, legal suits,  
accusations of copyright infringement, and intense, invasive scrutiny  
by owners of intellectual property. Making art will increasingly be  
about forging new legal concepts and creating new economies of usage,  
ownership, and participation. Making and exhibiting art will be  
fashioning politics, practicing a new economics, and setting  
precedents or challenges in law.

The existence of contemporary art is ultimately predicated on the  
conditions of life of its practitioners. The myriad daily acts of  
practicing, reading, inscribing, interpreting, and repurposing the  
substance of culture, across cultures, constitute these conditions of  
life. These acts, in millions of incremental ways, transpose the  
“work” of art to a register where boundedness, location, and property  
rest uneasily. The work of art, the practitioner, the curator, the  
viewer, and the acts of making, exhibiting, and viewing all stand to  
be transformed. All that is familiar becomes strange; all that is  
strange becomes familiar.


Monica Narula
Raqs Media Collective
Sarai-CSDS
29 Rajpur Road
Delhi 110054
www.raqsmediacollective.net
www.sarai.net