Cultural (In) Difference:
The Portuguese Contemporary Art Scene
Sergio Mah
1.
Globalization is today one of the most crucial issues influencing
the ongoing dynamics of the contemporary world. Among its
multiple effects is the perception that we are now entering
an unprecedented
period marked by a cultural transformation in which the contemporary
art scene is rapidly assuming a borderless nature. Within
this context, the field of art is taking on a de-localized
framework
as a result of the growing tendency for interaction and interdependence
between different formal and conceptual imaginaries. This
seems a particularly relevant reflection, derived from the
belief
that the phenomenon of art cannot be understood exclusively
from the observation and analysis of artworks themselves.
It also requires taking into consideration a series of
non-artistic
conditions and motivations.
With Portugal's most recent
history as background — in
particular the democratic revolution of April 1974 and the
country’s entry into the European Economic Community
in 1986 — I intend, in this paper, to reflect on the
dialectics of homogenization and differentiation by looking
at the Portuguese
case and its simultaneously peripheral and central place
in the European context.
Geographically, Portugal is located
in south-western Europe, and this location reflects quite
well the country’s current
political, economic, social and cultural position. The concept
of semi-periphery is particularly appropriate to
illustrate the intermediate level of development of the Portuguese
society:
a country of deep contrasts that simultaneously displays
characteristics of a successful advanced development and
distressing symptoms
of underdevelopment. In other words, a ‘late center’ unevenly
modernized and with strong signs of dependent development.
Portugal is a clear example of a complex combination of paradoxical
social characteristics, a configuration made and re-made in
the last 30 years, in which distinct historical temporalities
converged and confronted each other. For this reason, despite
the analytic complexity of its cultural and artistic realities,
Portugal is certainly a fascinating laboratory.
2.
At the beginning of 1974, Portugal was one of the less-developed
countries in Europe and the oldest European colonial empire.
A military coup headed by a group of young, democratic and
anti-fascist officers seized power on April 25, 1974 from
Western Europe's longest dictatorial regime. In a bloodless
revolution, this group of officers quickly sought to put an
end to the ongoing
colonial war in Africa and to materialize a set of political
transformations long desired by the Portuguese population.
In the national imaginary, 'April 25' represents
the end of a dark period in Portuguese history, and the turning
point at which society turned into the main actor and reclaimed
its role in the transformation of the country. These were
times of great social convulsion that unsurprisingly had
an important
impact in the dynamics of the cultural arena.
For the artistic
community in Portugal, the new context opened up an opportunity
to make up for lost time, and to overcome
the parochial isolation that for more than 50 years created
an ideological, conceptual and formal gap with European avant-garde
movements. The democratic revolution in 1974 represented
the threshold of a whole new range of intentions and expectations,
as new trends of thinking, expression and production emerged
in the country's art landscape. The political transition
allowed a new generation of artists to purge themselves of
a set of academic and conservative paradigms that had to
a great extent dominated the Portuguese artistic scene up
until
the 1970s. This cleansing process was aided by the return
to Portugal, right after the 1974 revolution, of a group
of young
artists who had emigrated (mostly for educational reasons
but some because of the political situation) during the 1960s,
especially to the United Kingdom, France and Germany. These
young artists, who were in contact with the most recent European
art movements, were particularly important in fostering a
new
dynamic within the Portuguese artistic reality, to the point
that, probably, for the first time in the 2oth century, there
was a broad sense of synchronization between Portuguese artists
and debates within the international avant-garde movement.
The
exhibition Alternativa Zero (1977) can be considered the
most significant moment reflective of this new scenario
for the
Portuguese art arena. It grouped artistic proposals based
essentially in conceptualist discourse and set the terms
of the debate
around fundamental topics: questioning the role and status
of the artist; the conception of art, in particular the concept
of open work; the need for a stronger interaction with the
public, which is now desired to be more active; the de-materialization
of the artwork; the search for new relations between art
and social or daily life; multi-disciplinarity and the subversion
of boundaries between different artistic languages.
In sum,
the April Revolution created the political, social and symbolic
conditions for an effectively qualitative change
in the Portuguese art world. Among signs of a growing openness
and permeability to external influence, the Portuguese art
circuit developed and constructed new and important institutional
supports
like the first modern art museum in Portugal, the Modern
Art Centre of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, opened
in 1983.
The decision to open such a museum in Portugal came from
a foreign millionaire based here, and was a symptom of the
evolution
of Portuguese cultural structures.
3.
In 1986, Portugal joined the European Economic Community
(after 1993 known as the European Union), which until then
had brought
together only the most developed European countries. Political
and economic convergence with Europe was a popular expectation
that began to rapidly grow right after the democratic revolution
of 1974. By the end of the '70s, the Socialist Party
(PS), which over the past 30 years has interchangeably governed
the country with the Social Democratic Party (PSD), adopted
the slogan 'Europe with Us.' Behind this slogan
was the hope that with entry into the EEC, Portugal would
build and consolidate a democratic society and develop economically
to the level of the most developed countries of Western Europe.
In this conjuncture, spirits were high, and it was expected
that the country would rapidly mutate, changing itself to
become
like the other members of the EEC. Such imagination was supported
by the fact that right after its entry, Portugal began receiving
vast amounts of so-called European Structural Funds (ESF),
aimed at helping with the transformation not only of the
economy but also of institutional structures, in order to
bring them
in line with the highest European standards.
In a sense, Portugal’s entry into the EEC, above and
beyond its political and economic dimensions, also reveals
an important symbolic dimension, i.e., the ambition for
a model of society based on parameters from the center, a
model
that reflected and effective in other areas, in particular
the artistic and cultural milieu.
If, after 1974, it became
evident the effort of a great number of Portuguese artists
went to exulting in the new conditions
of thought, expression, and production, which brought them
more in line with an international art scenario, entry into
the EEC marked another significant symbolic moment: the intent
of a Portuguese individual qua artist to realize a long-sought
proximity to European artistic communities, as a European
individual qua artist. In other words, what was previously
seen as a fascination
with or attraction to Western artistic modernity now found
a whole new set of conditions for integration with that reality,
the result of which will be decisive for the future.
It is
also from this point in time, in the political and institutional
panorama, that conditions essential for the
development of
an art circuit similar in its diversity and typologies to
the countries of the center began to consolidate and play
a role
in fostering a lively contemporary-art scene. Among these
was the consolidation of a network of museum infrastructures
prepared
to host modern and contemporary art (currently, Portugal
has six major contemporary museums, five of them opened between
1992 and 1999); the expansion of a gallery-based market,
particularly
in Lisbon and Porto, paralleling the creation of public and
private art collections; and a growth in art courses, owing
to the emergence of several regional schools, at both the
university and polytechnic levels. Other such conditions
included a rising
interest on the part of the media in the art scene, as seen
in the launching of art pages in both magazines and newspapers;
an increase in the number of scholarships, particularly to
institutions in the United States and Western Europe; support
for programs to help artists develop specific projects; an
escalating theoretical production among art-history academics;
and finally,
the emergence of a small group of independent curators.
Simultaneously,
Portuguese art began to increase their visibility abroad,
benefiting from the country's presence in the
Venice and São Paulo Biennale (in both cases, there
was regular representation beginning in the mid-'90s),
as well from other international events dedicated to Portuguese
art like Europália (Brussels, 1991) and ARCO, the
international art fair in 1998. The latter event was particularly
significant
because it marked the beginning of the growing presence of
Portuguese art on the Spanish art circuit. Meanwhile, important
foreign artists have had exhibitions in Portugal, while several
Portuguese artists and curators have been invited to organize
many international exhibitions and events. Indeed, what had
previously been seen as an exceptional case — the interpenetration
of Portuguese art with the international scene — configuring
a dichotomy of 'inside/outside,' began to profoundly
change in the ’90s, and this allowed a significant
expansion of the imaginary of both artists and public in
Portugal.
4.
I have tried above to highlight, even if very brieflly, some
of the transformations in the Portuguese art world over the
past 30 years against the background of political, economic
and symbolic conditions. Given the new democratic framework
and growing political and economic investment in the cultural
and artistic arena, I would argue that the most clear image
of the Portuguese art scene is one of a strongly pursued
centrality, which implies joining that center and submitting
to an idea
I would describe as 'modernity or contemporaneity as
an imagination of the center.'
Yet, the period we are currently
living in also requires critical reflection focusing on the
identity of Portuguese
art, as well
as on the dialectics of cultural and artistic differentiation
and homogenization. Ultimately, this approach aims at rethinking
the peculiar nature of artistic production by reconsidering
one of its main principles for modernity: that art should
express an understanding of the life and times of the reality
from
which it emerges. This issue is all the more important when
today one must almost inevitably examine the phenomenon of
art within a context of globalization. Regarded as a new
stage marked by the emergence of a new order based in growing
political
and economic interdependence, de-territorialized networks
of capital flows, technologies, services, information and
people
in a world without center, globalization has repercussions
in the cultural arena, which now appears more trans-localized,
surmounting borders previously structured around customs,
nationalism, language, ideology, and, frequently, all of
this.
The principal readings of globalization tend to regard
the cultural arena as a complex order reproducing a myriad
of
vertical and horizontal relations, unstable and non-deterministic.
It
thus makes no sense to resort to traditional models of differentiation
between centers and peripheries. One can agree in part with
this new scenario. For example, globalization has allowed
the integration of semi-peripheral and peripheral cultures
into
the center, while at the same time we can observe the modernization
of semi-peripheral and peripheral contexts (which in some
cases have succeeded in building their own 'central
poles').
However, if we look at the Portuguese case,
I think that this process of cultural proximity and connection
is far
from being
an outcome of globalization per se. In first place,
it is important to note that the globalization of culture
is intrinsically
linked to factors of a political and economic character,
namely
the expansion of the dominant national economies through
the expansion of capital, the structures of production and
the
market on a multi-national level. In second place, there
has been increased dissemination and domination by cultural
modernity
on the part of the center (especially the Anglo-American
one) over the global art system. It is symptomatic that the
international
art panorama continues to be mainly "dominated" by
institutions, artists, art reviewers, curators and collectors
(private or institutional) born or based in the center. Finally,
the tendency to be porous and imitate Western cultures is
as widespread as ßever.
All these issues are crucial
in understanding the phenomenon of contemporary art on a
world scale. But we should also
recognize that this is not a totally new phenomenon. Modern
art has always
been, by its nature, trans-national, even if, in its most ‘significant’ moments,
it was geographically established in artistic centers that
were simultaneously extra-artistic power centers, in which
economic and political power was intrinsically related to
the vast array of institutions devoted to the formation,
education
and promotion of artists.
5.
At present, Portugal has a circuit of contemporary and modern
art museums and centers unique in its history. But interestingly,
these institutions were progressively built and developed
by deriving their own tendencies from the great contemporary
and
modern art museums and centers located in the countries of
the center. I mean not only their internal organizational
logic or the type of values they promote, but also and above
all
a curatorial program that mimics in a very clear way an understanding
and evolution of the history of contemporary and modern art
basically framed and legitimized in the center. These tendencies
can easily be seen from a simple analysis of the sequence
of retrospectives of great Western artists presented in these
museums and art centers. This appeal to the centre raises
the
issue of the ‘dependency’ of the Portuguese institutional
circuit. In terms of the unequal import and export of significant
exhibitions, the gap between Portugal and countries like
the U. K. or Germany remains significant, a further reflection
of
how cultural globalization is subjected to the logic of economic,
political and symbolic expansion of the center over the non-center.
As an example, despite the higher cost, it is easier to bring
to Portugal a retrospective of a great English or German
artist (not to mention a North American), than to circulate
a retrospective
of the 'best' Portuguese artist in the U. K.
or Germany (which, I would argue, would be an extremely difficult
job).
In the Portuguese case, this appeal to Western centers
becomes even more contentious when we recognize that not
much attention
has been paid to the artistic production of peripheral countries
and cultures. Despite the fact that Portugal is a semi-peripheral
country, at the center of the fifth-largest linguistic community
in the world, covering countries like Brazil, Angola, Mozambique,
and Cape Verde, and undergoing a growing wave of new immigrants
(from Africa, Latin America, and more recently from the former
Eastern Europe), it is a profound paradox to acknowledge
that multicultural confrontation has been widely ignored
within
the Portuguese art scene. It is not enough to from time to
time promote exhibitions of the type 'African Art';
in their essence these are no more than mere exercises expressing
a superficial fascination with something seen as exotic or
ethnographic. At worst, behind these exhibitions is a certain
nostalgic view
of an 'innocent' or 'authentic' art
that disappeared with modernity. In sum, among our pivotal
figures, politicians, curators and artists, prevails a consciousness
that contemporary art manifests and builds by 'looking
up,' to the top of the pyramid.
This emphasis on centrality
is heightened by the fact that in Portugal there is no intermediate
level between commercial
galleries and the biggest contemporary and modern art centers.
Small and medium-sized institutions that could be platforms
or venues for the development of alternative or less standardized
artistic proposals are rare in Portugal.
At a different level,
in the last decade the Portuguese state, along with other
institutions relevant to the art world,
have favored granting scholarships to artists as a way of
allowing
them to attend masters or other arts programmes in central
countries like the U. S., U. K., and Germany. One of the
central goals is the promotion of individual artistic paths
that have
more potential; equally important is the desire that emerging
Portuguese art be better known in the most important sites
on the international arts circuit. This situation also merits
critical reflection, to the extent that at stake here is
almost an entire generation of new Portuguese artists. It
is hard
to find promising artists between the ages of 25 and 35 years
who have not benefited from significant financial and logistic
support for one or more years in programs in institutions
based in New York, London or Berlin. I do not question the
clear
benefits of this strategy, but it is important to reflect
on its eventual consequences. I could mention as an example,
even if anecdotal, the growing tendency by Portuguese artists
to
title their work in English. What I wish to emphasize here
is the tendency towards a dilution of territorial consciousness,
even with the limitations and perversions that implies, for
the notorious purpose of configuring and imagining artistic
discourse within a context of 'universal finality,'
one inevitably framed by Anglo-American dominance. From interaction
to formal imitation is only a small step.
6.
Despite the paradoxes, contradictions and structural constraints
of the past years, the Portuguese contemporary art scene
is living through a unique period of dynamism, energy and
great
productive effort. Nevertheless, we need to reflect on the
advantages and disadvantages of that vigorous appeal of the
center, and
on the fact that in the Portuguese case it derives not only
from the nature of the international art system, or economic,
political and cultural globalization, but also from the effects
produced by important moments in its most recent history.
Nowadays
it makes no sense to reject this relation with the center,
but the challenge for a country like Portugal lies
in the possibility of defining a unique autonomy, i.e., how
a semi-peripheral reality can empower 'sites of convinced
centrality.' I do not mean by this a mere rhetorical
reformulation of the notions of center and periphery. It
is above all about meeting the challenge of empowering artistic
production, through alternative routes less subject to central
models, as a meeting place for diverse cultural practice
and
thinking, in order to exchange alternative and 'original'
experiences. Whatever the eventual distance to the center,
it does not
necessarily imply a pretense for disconnection, but rather
an expectation
of materializing a self-defined and singular existence, inevitably
linked to a working territory close in its historical, cultural
and social levels. This is a dimension perhaps in decline,
but far from vanishing, and even further from being considered
no longer central. |