"Central Asian Contemporary Art:
From Crisis of Identity to Openness to Other"
The topic of cultural identity formation in the Central-Asian region has become dominant. Within the context of Central-Asian contemporary art formation it is impossible to describe cultural situation in traditional substantive terms. Contemporary man lives in a situation of continuous identity formation; this is why his self-identification is undecided. Central-Asian contemporary art is characterized by a very urgent need for a more large-scaled cultural interpretation of the works of artists-situationists, for an analysis of socio-cultural and aesthetic problems, hidden or openly expressed in their works within the context of post-modern idea of perceiving artistic event as a transgressive image. Their experiences, achievements and discursive practices contributing to the development of international communication strategies also need to be promoted.
Current globalization era determines the necessity to develop new attitude to self, to one’s self-identity and to eliminate the opposition «Itself – Other». We have to learn to speak two languages: the first that signifies our self and the second that responds to the presence of Other.
There is a relation of complementarity between Europe and its «others». It is this complementarity that posits a trial that Europe has to go through in order to become «pure breed», without simultaneously shedding its external influences and connections. I think that society is divided into two categories – guardians, i.e., those who preserve the existing order of things, and intellectuals, curators and artists of contemporary art that provoke changes and maintain differences.
Europe provides certain cultural exchange that has nothing to do with imperialism and today this exchange is more extensive that before. Many contemporary Kazakhstan writers, thinkers and intellectuals seriously consider the possibility of Euro-Asian dialogue, exchange of opinions between the two worlds. However, the issue of the dialogue of cultures is still at its developing stage.
I do not approve of abstract universalism, because, as a rule, it is the universalism of the party that has more power. The agent that proclaims the language of universalism today, more often known under the concept of globalism is the USA, a superpower, hopefully the last one. In one of the interviews, a well-know philosopher Edward Said stated that diversity should be promoted to the first place, which could help to resolve the issues of different regions of the post-colonial world, including post-soviet Central-Asian republics.
To begin discussing such things, the politics of originality and self-determination have to be abandoned. In the end it is necessary to come to understanding that political and ethnic groups cannot be homogeneous. Everything we talk about is mixed, we deal with the world of interrelated mixed societies. Everybody is a half-breed, nobody has pure blood.
He continues by stating education as a key issue. The majority of educational systems are infected with nationalism; they add significance to the national originality in its idealized form, asserting that it is not subject to any criticism, that it is the avatar of virtue itself. There is an opinion that if this type of tradition is not cultivated and heroic image of a conqueror is not created, then we run the risk of breaking the integrity of the fabric of society. However, this fabric consists of many different elements and this is quite obviously manifested by the availability of institutions in the Asian region that actively cultivate contemporary art aesthetics by holding exhibitions of those artists that work in contemporary art style and give special attention to the implementation of different educational programs and also to the organization of international conferences similar to the present one within the framework of the activity of Soros Center of Contemporary Art.
Contemporary aesthetics cannot afford to ignore experiments and novelties of the newest contemporary art. There is space for artistic avant-garde in the life of our culture. Contemporary art practitioners, while being Other, Different with regard to established cultural stereotypes, have their own motives and deep reasons to continue tireless search, which sometimes ends up in the destruction of not only traditional art but art in general. Some of them are aware of this destruction; this is why they call their creative activity anti-art. Persistent use of traditional concept of «artwork» in cases when artists themselves use other notions is not justified. Is it not more reasonable to apply new notions to new artistic phenomena, such as «artistic situation», «artistic event», «artistic experiment», «art phenomenon», «artistic idea»?
The following is how a well-known Italian philosopher and culturologist Umberto Eco formulates the problems of private experience of an individual artist when developing an intellectual and art strategy in his book “Open Work”: When creating some «way of shaping», a painter recognizes only that but through this way all other components of a cultural epoch are revealed (mediated by respective educational traditions, by certain cultural influence, by habits acquired in school and also by requirements, which are not separable from certain technical preconditions).
Thus, it is necessary to remember and understand the concept of Kunstwollen, «artistic will», which is manifested in common features specific for all the works of a certain period and reflects the trend specific for the entire culture of the given period on the whole. Dramatic process of adjustment to new values in the West could be traced in the well-known concept of nomadology, in which the experience of such authors of philosophic post-modernism as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari is represented; they state “There is no subject – there is only a generalized will flow, which is formed this or that way in different periods of time”, “Experience is not supported by the mind of the subject” («A Thousand of Plateaus»).
According to the worldview of nomadology, “genetic axis” is “an objective key core, which determines the follow-up stages: the in-depth structure of similarity”. In contrast, this “rhizome is anti-genealogic”: it is being “implemented in a different dimension – transforming and subjective”, i.e. principally not axial, not linear and is not subordinated to any structural or generative model, it stands aloof from the mere thought about genetic axe as an in-depth structure”. According to Deleuze and Guattari, “the settled (Western) culture in contrast to the itinerant “nomadologic” one is based on the understanding of “movement along the axis”, for which the “topologically external” acts as the “axially external” and could be neglected without any losses whatsoever. “We register history from the point of view of a settled person... History never understood nomads, the book never understood external”.
The most important “assumption” of Nomadology is presumption of acentrism: the space is in principle deprived of what could claim the status of a center. The interpretation of the rhizome as a medium in principle deprived one of a center, could, in fact, be interpreted as the one that has a creative potential of self-organization: a “rhisome can be torn, broken... rearranged into a different line”. The source of transformation in this case is not “external cause”, but internal non-finality, which is “neither stable nor unstable but rather metastable” and “is endowed with potential energy”. Currently, in the opinion of Deleuze and Guattari, Western culture “is tired” of its own orientation at universal rigidity and certainty: «what we are lacking is nomadology, different from history... Do we feel the need in nomadism more solid than the nomadism of crusades, the nomadism of real itinerants or the nomadism of those that do not bustle any more and do not emulate anything any longer?»
The specificity of the current situation is that there is no universal goal set in advance, no common idea. Consequently, the mere concept of compliance of an individual and his place in the universe keeps on shifting – this is permanents fitness –striving to match the continuously evasive, unstable situation. Мaybe this is why oriental philosophy forms adopted to understanding and needs of a western man turn out to be unexpectedly in demand. There is no more a certain place, no natural way, no common idea. This is the situation, in which contemporary art gains its foothold.
Gadamer posits that the ability of art to imitate reality is still there; but now it forces an artist hold true to reality, not be a realist. In his opinion absurdity, abstraction, avant-garde better imitate the essence of contemporary life rather than imitation of seeming sustainability of things, characters, etc. Reality in essence is recognized in image destruction (self-identity) and not in creation of its simulacras (similarities). Complete self-possession is a way to standoff; to complete the process of becoming oneself implies being totally alone, without Other «To each his own» (which could be perceived as complete identity of a subject with his self-identity) is written on the gates to hell.
Identity of a human is defined in the terms of an absolute Other. Now the Other itself is the goal of self-identification of a man. His existence turned into becoming self while being open to Other. Identity isa given but a task, a challenge, that one may not cope with. Other is present in the culture of the system and is explained by it («as text through context»). Other is manifested as an immanent phenomenon, which we may understand hermeneutically through the world context. But at the same time the Other is revealed differently, as another kind of being, which is meaningful by itself, without a context. “The phenomenon of the manifestation of Other is face (image)” (E. Levinas).
In aesthetics, there appeared a need in deciphering, rewriting of fundamental traditional discourse as an expression of hierarchy of cultural values, the primacy of soul over body. Central-Asian contemporary artists in their creative activity expressed their vision of hermeneutics of fcontemporaryity of the Other while synthesizing the problem of self-identity and of the Other. They addressed the issues related to the collective unconscious, to social body and this in a sense is revolutionary (Latin revolutio from re-volutio – repeated movement back [towards the origin]), appealing to heterogenic source of human being – here as an openness to the Other. In order to illustrate the development of peculiarities of different post-modern strategies in their aesthetic expression here, in the Central-Asian region, I will allow myself to briefly characterize some of the works of Central-Asian artists, in which the problem of aesthetic concept of the Other is quite obvious within the context of our regional artistic situation regarding contemporary art.
The entire series of works – objects of a recognized master of Kazakhstan art Rustam Khalfin, representing plaster castings of human palms and known under the specific name “Pullot” (2005), meaning the ability of a hollow space to incorporate, shape and fill-in a certain content, similar to the ability of a twisted human palm to accommodate and form its own mould out of a plastic material – these are special artifacts, that act as microcosm, monad, a separate world, which is never equal to another and will never be limited to another one, all-sufficient and absolute because they have all necessary: substance – matter, surface –touch that both limits and gives direction and finally illuminated environment, which naturally is created immediately, like an atmosphere, around works. Link between internal and external is violated by the playing surface. The play of the bends asserts the border of a thing. The depth of the thing does not really disappear it rather takes the place adequate to it. In Khalfin’s aesthetics, tactile gauging of an artistic gesture is full of meditative concentration, where the body of work smoothly flows into the body of an artist and back, becoming the body of not so much a settled person but rather a nomad.
Videoart work of Almagul Menlibaieva “Apa” (2007) is the synthesis of aesthetic and archetypal ways that a woman perceives herself through the gender prism of the Other, which is expressed as surrounding snow landscape, from the perception of which women are “doomed” to be in their snowdrifts stripped to the waste, and at this they get the excess of enjoyment, in the literal sense freeze their fertile biological function and become Other in relation to themselves. In this truly remarkable work, characterized by somewhat metaphysical, distanced and estranged vision, the author tries to identify the nerve of contemporary gender technologies and social and cultural feminist projects in her strive to understand her own female nature by way of contemplation of the face of the Other in a neglected initial habitat.
Of special interest is an artistic object of a Bishkek group of contemporary (contemporary) artists “ZAD”, which signifies a flexible border between the natural world and the world of human technologies. This object represents such an item of everyday life as a snow-white WC, lonely standing on the Issyk-Kul lake shore and a shining white sewer-pipe of that WC goes into its environmentally clean waters. The given work with its certain shade of irony implies that such a well-familiar thing to us from our daily life like WC seems to be more superior than any other present possible natural object, which nevertheless is radically absent (in this case the lake) being so different. In fact, today we have to confront the situation when we are unable to go through our “homeless” existence, given that contemporary technology leaves open surreal difference between internal and external, between one’s home and the world, bringing us together with the epochal-dramatic circumstance when nature is doomed to be built into the cold space of technology world as a common storage site of the wastes of human activity. A well-known artist Georgiy Tryakin-Bukharov in his really skillfully arranged objects constructed out of different garbage stuff, like “Nif-nif”, “Naf-naf” and “Nuf –nuf” (2007), articulates the idea of total estrangement of a human being from his main point, which has been recoded by metal-cold schemes of technological calculations. They turn human beings into piles of uniform and conserved human material, representing at his biological level resemblance (simulacrum) of such nice fairy-tale personages like three pigs.
On the video-work of Said Atabekov “Walkman” (2005) there is a personage dressed as shaman, walking along the vast expanses of the Central-Asian steppes having put an unusual load upon himself – a sizeable contrabass. Regardless the fact that the given work, like most works under consideration here, is open to different interpretations, it also includes the topic of openness to Other as a way of aesthetic search of Central-Asian cultural identity on the part of the author. This video represents a special type of visual anti-Utopian discоurse that apart from aesthetic dimension has a deeply ethical one in its perspective of transfering to absolutely Other, understood as the responsibility of a person before cultural-historical experience of different civilizations. This is in my opinion the underlying reason of this well-thought work of Atabekov as well as many other of his works that have got recognition of western artistic community and art experts. The works of Yerbosyn Meldibekov are also well-known in the West and one of them is more indicative at the background of the topic I raised here, specifically “Pol Pot” video (2007). In this work the author plays up the plot of a distinguished Russian painter Vasiliy Vereschagin “War Apotheosis”, in which a huge heap of human skulls in the open field is depicted, creates a strange hill from rounded boulders with human Asian-type moving heads piping out of there on the moon-like deserted landscape. It seems that in this video intention of the author is to highlight the phenomenon of the so called “repressed social body” (which is manifested by the name of the work itself), on which omnipresent and universal powerful technologies exercise their influence with their weight and these technologies are in turn mediated by corporeal practices that impact the interaction of people. Only focusing on specific “sites” it becomes possible to identify, which kinds of corporeal collection exist in this or other society. In this specific case the site is the body because it is the point of convergence and divergence of interaction of bodies.
Based on this artistic insight of the author, the body could not be self-identified, but exists in transition from one site of totality of sociality to another. Thus, a social body does not exist on its own but exists due to preset structures which have power. This video is a certain sample, based on which an Asian “social body” is constructed, the body which suggests functional direction at the Other – power machinery that dictates its own Other, i.e., social body’s notorious “patience”, “sacrifice”, “abdication from itself”. Thus, at the exact suggestion of Meldibekov’s art in the genre of video-art discloses its phenomenon of resisting life as its Other. At the same time life that has made transgression to its Other now acquires a universal form of survival signifying not only the continuation of life but also life after death. It is exactly this form of life after death that is vividly expressed in this sagacious work of Meldibekov. Thus, the aesthetic phenomenon of openness to the Other that reveals itself in the creative activity of Central-Asian contemporary artists in the process of their overcoming the crisis of cultural identity opens the issue of a mobile border between a normalized body of the social and the thing that opposes it – the Other of the social, which is the embodiment of the chaos and decay of social and cultural identity. It is this principal moment that proves to be crucial for the state cultural institutions to have a negative perception of the culture of contemporary art with inherent nomadism and therefore transgressive experience of the Other as a social and cultural phenomenon, absolutely foreign to itself. Well, then, Jedem das sein! (To each his own!).
Jannat Baimukhametov, Kazakhstan
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