New Worlds Inc. the Global Museum Franchise

‘cos out there’s always a construction site,

a Starbucks, and yet another Guggenheim (1)

Charles Merewether’s interview in The Australian newspaper of November 25, 2007 is a fascinating and perplexing document in terms of what it reveals about both his and more generally held visions of contemporary local and global art. The article begins with Merewether, as curator of the 2006 Biennale of Sydney: Zones of Contact, airing his frustration at what he thinks is Australia’s lingering parochialism and insularity, its overall failure to engage with the ‘residue’ of his particular multi-culturally sensitive vision of the Biennale, or with contemporary art more broadly. For Merewether Australia is ‘conservative’ and ‘inward looking’, much more ‘money orientated than before’ and generally ‘not particularly interested in the cultures of other places’ (2). Adding to this sense of frustration with the contemporary Australian cultural scene was the curator’s failure to attain directorship of the recently opened Queensland Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA).

Moving from this sense of personal frustration, the greater body of The Australian’s interview with Merewether details his current employment as ‘deputy director of a $33 billion dollar new cultural district in Abu Dhabi’ in the United Arab Emirates, involving ‘new outposts of the Louvre and Guggenheim museums’ (3). These particular ‘outposts’ will feature specially designed buildings by high-ranking glitterati of the international architecture firmament like the Canadian/American Frank Gehry, creator of ‘destination’ buildings worldwide, and Frenchman Jean Nouvel, famous amongst other achievements, for his L'Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris. Such emphasis on high-profile cosmopolitanism however is but part of the picture - the new Louvre and Guggenheim buildings will be merely one aspect of an entire cultural district built ‘from scratch’. This precinct will also incorporate all the utilities necessary for any civilised life; the choice of twenty-nine hotels, three marinas, two golf courses and a nineteen kilometre stretch of beachfront. It is not surprising that having given up on Australian culture as too parochial, Merewether has set his sights on the kind of utopia only the conjoined cooperation of global multinationals could conjure. It is no wonder that Saadiyat, the island on which this cultural wonder world is to be made a reality, is also known as the ‘isle of happiness’ (4). One only has to ask, whose?

Overall, Charles Merewether’s interview raises numerous questions about the framing circumstances of contemporary art produced under globalised conditions. The underlying assumptions that Merewether makes referring to the circumstances of artistic production in Australia and the critical justifications he raises for the nature of the new project he is presently involved with, in Abu Dhabi, is what makes his statements so interesting and revealing. Indeed, Merewether’s authorship of these statements is a moot point; the critical issues they raise are transpersonal and have little to do with the personality or career aspirations of a particular individual. Moreover, the type of global culture outlined in Merewether’s responses is today truly dominant in a world art scene driven technically and ideologically by massive corporate investment demanding ‘returns’, and reproducing the very structural basis of global neo-liberal capitalism. In fact, the insularity and conservatism of Australian contemporary culture and its institutions that Merewether laments is but an alternate symptom of the same spectacularly globalised system by which he is presently employed.

With respects recent Australian culture, it is true that for any one not suffering total amnesia, the experience of eleven years of grinding political conservatism and right-wing radicalism of the sort pursued by Howard’s Coalition Government, would be more than enough of an obstacle for anyone with genuinely liberal ideals to bear. Certainly, Merewether’s Zones of Contact was at the very least admirable for its purported aim to address an Australian national, and disturbingly re-emergent, nationalist culture by means of injecting critically alternative and contradictory local and world views. Still, it is just such a traditionally liberal/ humanist attitude, locating culture as primarily an educative tool geared towards personal and collective enlightenment, that simply plays into the hands of institutions for whom such an outlook is both expected and inoffensively familiar. At the same moment, Merewether’s identification of the inward-lookingness of an Australian contemporary culture much more money orientated than in the past, is certainly a fair call. Sydney, the city staging the Biennale, is overwhelmingly a ‘money town’, a place where the pursuit of inflated social status via the barely regulated and unembarrassed accumulation of excessive wealth, is a glaringly obvious social reality with distinct political and cultural affects. One such affect is the oscillating conservatism of the cities larger cultural institutions whose programs are additionally influenced, as Merewether also rightly notes, by promises of much needed financial investment from government and corporate sponsors to whom they are essentially forcibly beholden. Nevertheless, when the ‘socially aware’ curator makes the point that ‘similar bodies in poor countries such as India get miniscule funding but it does not stop them from talking about art and engaging with it more meaningfully than the Australia Council’ (5), he is doing so against his current participation in a multi-billion dollar multinational project. Merewether obviously views this project as vastly superior to antipodean isolationism in its excitingly outward looking viewpoint and inherently ‘discursive’ orientation. It is paradoxical though, that in this instance, an Australian culture written off for its conservatism, a condition only worsened by scarce funding, now finds an antidote in the comparatively far-flung context of a ‘deserted’ island off Abu Dhabi that is to be facilitated through what is perhaps the most conservative marriage imaginable, that of an ‘enormous’ bureaucracy and capital! Ultimately, without the combined weight of these, it would be impossible to believe that it was ever an option to ‘start a culture from scratch’.

The notion of starting a culture from scratch that Merewether cites is central to his understanding of the endeavour he is presently engaged in. It is also a concept so ironic, bearing in mind Merewether’s position as an ex-pat Australian arts professional ‘made good’, that it is fairly humorous. It is especially ironic in relation to the curator’s self-imposed flight from an unenviable Australian cultural situation where it is claimed ‘there is no place to stage a debate’ (6). This is because it would seem once more, that the solution was to relocate somewhere where supposedly there has never been any cultural debate - ever. That is to say, from this point of view, that the true hope for contemporary ‘global’ culture is to commandeer ‘virgin’ territory for the sole purpose of demonstrating what such a culture might be at its best and most pure. Through a different critical lens it could also be seen in this case as simply replacing a long since critically refuted terra nullius - that of Merewether’s native Australia - with another albeit by way of avenues more cultured and benign. The neo-colonialist and exoticist implications of the impending Abu Dhabi ‘culture park’ would by this stage appear patently obvious. And this is despite Merewether writing-off accusations about the development being but a new form of colonialism as just not ‘interesting to him’ (7), that such an accusation in any case belongs in the past. That such accusations are ‘not interesting’ for Merewether, however, fails to divert their undeniable legitimacy. Actually, after surveying the extent of neo-colonialist interest the ‘happiness island’ project suggests, such claims are patently unavoidable. 

The colonialist dimensions of the Louvre/Guggenheim project is never more apparent than in Merewether’s statements about the regions local inhabitants, who are of course predominantly Muslim. This issue raises distinct concerns about definitions of cultural sensitivity; how for instance, Emirati staff will need to be specially trained to deal with potentially controversial Western subject matter. At the same time, Merewether expresses a concern not to violate Islamic law and to only exhibit works thought permissible in the regional context in which they are shown (8). What will be exhibited remains anyone’s guess. On the one hand, Merewether’s statements imply that, locals will need some degree of ‘professional’ re-education to fully appreciate ‘imported’ culture. On the other hand, it seems highly unlikely the Chapman Brothers will be getting a show. The duality of this situation is striking. First, it is hard to argue that ‘educating’ the local populace in the trends and quirks of international (ie: mostly Western) contemporary art is not paternalistic and indeed, neo-colonialist. Afterall, one can only imagine what would happen if Abu Dhabi’s cultural institutions moved to establish multi billion dollar centres specialising in ‘Middle-Eastern’ art in downtown Soho or Sydney. In a post-‘September 11’ globalised economy it is not just lack of resources that disallows such cultural reversals. Second, pretending to cultural openness is just that if cultural sensitivity translates as censorship, if the content of exhibitions are at least partially determined by repressive policing. It further beggars to wonder what types of genuine ‘exchanges’ will take place on Saadiyat Island given that it has already been slated as a ‘blank slate’ just waiting for global culture to ‘happen’. Again, this attitude precludes any kind of regional equality as far as the culture exhibited there is concerned.

Beyond questions of cultural sensitivity and the potential for exchange that Merewether touts as the positive motivators driving the Abu Dhabi development, lie much broader, more intractable questions. The nature of these questions relate to the greater machinations of contemporary global capitalism. To begin, capitalism in its current globalised form has assumed the guise of unfettered free-market neo-liberalism particularly since the long-ago collapse of the communist bloc. Neo-liberals view broad base capitalism as the optimum system for ‘all’ irrespective of context (9). At the same time, neo-liberal capitalism is frequently equated with global ‘democracy’ or at least its aura, the suggestion being that freedom is equally, if not fundamentally, the freedom to buy and sell. The universalism of such a conception can only come about because the sign of capital is always the same despite geographical and cultural peculiarities and whether or not we are talking dollars, pounds, euros or drachma. In this sense, neo-liberalism naturalises capitalism via the argument that its potential infinite application proves its inherent universal ‘rightness’ (10). It is this pervasive notion of universality that furthermore recharges enlightenment thinking within a contemporary ethos by way of economic measures. This re-enlightenment might also be viewed as colonialism by other means, irrespective of whatever good intentions its participants purport to hold.

Meanwhile it is precisely structural and ideological reasoning of this sort that is capable of facilitating the Saadiyat Island project, and of conceiving of it in the first place, as occurring in an ‘empty’ context - if the context is empty it is because it has not yet partaken of the ultimately enlightened ‘modernising’ rituals associated with the introduction of transnational capital. Of course, one of neo-liberalism’s major weaknesses, which it invariably projects as one of its core strengths, is its resistance to an analysis of capitalism as culturally and historically determined. Neo-liberalism’s pretences to universality immediately deny the need or possibility for such interrogation, particularly if it is ‘good for everyone’ anyway. Naturally, what it also denies in its intense self-protectionism is the critical investigation of global capitalism’s specific geographic failures and glaring injustices. If Abu Dhabi’s local inhabitants for example, are implicitly thought of primarily as cheap labour for the construction of the grand cultural project in question, this is bound to be seen by the neo-liberals who have conceived it not only as good for the development itself but for the ‘global’ economy in ‘general’. What is unlikely to be discussed though, are the hierarchical inequities provoked under such conditions where locals basically serve a multinational cause for the benefit of the latter’s hugely disproportionate fiscal expansion. 

Further attendant with such a scenario is the interconnected way global neo-liberalism has transformed highly visible cultural institutions. Such institutions, and the Louvre and Guggenheim are pre-eminent in this respect, have presently been recreated as globally trading ‘brands’. The Louvre and Guggenheim, especially the former, are themselves historical products of a globe-consuming colonialism, the institutionally sanctioned and reified repositories of world culture. In the specific situation in which Merewether finds himself, the globally identifiable Louvre and Guggenheim brands, rather than strictly competing, promote themselves as providing differing though, in the end, complementary views of contemporary culture and art history. Of course, these museums have already been operating as globally trading corporations for many years. Today, under circumstances escalated by the global dominance of the neo-liberal capitalist model, the practically unimaginable quantity and monetary value of the works or cultural products the Louvre and Guggenheim museums own, now translates art, new and old, literally into ‘cultural capital’ to be traded as far a field as possible. These heavy weight museums, like any other serious corporations, must continue to grow in response to the structural demands of a capitalism ever seeking unchartered markets. Trading of this sort is simultaneously believed indispensable to the brand-equity and continuing prestige of the Louvre and Guggenheim names. What is more, risk-taking of the kind associated with a venture on the massive scale of the Saadiyat Island project, is likewise deemed necessary to financially maximise the ‘stocks’ of both ‘companies’ in a global market fundamentally prefigured as without borders. At the same time, and even more curiously, the Louvre and Guggenheim franchises conduct a parallel trade in the virtual value of their reputations; it is exactly these, in close conjunction with other brand names like ‘Gehry’ and ‘Nouvel’, that will be relied on to draw the masses to a location not normally associated with contemporary cultural tourism. With this in mind, the Abu Dhabi Louvre and Guggenheim, will symbolically recreate ‘from scratch’, an island most eager-to-pay Western tourists seeking ‘new cultural experiences’ will never have heard of. Here, through the inflated marketing of familiar cultural brands, a previously ‘unknown’ locale is rendered eminently desirable as a must-see destination. The ‘Island of Happiness’ becomes an oasis in an otherwise troubled region in the same way Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim put Basque territory on the mainstream tourist map by affectively voiding the site of evidence of ongoing struggle and political unrest.

The image of the desert oasis, so beloved in the historical imagination of the West, provides yet another paradox to Merewether’s sudden propulsion into braver, better contemporary cultural worlds. At this point, it is worth returning to the curator’s laments about the Australian reception of his Zones of Contact Biennale. One such lament concerned his dismay ‘that work from the Middle East might have raised issues about what is going on there’ (11). What is ‘going on’ there is certainly a very good, if not urgent, question that remains far from answered. Once more, Merewether’s involvement in the creation of a Western cultural enclave in that very same region cannot but strike the reader as extraordinarily ironic. For starters, the ‘Middle East’ is itself a Western concept that came into common usage as a way of conveniently annulling, for colonial and regional strategic purposes, the complex differences separating the different nations it simplistically encompasses; differences perhaps unfathomable to an outsider. As for what is happening in this region, the carnage of the US-led Iraqi military fiasco comes most immediately to mind. The general geographic closeness of this ongoing, desperate and deeply misjudged conflict to the proposed cultural precinct is simultaneously uncannily as far removed from it as possible; on one side, daily exposure to extreme violence, privation and the misery occasioned by the vicissitudes of cultural isolation and on the other, luxury, refinement, endless tourism. No representation housed in a purpose built museum, no matter how shocking or moving, could account for the apparent end game of Iraq, a scenario itself set in motion predominantly by a reinvigorated Western colonial militarism. Considering this fact, it must be asked, who the principle sponsors of the Abu Dhabi development are; will the astronomical expenses and physical resources the project demands from the outset be dependent in any way upon raw materials, most obviously oil, sourced from Iraq? If this were the case, then the prefigured oasis of the Saadiyat Island initiative trading in the ‘good vibes’ of cross-cultural exchange and transnational dialogue, will come at a very high price. The Louvre and Guggenheims’ presence in the region will then but seem the soft counterpart to the hard measures currently being exacted from the Iraqi population.

Finally, casting an eye back over Charles Merewether’s interview, we must question the curator of the 2006 Biennale of Sydney’s claims, that ‘his’ exhibition passed by virtually undiscussed in the place of its staging. Surely, this is simply untrue given that there were a number of symposia held during the course of the exhibition that involved the participation of numerous artists, critics and curators from Australia and abroad. Likewise, Zones of Contact was reviewed by every single significant arts publication in the country thus doubly contradicting Merewether’s suggestion that it went without national audiences batting an eyelid. That the level and sophistication of discussion here may have seemed paltry or disinterested by international standards may (or may not) be the genuine case. However, it must also be asked how much discussion an exhibition like, Zones of Contact needs, for it to be viewed a ‘success’. The larger question here concerns the very basis of hyper-institutionalised, hyper-professionalised  ‘global’ exhibitions of which biennales the world over are a prime symptom. The unwieldy predetermined smorgasbord they tend to serve up is, upon final analysis, usually unsympathetic grounds for a genuine, that is to say, truly political engagement. In fact, under the healthy breeding conditions enabled by the global onslaught of neo-liberal capitalism, biennales tend to be consumed by audiences just like any other highly mediated cultural event - the Festival of Sydney for instance; both are basically approached as entertainment. Of course, global politics featured quite heavily as subject matter in Merewether’s Biennale. Unfortunately though, as mere representation actual politics is lost (12).

 In the end therefore, the accusation that Australian contemporary culture is just too parochial to actively engage global thinking, even though such an accusation might be fair enough, is ultimately not convincing as an argument to explain Merewether’s sense of his Biennale’s ‘failure’. The curator’s subsequent relish in his passage to the hallowed halls of multi-billion dollar global corporate culture comes as no surprise. In this case, the typical quantitive excess of his Biennale, that ‘featured art by 85 artists from 44 countries exhibited in 16 different venues’, is upgraded to a practically unimaginable level. In lieu of concepts of contemporary ‘global culture’, ‘the bigger the better’ or so it would seem, and certainly as a guarantee against the likelihood of cultural endeavours being ignored. Paradoxically, the isolationism, strong evidence for which Merewether complains of in local culture, he now simply enacts on neo-colonial terms; for whom, we must ponder, does ‘the isle of happiness’ await. Despite its supposed theoretical possibility, it is unlikely to be for the ‘everyone’ or ‘anyone’ of a universalising neo-liberal ‘democracy’. Rather, Saadiyat Island’s most likely customers are precisely the same cashed-up Western ‘culture-vultures’ that the original Louvre and Guggenheim museums already attract. Here, the ‘desert island’ of the Western imagination is to be actualised in the ‘troubled’ ‘Middle East’ and as a picturesque antidote to it. The ‘world in a grain of sand’ the project implicitly proposes, represents instead a seemingly globally incontestable Western image. What Merewether forgets is that sometimes it is precisely culture, unfettered by the compromising demands of corporate high-finance and apparently overlooked here and elsewhere, that remains the most critically potent, if more difficult to see.

Alex Gawronski

First published in Broadsheet vol 37 no.1, Mar, Apr, May 2008. CACSA, Adelaide, Australia.

1. Einstürzende Neubauten, Youme & Meyou, Perpetuum Mobile, Mute Records, London, 2004

2. Sebastian Smee, interview with Charles Merewether, ‘Nation ‘Too Parochial’ to Engage’, The Australian, 5 November 2007

3. ibid

4. ibid

5. ibid

6. ibid

7. ibid

8. ibid

9. See Francis Fukuyama, ‘The End of History and the Last Man’ (1992), Free Press (Simon and Schuster), New York, 2006

10. ibid

11. Sebastian Smee, interview with Charles Merewether, ‘Nation ‘Too Parochial’ to Engage’, The Australian, 5 November 2007

12. Roland Barthes argued that that genuine politics was precisely that which could not be represented. From this position, politics is not an isolable image of ‘the political’ but an ongoing ‘agonistic’ process that actually becomes apolitical once it is mired in the mere play of fixed antagonistic images. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, London, New York, MacMillan, 1996