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Beyond cultural: Global approach in visual art

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Beyond cultural: Global approach in visual art

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Content Beyond Cultural: Global Approach in Visual Art
Copyright 2000
by
Tomoyuki Isoyama
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
(FINE ARTS)
December 2000
Tomoyuki Isoyama
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UMI Number: 1407912
___ ®
UMI
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UNIVERSITY O F SO U TH ER N CALIFORNIA
T H E G R A D U A T E SC H O O L
U N IV E R S IT Y PA R K
LO S A N G E L E S. C A L IF O R N IA B0007
This thesis, written by
T e ^ f Y u l < \ ________ _________
1
under the direction of hJL£— Thesis Committee,
and approved by all its members, has been pre
sented to and accepted by the Dean of The
Graduate School, in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
M f o T E K O F F/ a/E A ^ T S
D m
IITTEE he:
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Contents
I. Introduction 1
II. Universality in the Postmodern Context 2
III. Hegemony of the Western Art World over Others 7
IV. Conflation of the Universal and the Particular: the Global Approach 12
V. Visual Pleasure Within the Global Approach 21
VI. Conclusion: The End o f Art? 26
Bibliography 29
Appendix 32
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I. Introduction
“Global” has become another obnoxious word these days. The same
companies are making profits not only here but also on the other side of the earth,
demonstrating the efficiency of multinational capitalism. People spend money on
computer translation software not because they want to learn foreign languages, but
because of the necessity to make themselves understood in the borderless age realized
through the internet.
What is the situation of art in this hectic global communication age? It does not
seem that there is a Global Standard in visual art, and even if there is one, it would be
impossible to prove it. Almost three decades have passed since Clement Greenberg
tried to argue that there was an objective taste about art which was based upon the
historical continuity of consensus about the masterpieces} Greenberg states,
Certain works are singled out of their time or later as excelling,
and these works continue to excel: that is, they continue to
compel those of us who in time after look, listen, or read hard
enough. And there’s no explaining this durability— the durability
which creates a consensus— except by the fact that taste is
ultimately objective.2
However, the historical continuity in his argument only reflects the canonized art
history of patriarchical, Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman tradition. The
ethnocentrism in his argument has made his theory currently disreputable, and
vulnerable to the attacks made by postmodern and postcolonial perspectives.
1 Greenberg, Clement. “Can Taste be Objective?” ARTnews 72 (1973):
22-24.
2 Ibid., 23
1
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Even though Greenberg might not agree with this, visual art is culturally
particular, and there is no objective taste. Only culturally and subjectively acquired
taste exists, just like the taste for particular foods nurtured within particular cultures.
For instance, if you are an American, you might have hard time eating sea urchin
served at a Sushi restaurant. And for the very same reason, there are people who are
struggling to understand why Jackson Pollock's paintings are considered “good.”
Sea urchin never tastes the same to Americans as it does to Japanese, and Pollock's
painting never looks the same to Japanese as it does to Americans.
Then, what kind of visual art can overcome this barrier called “cultural
difference” and be universally appreciated? Is there any global approach in visual art
that can be validated anywhere on earth? We need to consider the problem arising
from the acceptance of pluralism in the field of visual art. Pluralism is likely to end up
being self-contradictory because it inherently connotes multiple standards; they might
like it over there on the other side o f the earth, but not here because we don't know you
and your culture. What is beyond the binary oppositions of East and West, North and
South, Modem and Postmodern, and Rich and Poor? And beyond all the cultural
particularities that intertwine and conflict, could any work of art be transcendentally
global and universal in nature over time?
II. Universality in the Postmodern Context
It is of importance to begin with the inquiry about the concept, “universality”
that has become more and more problematic to use in 1990s in the realm of academia.
The concept embodied by the use of this term is not as definite as it used to be, and has
become relative depending on the situation in which the word is used. However, one
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could claim that it is not “universal” if it is used in a relative way. It could be said that
the word, "universality" no longer holds true as a metaphysical value that has a
transcendental nature (if it ever used to be) mainly because of the postcolonial
movements which seek to be pluralistic and anti-ethnocentric. In other words,
postmodern theories subverted the idea that accumulation of the knowledge leads us to
a more coherent understanding of the world, that is, universal truth. Postmodern
theory proposed that any given premise could not stay the same because any context in
which the premise was bom cannot stay the same but constantly shifts. Universal
truth is only momentarily and sporadically universal, even in the scientific field that I
am going to examine in this chapter.
Then, why do we stick to the word, “universality” when it does not mean what
it is supposed to mean? Moreover, how do we interpret the modification that the word
has undergone? I would argue that the concept of universality is too precious to
discard for two reasons. One is that it has been the center of the Judeo-Christian belief
that God governs all the visible and invisible phenomena in this world. Denying
universality ultimately leads us to doubt the sublime will of God which confers the
unity and grace on this world, which is too scary to imagine. The second reason is that
it has been the origin of all technological progress. By accumulating universal truths,
we invented the locomotive, the airplane, and the nuclear bomb.
Indeed, if the concept of universality is one side of a coin which has been
generating civilization’s progress, the other side must be the activities called “science.”
Ever since Galileo Galilei “discovered” that the earth goes around the sun, and Darwin
argued that our ancestors were not Adam and Eve but just apes, “science” has been the
3
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other monotheism. In other words, “science” has been the most definitive criteria that
people rely on to prove the truth about anything-until very recently.
A largely entertaining and controversial book, The End o f Science, written by
John Horgan, a staff writer for Scientific American, tries to illustrate the fear among all
the cutting edge scientists: "there is an increasing feeling that science as an unified,
universal, objective endeavor is over."3 But how come? Contrary to what people
might think, science is ending because it has been successful over the centuries and
there is not much left to discover. The more effectively and efficiently science
becomes, the more we realize the limit of our own rationality because "Scientific
knowledge is an ‘edifice’ whose form is predestined by the laws of logic and the
nature of human reasoning."4 Ironically enough, human reasoning eventually
concludes that we cannot deny the probabilistic element underlying all the phenomena
in this world. The fact which was manifested by the model of Lucretian swerve in the
field of quantum mechanics is strong enough to subvert all preceding belief about
science. In fact, "God does play dice."5 Moreover, Chaos and Complexity theory
3 Horgan, John. The End of Science (New York: Addison and Wesley,
1996) 9.
4 Ibid., 24. This type of argument is not really new. Kant must be the first
one to point out that all knowledge is simply an “edifice” and we are the "prisoners"
of our human reasoning because our perception is confined by what he calls "a priori
concepts." See for instance, Kant, Immanuel. Observations on the Feeling o f the
Beautiful and Sublime. Trans. Goldthwait, John. (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1960).
5 see for example, Horgan, John. The End o f Science. (New York: Addison
and Wesley, 1996) 16-18 for detailed explanation.
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states that "many phenomena are intrinsically indeterministic: they exhibit behavior that
is unpredictable and apparently random. Scientists can only guess at the causes of
individual events and cannot predict them with any accuracy."6
Facing all these limits of science, that it culminates in incoherence when pushed
too far, we have to question the concept of objective truth which has been embodied by
the scientific quest. Namely, Science had begun to deny the idea of an objective and
universal truth and is facing the rupture of its internal logic. Given this idea, one could
easily infer that all these newly discovered “truths” about science totally fit into the
postmodern concept of shifting context rendering any “truth” ephemeral and quite
instantaneous. Science, in a postmodern context, is questioning its raison d'etre by
itself, and at the same time, the concept of universality.
In the field of humanities, too, the concept of universality became constantly
questioned and reexamined in light of postmodern and postcolonial theories. Naoki
Sakai, a Japanese literary critic, clearly manifest the fallacy of universalism by
testifying its relation to the hegemony of the west over the entire world.7 Sakai
argues in his book, Translation and Subjectivity, that universalism is a disguised
particularism because its validity is based on the influence that western modernization
has had on the rest of the world.
6 Ibid., 15
7 Sakai, Naoki. Translation and Subjectivity: On Japan and Cultural
Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997) See the chapter five
of this book (153-163), titled "Modernity and Its Critique: The Problem of
Universalism and Particularism."
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Sakai begins his argument by denying the chronological order of premodem,
modem and postmodern. If we take a geopolitical point of view, all three could coexist
at the same period of time and create the following dichotomy: modem west which
embodies the universal and the premodem non-west which embodies the particular.
According to Sakai,
the West must represent the moment of the universal under
which particulars are subsumed. Indeed, the West is particular in
itself, but it also constitutes the universal point of reference in
relation to which others recognize themselves as particularities.
In this regard, the West thinks itself to be ubiquitous.8
Therefore, modernization occurring in non-westem countries, such as Japan, equaled, at
the initial stage, to Europeanization, and at the later stage, to Americanization. It seems
that this modernization is a part of the hegemony of the West. However, it is obvious
that Japan could never be a part of the West in spite of the fact that it has completely
modernized. Hence, modernization does not create homogeneous universality which
asserts the triumph of the West over others but just bears another particularity which
disguises itself as universal and quasi-west. In reference to the role of the West as a
policy-maker of the world, Sakai further states that "what we normally call universalism
is a particularism thinking itself as universalism; it is doubtful whether universalism
could exist otherwise."9
As I argued before, Science and technology, the origin of the hegemony of the
West, had already started to question the concept of universality in itself. And the rise
of non-westem countries as economic and political superpowers, such as China and
8 Ibid., 155.
9 Ibid., 157.
6
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Japan, would also exemplify the vacillation of universality. Sakai clearly deconstructs
the postmodern world from this postcolonial point of view,
when the society is perceived to be ahead of other societies,
this universalism effectively and powerfully legitimizes that
society's domination over others. But if its economic and
political superiority to the others in rationalization is not
perceived to be certain, it rapidly loses its effectuality and
persuasiveness. By the weight of its commitment to
universalism, the society's self-esteem would eventually be put
in jeopardy. Universalism would then appear to be the
burden under whose pressure the image of the society as a
totality would be crushed.io
Given this description, one can detect that the origin of postmodernism does not lie
within the rupture of western thought’s internal logic, but came with the decline of its
status as "universal."
III. Hegemony of the West in the Art World
However, this logic of universal and particular has a different dimension in the
context of the art world. Sakai’s argument cannot simply be applied to the discussion
of the art world because it seems that the art world still operates by putting the West in
its center regardless of the claims made by postmodern theories. For example, it is
almost guaranteed that an artist can have a show in an accredited gallery in Tokyo if
s/he has already shown frequently in New York or Los Angeles. It is only a matter of
asking people and knowing people in Tokyo. This clearly delineates the hierarchical
order in the art world that places Europe and the United States at the top. One’s work
becomes globally recognized only if s/he has a good show somewhere in the West.
10 Ibid., 158.
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This explains why a lot of non-westem artists are eager to be famous in the western art
world even though they are already established in their home country.
Why is that? Why has postcolonial pluralism not taken hold in art world
discourse? One simple answer is because the occidental view about art is still dominant
and widely accepted all over the world. Ever since art claimed its modernist autonomy,
any work of art has been discussed using the logic that is unique to the western art
world.1 1 Modem and contemporary art is uniquely occidental in nature because it
follows the model of operation that was created in the West. Accordingly, the word,
“contemporary art” not only refers to art that is produced by contemporaneous
population, but it also means that the art is created under the influence and reflects the
ideology of the western contemporary art.1 2 Any work of art that is not following this
1 1 see for example, Krauss, Rosalind. "Sculpture in the Expanded Field."
1979. Ed. Foster, Hal. The Anti-Aesthetics: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Seattle:
Bay Press, 1983) 31-42. Krauss discusses the history of sculptural art using a
mathematic model called Klein group. But she uses the terms that are particularly
western to decipher sculptural activities. Namely, she says sculpture is something that
is neither landscape nor architecture, which are uniquely western distinctions. For
example, Japanese gardens are somewhere in between, or the synthesis of, landscape
and architecture. Moreover, Krauss seems to admit that her structural analysis only
holds true within the western tradition saying, “For, within the situation of
postmodernism, practice is no longer organized around the definition of a given
medium-but rather in relation to die logical operations on a set of cultural terms, for
which any medium-photography, books, lines on walls, mirrors, or sculpture itself—
might be used.” (Ibid., 41).
12 It should be noted that there are artists who work on the native-foreign
binary in terms of the motifs and mediums of the visual arts. Generally speaking, those
artists compare and contrast the traditional forms and motifs of their own culture and
the western ones that they learned in school, and somehow integrate them according to
their subjective criteria. A clear example is Yasumasa Morimura’s work in which he
adopts and manipulates famous western paintings and disguises himself as characters
in those paintings. His work depicts his own vacillation of his identity that flows
8
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western model is scornfully classified as folk, outsider, or as traditional art. Such art is
often disdained and segregated from the discourse of “serious” fine arts.
Furthermore, the western model of operation constantly replicates itself through
the post-secondary fine arts education all over the world. Artists are educated in a
similar way everywhere in the world without realizing that what they are learning is, in
fact, a particular vision about fine arts which has been distilled over the centuries
through the western tradition. Although this system of teaching art within the academic
institution has been questioned over years (Can you teach how to make a good painting
when you don’t know if there’s any objective taste or not? How can you objectively
evaluate a student’s ability as an artist when there is no way to prove or disprove it?),
there is simply no alternative educational methodology proposed by non-westem
academic institutions.1 3 This system works just like a “meme,” the concept advocated
by Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, that cultural units, which he calls
"memes," are analogous to genes. These memes, which are basically ideas, replicate by
implanting themselves in vehicles called the human brain.1 4 Consequently, as long as
this western originated education system thrives and dominates, it proceeds to
legitimize and strengthen the hegemony of the western art world over others.
between the East and the West. Nevertheless, it also reflects the model and the
ideology of western contemporary art because the subject matter is the gap between
those western originated ideas about art and his own.
13 A detailed description of the situation of teaching and learning fine arts in
the academic institutions can be found in Singerman, Howard. Art Subjects: Making
Artist in the American University (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
14 see Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1986) 189-201.
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However, one could argue that the flourish of international biennials and
triennials taking place outside the West subverts the hegemony of the western art
world. Ironically, the more these biennials and triennials claim marginalization as a site
of power,1 5 the less coherent it becomes as an alternative model in the methodology of
art. The very heterogeneity of the works featured in these exhibitions undermines any
unified, cohesive ideological framework that efficiently challenges western art discourse
which is in the process of expanding its scope to include these activities.
The dilemma of this alternative methodology is apparent in the case of the first
Fukuoka Triennale of Asian Art that was held in the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum,
Japan, in 1999. The ambitious intention of festival organizers was described as “[the
fact they] refrained from inviting the most well-known people from each nation
show[s] that they were sincere in trying to prevent another ‘art Olympics.”’1 6 Even
though the event itself was successful in introducing new and young and cool artists
from marginalized Asia, the idea of avoiding an “art Olympics” delineates their
dilemma. If organizers had picked the artists that were world famous, they would have
automatically acknowledged that they followed the criteria already established by the
West, because being famous all over the world means— as I have argued before-that the
art is favored by western tastes. They had to pick relatively minor artists in order to
suggest the existence of alternative criterion and the operation of an art world that can
15 I am referring to the argument of Hooks, Bell. “Marginality as a Site of
Resistance.” Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Culture. Eds. Ferguson,
Russel et al. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990) 338-343.
16 Fouser, Robert J. “Asia as a State of Mind.” ARTAsiaPacific 24
(1999): 24.
10
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smoothly encompass such a heterogeneity among works. And to everyone’s regret,
their hope for being another “center” proved to be self-contradictory mainly because
of the very distinction they used, “Asian Art”-w hich does not have any overarching
tradition that could rival the dominant western discourse. Hence, the hope for distilling
the alternatives from heterogeneity is overtly elusive. The heterogeneity among the
works in the Fukuoka Triennale of Asian Art was read as confusion and diversity,
which summarizes the geopolitical condition of entire Asia. The nature of the
Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, where the main show of the Triennial took place,
contributed to this disillusionment. According to Makoto Murata, a Japanese art critic,
‘A sia’ refers to an extremely broad region encompassing
different climate and ecosystems, as well as a great variety of
languages, religions and systems of government. As a concept,
and as a reality, it is much less unified than Europe. It would
seem, in fact, that ‘Asia’ is little more than a fiction created for
the convenience of Europeans. Therefore, the idea of an asian art
museum, designed to bring together the art of such diverse
nations, is somewhat problematic. At a time when there is much
discussion of post-colonialism and the world is becoming more
and more borderless, it is possible that the creation of an art
museum confined to the category of Asia could be seen as
reactionary.1 7
Ironically enough, the very effort to create a rival to the western dominated discourse of
art is, here, seen as “reactionary” to the postcolonial theories by which they motivated
themselves to carry on this ambitious triennial.
Like the Fukuoka Triennale of Asian Art, other international art events that try
to be alternative only legitimize the hegemony of the west because they are not coherent
enough to demonstrate alternative methodologies and definitions about contemporary
17 Murata, Makoto. “Asia as an Art Museum.” Trans. Anderson, Stanley.
ARTAsiaPacific 24 (1999): 22.
11
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art. Rather, they occasionally need to follow the dogmatic scheme prepared and
practiced in the dominant discourse, by generalizing the heterogeneity represented by
the works exhibited. As a consequence, the effort to create alternatives to the western-
driven art world is doomed to fail, and becomes a part of the process that the western
art world co-opts re-asserting its own status as the one and only, the universal.
One day, what Greenberg imagined— an unified objective taste on visual art—
might come true: “we want to agree in our esthetic judgements and may be justified in
so wanting.”1 8 However, I would say that it is a scary scenario to imagine and the end
of subjectivity in art spells the end of visual art. A fixed taste and criteria stifles
experimentation and promotes homogenous conservatism. There is not much
difference between the McDonald’s in Los Angeles and in Tokyo and that is the way it
is supposed to be. However, who would want to learn Visual Art just like learning how
to cook a Quarter Pounder at McDonald’s? You don't really have to be genius to
make this, just follow the manual, boy.
IV. Conflation of the Universal and the Particular: the Global Approach
So far, I have described the vacillation of the concept of universality and the
repugnant state of the art world within postmodemity. Though it is not manifested in
the most visible way, the vacillation of the concept of "universality" is one of the key
18 Greenberg, Clement. “Can Taste be Objective?” ARTnews 72
(1973): 23.
12
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issues of the art in 1990s.1 9 Here I shall move on to illustrate if there could be any
possibility of a global approach in visual art that has the qualities to survive this western
dominated art world and postcolonial pluralism.
The works by Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid, a team of artists emigrated
from the USSR in 70s, suggest important clues to the global approach in visual art.
For example, Painting by Numbers (1994-1997) is quite intriguing in the way it deals
9 0
with mass culture and the concept of universality through statistics. Painting by
Numbers is a series of paintings based on public opinions. They prepared a highly
elaborate questionnaire asking people about their preferences on colors, motifs, and
other elements of painting (i.e. the size of the canvas) using more than ninety
questions. Using the statistical analysis based on their questionnaires, they completed
two paintings for each of the fifteen countries polled. One was the "most wanted" and
the other was the "most unwanted." They completed the survey in over fifteen
countries and made "most wanted" and "most unwanted," which are supposed to reflect
each country's taste on painting and visual imagery.
It is extremely crucial to point out that Komar and Melamid, as artists of a
postmodern era took a leap from the Modernist, Greenbergian approach, on the issue
of objective taste in visual art. Instead of relying upon the vague and untrustworthy
19 It should be noted that the advent of photographic technology gave rise to
the quest for “visual universality” in the late 19th century. One of the most
enthusiastic surveys was done in Paris in 1880-1890, using photography to manifest
the typological characteristics of the criminal types. See, for instance, Sekula, Allan.
“The Body and the Archive.” October 39 (1987): 3-64.
20 Komar, Vitaly, ed. Painting by Numbers: Komar and Melamid's Scientific
Guide to Art (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1997).
13
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historical continuity o f consensus among masterpieces, they made ironic use of the
most reliable ruler of our time, science. In fact, the statistical science they adopted to
the project was, according to Arthur C. Danto’s essay on this project,
state of the art (accurate “within a margin of error of +/-3.2
percent, at a 95 percent confidence level”), and the answers
themselves constitute a singularly interesting piece of aesthetic
sociology. Blue, for example— by far America’s favorite color
(44 percent) is most appealing to people in the central states who
are between forty and forty nine years of age, conservative, white,
male, making $30,000 to $40,000, and who don’t go to
museums at all .21
How could one dislike a painting that “reflects as many of the preferred qualities as the
artists could incorporate onto a single canvas.”22 How could Greenberg argue that
the objectivity of taste embodied by a purely scientific survey be more disreputable than
his? Painting by Numbers is a perfect manifestation of the people’s objective taste
about the visual image.
However, it is obvious that this project involves a certain satire in itself. Why
does the “ Most Wanted Painting” look so generic and boring? There is a set of
reasons for this disappointment that draws a complex relationship between the physical
side of the project, which is the failure as painting, and the conceptual side, the success
as an art project. This project is, in fact, a harsh comment on the art world that
operates in the realm of capitalism. Examining Komar and Melamid’s vicious yet
21 Danto, Arthur C. “Can it be the “Most Wanted Painting” even if nobody
wants it?” Painting by Numbers: Komar and Melamid's Scientific Guide to Art. Ed.
Komar, Vitaly. (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1997) 135.
22 Ibid., 135.
14
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mischievous scheme can provide one of the most important clues in regards to finding
a global approach in visual art.
First of all, there is a question about the poll. Even though it is highly precise
statistically, can we take it literally? Did the respondents really mean it when they were
answering the questions? Danto incorporates a psychological theory called
“paradigm theory” to point out the fallacy of the survey.23 For example, according to
this theory that tries to explain the logic behind free-association, “Most people will
answer “robin” when asked to name a bird, or “dog” when asked to name an animal.
Few will answer “coot” to the first, or “aardvark” to the next.”24 This clearly shows
the link between the generalized categories, such as bird or animal, and the most
representative ones within those categories, such as robin or dog. This direct
association between a category and the most representative one originates not in the
individual basis on their preferences, but in the empirical basis derived from the
frequency of occurrence in one’s daily life. That is to say, people think of a robin
when they are to name a kind of bird because the word, “robin” is inside the drawer in
their brain that is labeled something like “frequently used term” and it is easer to take
out than, say, “aardvark.” The same thing seems to happen when people think of
answers to the questionnaire of Painting by Numbers in terms of the occurrence of the
association. Danto concludes that “It is altogether likely that what Komar and
23 According to Danto, this theory is developed by a psychologist Elenor
Rosch based on the way in which information is stored in our brain. See Ibid., 137 for
the detailed explanation.
24 Ibid., 137.
15
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Melamid have unearthed is less what people prefer than what they are most familiar
with in paintings.”25
Komar and Melamid’s scheme can also be seen as subjective in their way of
handling of the statistics. The most conspicuous example would be the combination of
the motifs that respondents really would not want in one painting even though they said
they preferred to have them, maybe, singularly on the canvas. Simply put, although
people may prefer landscapes over non-landscapes, paintings with people over
paintings without, and would like to see wild animals, this does not mean that they
prefer paintings that have all these elements combined. Komar and Melamid must have
been chuckling when they were painting America’s Most Wanted in which they
juxtaposed George Washington and a typical American family in camping clothes in a
quiet landscape that is, according to Danto, “a modified Hudson River Biedermeier
style”2 6 that breaks the convention of painting under the name of being true to the
people’ s choices. It is apparent that the interpretation of the written survey is totally
arbitrary by Komar and Melamid, and the manipulation of the survey by the process of
a two dimensional transfer, to a pictorial surface, is the device that hides their
mischievous intention to reveal the fallacy of democracy within visual art, and the
concept of objectivity applied in people’ s taste.
Another important aspect of this piece is its cross-referentiality created by the
fact that it involved more than fifteen countries whose ethnic and cultural backgrounds
25 Ibid., 137.
26 Ibid., 137.
16
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vary significantly. Nonetheless, people responded to the questions in a similar manner
everywhere and as a consequence, all Most Wanted paintings look significantly
congruent. In addition to the reasons that I described above (the schematic design of
the survey that purposely led people to react in the similar manner to the questions, and
Komar and Melamid’s subjective way of treating the statistics), there is another hidden
structure that contributes to the homogeneity presented by the project and that is a
necessary parameter of the global approach in visual art that provides an universal point
of reference regardless of the cultural backgrounds. That is to say, why different
people think o f similar things when they are asked about art? The answer to this
question provides us with an insight. The most pervasive form of art creates the most
common association about art, and the most pervasive form of art is, as I argued in the
previous chapter, western ones. This is where the following observation by Danto on
the likeliness among Most Wanted paintings finds its root: “The ‘most wanted
painting,’ speaking transnationally, is a nineteenth-century landscape— the kind of
painting whose degenerate descendants embellish calendars from Kalamazoo to
Kenya.”27 As modernization spread out into the world, the efficiency of the western
technology also created an aura of superiority of Western culture. Consequently,
nineteenth century style landscape painting must have been extremely striking to the
people in Africa or in Japan in the early 20th century not only because they looked so
exotic and magnificent, but also because it was made by the superior people who knew
things that they had never imagined to be possible.
27 Ibid., 137.
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This argument brings us back to the issue that I discussed in the previous
chapter; the role of education in the hegemony of the western art world over others.
People learn how to draw, everywhere in the world, referring to Leonardo da Vinci, not
to any local hero who does not have worldwide reputation. Linear perspective is
explained using the examples from the Renaissance in which the vanishing point is
placed at the head of Jesus. And surprisingly, if you follow the rules they made, you
can draw fine drawings like them. What a convenient tool to convert people into the
believers of western technology this art was! It is not that hard to imagine why the
Most Wanted in Kenya looks like the America’s Most Wanted painting. In both
nations, art has been taught in a similar way, and a similar kind of art (nineteenth
century landscape painting) is printed on the calendar pages that cover the walls of their
living rooms. The survey of the project was not about the preference of motifs within
painting but about what people have seen or learned about painting. “There is nothing
in the least African about the Hudson River Biedermeier style of landscape with water.
But it may be exactly with reference to such images that the Kenyans learned the
meaning of art.”2 8 Moreover, the fact that all Most Wanted look similar and all Most
Unwanted significantly differ culture to culture confirms the hegemony of the western
art world through education. Namely, people are taught what the good art is by
referring to the example from the west (and from the non-west discussed under the
western discourse), but they are hardly taught what the bad art is, simply because there
are not enough examples of the bad art available. Ironically enough, the concept of the
28 Ibid., 137.
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bad art, Most Unwanted, is the one that represents the climate of the participating
cultures the most because it is freer from the ghost of western influence.
The cross-cultural referentiality embodied by Painting by Numbers is required
when one aspires for the global approach in visual art, and it is only possible when it
incorporates the hegemony of the western art world into the configuration of the
project. In fact, only with the dominance of the western art world and its discourse over
others, the global approach in the visual art is possible because it provides the universal
point of reference as we have seen in Komar and Melamid’s project. However, like
Painting in Numbers, this approach is doomed to have its root in satirized, quasi-
sociological research. The survey is designed to be solely objective in order to prove
that there is no objective criteria we can rely on to produce a good painting. That is to
say, they created a particular set of parameters which altogether work to embody
transcendental universals, a painting which everyone likes, and a painting which
everyone dislikes. However, they must have known that they were creating their own
work of art which made use of opinions about the visual image in the form of statistics,
with which they implanted their own filtration called painting. The set of parameters
that Komar and Melamid created affirms a boundary only inside of which their
particular inquiry about visual images can be validated and universal. And the
possibility of the global approach in visual art lies within the cross-cultural
referentiality within this set of parameters of the project. It needs to disguise itself as
global or universal, and only in the case that disguise looks plausible (and the
plausibility is created when it seems that it is validated by the dominant discourse about
the art, the Western one), it can be registered as a global approach because it
exemplifies the cross-cultural phenomena using a universal point of reference.
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A global approach to art does not have to illustrate an approach that is validated
everywhere in the world, which is ultimately impossible, rather, it only has to operate
itself impeccably in the disguise look of universal.
One might have noticed, then, that this approach is two-faced, this type of art
produces meaning beyond simple visuals that can, in fact, only be understood by a
culturally specific art world. Any piece of art which seeks to be global has to face this
duality of meaning. For example, in Painting by Numbers, one face presents us with
the less than appealing paintings Komar and Melamid created. The other face is the
deep rooted cynicism on capitalism and the western art world embodied by the
configuration of the project, which is not really visible through the former, the visuals.
One needs an explanation about the set of parameters of the project in order to
understand the meaning of the work. And this is a very important aspect in the global
approach to visual art. One cannot simply rely on the visual presentation to generate
the art’s meaning, since there is no guarantee for that meaning to hold true in a
different cultural context. Any meaning imposed directly upon the visuals do not have
any universal quality. Therefore, another layer that generates the transcendental
meaning above the visual is required to claim the status of the piece as globally
understandable. This layer needs to have a universal point of reference to make a
comparison between different paradigms available to create a cross-referentiality which
does not suggest any hierarchical order between each paradigm but produces the
equally particular and qualitatively different bitmaps of them. Indeed, one can never
prove or disprove America’s Most Wanted is a better painting than China's Most
Wanted. They are, in my opinion, equally bad paintings that play irreplaceable roles in
a fabulous and revolutionary piece of art.
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V. Visual Pleasure Within the Global Approach
One thing that Komar and Melamid sacrificed in Painting by Numbers is the
visual pleasure, the privilege of the audience, in order to convey the satire of the project
more vividly. In the configuration of their project, there could have been no way to
achieve its conceptual clarity other than the way they did. However, not only the
ordinary people but also the educated art audience of, such as Donald Kuspit, a
renowned art critic known as being “conservative,” might say that Painting by
Numbers is not Art simply because, regardless of the processes, it is not visually
pleasing. They might claim that their project is an interesting piece of sociological
research but less appealing as a piece of art because of the lack of adherence to the
importance of the first look. It seems that the global approach that I have been trying to
describe here might be destined to allow boredom in the visual realm because it is
ultimately impossible to create visuals that pleases everyone. Komar and Melamid
purposefully created those paintings to be liked by no one, regardless of Most Wanted
or Most Unwanted.
Given that visual art is culturally particular, how can one synthesize the global
approach with visual pleasure? Can we create a piece under the global approach to
impress everyone in the world just by the first look of it? I would claim it is possible
under a certain situation. In the earlier part of this essay, I described that there is no
"universality" possible as a metaphysical value. In fact, this disillusionment about
“universality” is nothing new if we consider the “a priori concepts” by Kant, the
argument of “super structure” by Marx, and even Foucault's acceptance of his idea
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being not global but merely partial.29 All these thinkers suggest that metaphysical
on
values are secondary to what we might call materialistic phenomena. Our biased
minds perceive things as what we want them to be and simply infer any metaphysical
value from them by our own biased reasoning. Moreover, no “neutral” view of the
world is possible because we are confined by what we are, and no transcendental nature
could be attached to any metaphysical value.
If any idea or concept cannot be held universally, one need to go back to the
materialistic realm which consists of the reality of the world. And it seems that this is
where the global approach to visual art should focus in order to overcome the
theoretical and pluralistic obstacles and achieve global visual pleasure. In other words,
we should make use of a material or an icon that signifies nothing but itself, if there is
any, in this postmodern context.
A promising piece of art was made by an young japanese artist, Masato
Nakamura. His piece, QSC+mV (Quality, Service and Clean plus McDonald’s value,
1998-99) is a large scale sculpture that consists of only McDonald’s signs, the yellow
M. Made primarily of resin, by which real McDonald’s signs are also made, there are
eight, shiny, self- standing McDonald’s signs arranged to form a large circle in which
viewers are invited to go in. Each sign is made to almost twice the height of an
29 Although this overly simplified description about their key ideas are likely
to be attacked, one could conclude that the repeating decline of any governing theory
not only necessitates the rise of new theories but also questions the status of the Greco-
Roman and the Judeo-Christian tradition as being center of metaphysics.
30 The purest form of conceptual art also needs some physical dimensions, in
my opinion, such as the written alphabets or human voice.
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ordinary asian male creating the effect much like a religious sanctuary. When I saw
this piece in an art magazine, I thought, “this is my generation right there!” It is the
McDonald’s sign that we know, that we grew up with,3 1 but it is so beautifully
constructed that it takes a little time for the viewer to recognize that it is just a
McDonald’s sign.
Multinational consumer capitalism, embodied by McDonald’s offers an insight
to the issue of visual pleasure within the global approach. The fast food and
refreshment industry that seeks to ignore national borders, such including
McDonald’s, Coca-Cola and Starbucks, is not only creating the universal point of
reference about taste, but also transforming the look of cities into a homogenous,
American suburban style all over the world due to the abundance of their conspicuous
corporate icons placed outside of their stores. Imagine yourself driving on a freeway.
You are passing numerous cities and numerous similar looking small communities that
are placed in between bigger cities. They have gas stations, motels, and a couple of fast
food chains around that create a homogenous landscape everywhere in this country.
This clearly shows how corporate identities, through their visual representations-the
signs-are pervasive and implanted into our perception of cities. If these companies
keep invading other countries, sooner or later, the look of cities in different countries
become similar to the ones in the United States. Even though the word,
“McDonald’s” is written in languages other than English, the Yellow M sign lingers
31 The first McDonald restaurant in Japan opened in 1971, which was the year
that I was bom. It was located inside a prestigious department store called
“Mitsukoshi” in Ginza, Tokyo.
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on to accompany every single store they open to invite people to the same, old,
familiar taste.
Of course, I am not trying to claim that the McDonald’s sign has an universal
meaning all over the world. There are a number of countries which have not been
invaded by them, and even in the countries in which they have already opened
successful businesses, its icon is perceived in a million different ways depending upon
each country’s own context and the history of McDonald’s within that context.
However, the Mcdonald’s sign, ultimately means, in the most frequently occurring
context, the cheap and fast food which has buns and some kind of meat and vegetable
in between them, called “hamburger.” That is to say, the McDonald’s sign stands
alone against the fragmentation of its meaning, and carries the equally similar impact as
a visual signifier to whoever knows the relationship between the signifier, the sign, and
the signified, the hamburger.
The McDonald’s sign is the closest example of icons that hold so-called
“linguistic norm” in the postmodern context. What Masato Nakamura demonstrated
in the piece, QSC+mV is the possibility of the visual pleasure that can be globally
appreciated, by putting the McDonald’s sign into the fine art context. The physical
side of the piece, the fact that it is just a combination of neatly constructed McDonald’s
signs, inevitably speaks of the conceptual side of the piece, the metonymy of the
processes of cultural homogenization via commodity. Unlike the Andy Warhol’s soup
cans and Marilyn Monroe, or the Jasper Jons’s flag that involved some degree of
manipulation of the eroded icons, Nakamura’s almost minimalistic treatment of the
Yellow M was intentional in order to avoid the salient appearance of the reflection of
his own association about the icon which might not be shared with others and hinders
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the connotation of the other transcendental layer— the global meaning of the icon that
almost everyone can share. This piece has the characteristics of pastiche in Fredric
Jameson’s sense. It is an appropriation of the value of signifiers that does not
legitimize the authenticity or hegemony of what is being appropriated and therefore, it
maintains a distance and a neutrality.
Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique style,
the wearing of a stylistic mask, speech in a dead language: but it is a
neutral practice of such mimicry, without parody’s ulterior motive,
without the satirical impulse, without laughter, without that still
latent feeling that there exists something normal compared to which
what is being imitated is rather comic 3 2
Namakura’s piece has satire and humor. But it is not derive from a playful pastiche of
emptied signifiers (as with Warhol or Jons) but derived from a carefully prepared
conceptual layer that critiques the geo-economical structure of the world. This is
possible only when the visual and the physical side of the piece stays neutral to, or
remains consistent with, the original meaning of the icon. That is to say, we need to
keep in mind that the art objects themselves are not metaphysical values, although they
are often attached to them. The visual pleasure of the global approach can be attained
when one discards the metaphysics of the visual that is not necessarily global, and
organizes the visual to create symplicity that has more room for individual free
association. The McDonald’s sign is a McDonald’s sign, wherever and whenever we
see it. And its ubiquitousness marks its transcendentality as an icon. It signifies
nothing but itself. It is upon us to infuse meanings of it in different contexts, just like
Nakamura did in the art context. It is your own reading of the icon and you don't have
32 Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” Ed. Foster,
Hal. The Anti-Aesthetics: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983)
114.
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to worry if it is right or not. There is nothing wrong with you thinking about your
former girlfriend when you see a McDonald’s sign, because it was in the parking lot
of the McDonald’s where your girlfriend said goodbye to you. McDonald’s means a
lot of things and one can never grasp all of them.
VI. Conclusion: The End of Art?
The global approach in visual art seems to suggest working on the materialistic
realm, especially with mundane things such as consumer commodities. Since the
meaning of any signifier differs culture to culture and time to time, those ubiquitous
objects seem to resist the heavy semiotic theories expounding on the vulnerability that
exists between the signifier and the signified. Using physical and tangible objects, the
global approach requires artists to create their own set of parameters to edit the
information created by the set, and present a visual work of art that embodies this
conceptual leap.
Interestingly enough, the process of the western art world conquering the rest
and that of consumer-driven multinational capitalism seem to coincide. When the
Coca-Cola company went to China, the biggest problem they faced was how to name
their product. Since all Chinese characters are not phoneme based but meaning based,
Coca-Cola had to find the combination of characters that were phonetically close to the
pronunciation of Coca-Cola, and whose meaning as a combination represented the
concept of the product in a coherent way. As a result, they came up with a superb
solution. The resulting name sounded close enough to Coca-Cola and its meaning in
Chinese is roughly translated to “fun in mouth.” There has not been much difficulty
for the Coca-Cola brand to be assimilated into Chinese culture and society since then
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and this fact overtly explains the expansion of audiences who are familiar with westem-
origin icons. Chinese society has come to understand the meaning o f Coca-Cola as
people in the United States or in other Coke-familiar countries do when used and
appropriated in any piece of art.
Does this mean that, in a near future, people in different parts of the earth are
altogether going to enjoy a similar taste in visual art, just as they enjoy Coca-Cola
everywhere in the world? Is it the end of progress in our creative impulses that has
been manifested in the form of art? If one learns art, which is the subjective way of
expressing one’s own interiority? in a totally objective manner, how could one grow a
sense of uniqueness and capability of doing things that have not been done before?
My honest guess on this scenario is that it is going to depend on how the artists from
the areas that are less influenced by the western discourse continue and thrive by
creating works that are not simply categorized as outsider art. It will be dependent
upon their ability to present alternative methodologies to create works that are
controversial enough to attract the attention of the dominant art discourse. Only by
doing so can the art world gain the vitality and the diversity of postmodern pluralism.
I have been trying to paint a portrait of how the issue of universality has
manifested in the field of 90s art. Universality, or in other words, objective truth, exist
in each layer of things and is not coherent with another universality being in another
layer. In this respect, universality and particularity have no qualitative difference. This
is why multiple readings about one work of art are possible.
Art is not made out of the metaphysical value but made out of physical objects
such as paint. In case of conceptual art too, an idea needs a medium to transform itself
into the visible realm. Even though an artist is solely biased by the metaphysical values
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embedded within the culture in which s/he was bom, the fact that any theme or idea
needs to be expressed through physical objects reaffirms the view that metaphysical
ideas alone cannot be a work of art. Art can reference metaphysical values by its
representational nature but not vice versa.
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Appendix
In this appendix, I would like to briefly discuss how I perceive my own works
of art to reflect the theoretical framework presented in my earlier observations. My
approach towards the issue of globalism in visual art has its root in the sociological
investigations of consumer commodities. I always present the outcome of the
investigations in a catalogued form as an edited set of knowledge, which, at the same
time, embodies my visual aesthetics.
Dictionaries (1999-2000) deals with the issue of transmittance of the elements of one
particular culture to other cultures. I collected the monochromatic drawings that
occasionally accompany and supplement written explanation of particular words. I
used four different English dictionaries— English to Japanese, English to Persian,
English to Chinese, and English to Thai— as image sources. The images from these
dictionaries were catalogued, digitized and presented in gridded diagrams. I arranged
more than two hundred illustrations in alphabetical order from left to right in four rows.
The top row consists of images from English to Japanese dictionary, the second,
English to Persian, the third, English to Chinese, and the bottom row, English to Thai.
Each of these dictionaries is published in each country to be used by, high
school students who are in the process of learning English as a foreign language. It is
crucial to note that these dictionaries represent the most definite and reliable criteria by
which to refer to anything about the language and the culture that is being learned. In
order to successfully perform its role as a compass to navigate a stranger, the following
questions arise. When does a dictionary need a drawing to explain the meaning of a
word? When are no pictures necessary to explain listings? The answer depends upon
how remote the target language-English-is, from the languages that translate the target
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language, i.e. Japanese, Persian, Chinese, and Thai. When a word-to-word translation
is possible, as in English to German or French to Italian, there is not much need for the
illustration. However, if the two languages are both culturally and linguistically far
apart, pictures are needed to guess the meaning of the word.
My main focus on this piece is to delineate the misrepresentation of the concept
of a word by a visual image. Simply put, there is always a certain gap between what the
picture represents and what the word really means. To the native speaker of English,
the use of particular illustrations in these dictionaries seems funny because of the
failure to convey the core concept of the word being represented. This overtly shows
the limit of a visual aid to complement the lack of the appropriate equivalents in these
languages. For example, why is it necessary in the English to Persian dictionary to
show a picture of a Barbecue in which an ordinary american family is barbecuing
outside? There is no explanation for this except to assume perhaps that people do not
barbecue in the Middle East. The illustration alone does not convey the meaning of
Barbecue successfully, but it is extremely open to the misunderstanding of the meaning
of the word. Does barbecue mean to eat outside, or cook outside? Moreover, it does
not tell us anything about the feeling americans have towards the barbecue— a fun
activity with one’s family or close friends on a holiday afternoon.
Another key aspect of this piece is the cross-referentiality that I described
earlier (pp. 16-18). In Dictionaries, different cultures present their own interpretation
of certain words by their particular styles of illustration. Surprisingly enough, the
words that do get illustrated frequently coincide among the different dictionaries. For
instance, all four dictionaries have the illustration for castle and lobster, while three of
these dictionaries have guillotine, and so on. Why do these overlappings occur? What
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do they tell us about the relationships between English, Persian, Thai, Chinese, and
Japanese cultures? It has been long said that it is impossible to compare a culture with
another without any preconception because any assessment about a culture by another
culture is doomed to be ethnocentric. However, in this project, English language and its
culture serve as a polar axis to compare and contrast different cultures through the way
elements of another culture, English and American, are interpreted. This very fact
creates the cross-referentiality through visual images that can only be validated within
the discourse of contemporary art, in the way that I described previously.
Another representative piece of a global approach to visual art that I have
completed is Orange Candies ver. 2.0. (2000). This time, I aimed at the multinational
capitalism manifested through the physical, consumer commodity, of those orange
candies that are available in the greater Los Angeles area. Inside the city with its
diverse ethnic mosaic, the research started as the investigation of the ethnic
supermarkets scattered throughout the city. Referring to the Zagat Survey, I drove
around and visited a number of supermarkets in order to obtain the various kinds of
orange candies which were available. As a result, I gathered more than one hundred
orange candies whose origins ranged from Croatia to the Philippines, of which only
sixteen of them are made in the United States.
I digitize what I collected and scanned the package/container for each candy’s
front and the back. In addition, I scanned both the individual wrappers and the candies
proper. Again the scanned images were arranged in a grid format and made into four
large-scale digital photographic prints. The first print consists of only those images
representing the front of the package/container, and the second print presented the back
side of the containers. The third print showed the individually wrapped candies, while
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the last print was filled with the “naked” candies.
As a final step, I pulverized all the different orange candies and offered the
viewers the platonic ideals of the orange candies by creating their synthesis. The
resulting powder was put inside small glass vials. Forty nine of these vials were put on
a pedestal which was placed right next to the four photographic prints. The placement
of the four photographic prints from left to right— the front of the package, the back of
the package, the individual wrapper, and the unadorned candies— and the pedestal
suggests the flow of the entire project, the procedure that each particularity turns into
the purest form to become a part of a universal, however, in a quite satirized way.
The grid format in this piece has a significant function in bridging the four
photographic prints to create meaning for the whole, together with the pulverized
candies. In fact, the audience is almost forced to go back and forth between the four
prints in order to discover the relationship between the prints, and the meaning beyond
the seemingly simple visuals. It is here that the transcendental layering of the piece
occurs. The placement of each candy within the grid is the same throughout the four
prints. Within the ninety six grids— which corresponds to the number of different
orange candies used in the piece— an American made candy, the Lifesaver always
appear on the far left comer on the top row, and Philippines made Halls is always 7th
from the right and 5th from the top, and so on.
As a result, the audience can enjoy the sequence of photographic prints in two
main ways. Looking at each print individually invites comparison between each
individual candies and the totality as a singular print. However, once one notices the
overarching structure of the piece, s/he would begin to link four different prints by
looking at the specific ones consecutively throughout. One can follow the procedures
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of the piece by examining the front side of the package of, say, Starburst, the back side
of it, the individual wrapper of it, and the candy.
What this carefully designed visual experience provides for the audience is the
allegory of the Cultural homogenization via commodity. It is not that hard to imagine
that the orange candies from all over the world do not present much heterogeneity.
Indeed, they are the components of the same artificial flavor, smell, colorants, and some
natural substances (i.e. the real orange juice in some expensive ones). Only the
percentage of the mixture of these differs from one to another. This fact overtly speaks
for the homogenization of the taste via commodity. The powder candy inside the glass
vials are the satirized concretization of this process. What the viewers really taste is not
really the composed artificial flavors, but the platonic ideal of the orange candy that
only exist in our mind. That is to say, it is not the individual candies which creates the
overall taste of the powder, but our preconceived idea about how orange candy should
taste, and that makes us taste the powder as it should taste.
As I argued in the introduction of this essay, sea urchin never tastes the same to
the people who have different cultural backgrounds, so it is the same with the
pulverized candies. The exact same powder made out of various orange candies creates
a range of impressions. With the aid of the physical sensation called taste, my global
approach to visual art created a far more vivid and visible transcendental layer, the
universal appreciation of one piece of art which does not force any particular reading,
but is open to a lot of different interpretations.
3 6
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Isoyama, Tomoyuki (author)

Core Title Beyond cultural: Global approach in visual art

School Graduate School

Degree Master of Fine Arts

Degree Program Fine Arts

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Fine Arts,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Advisor [illegible] (committee chair), Bunn, David (committee member), Fine, Jud (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c16-39537

Unique identifier UC11342027

Identifier 1407912.pdf (filename),usctheses-c16-39537 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier 1407912.pdf

Dmrecord 39537

Document Type Thesis

Rights Isoyama, Tomoyuki

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA