In Out of the Cold: The End of the Cold War, Dislocation, Diaspora, and Identity
In Out of the Cold: The End of the Cold War, Dislocation, Diaspora, and Identity
More visibly than any arts institution in memory, The Center for the Arts was born out of contemporary political, economic and cultural forces. These local, national and international developments impact on the construction of individual identity, and consequently the arts. The Center exists to balance the availability of institutional cultural authority to groups that have in recent decades begun overcoming inequities on the political level. The Center must address the impact of Yerba Buena Gardens—the massive redevelopment project of which it is a key part—on its neighborhood and larger urban environment and to serve their communities. It is highly appropriate therefore that our opening exhibition examines this landscape into which the Center for the Arts is thrust.
In Out of the Cold uses the end of the Cold War as a tool to show artists reflecting on not only the difficulties of that historic period but on the related themes of dislocation, diaspora, and exile, and how all those effects have impacted on our understanding of who we are. The geopolitical boundaries and political blocs of the last half century seemed immutable to most people, along with simplistic ideology that defined all contemporary events as a struggle between the US and the USSR. As we watch boundaries crumble almost daily in Europe, Africa and Asia, we see that they are only fragile human constructs, at all times vulnerable to collapse when suspension of disbelief is withdrawn. As the Slovenian theorist Slavoj Zizek stated, "There is a whole logic of secrets that are known by everybody but still must not be publicly discussed. In Eastern Europe, the moment that they were publicly pronounced, the whole system experienced this as a total catastrophe." (Artforum, March 1993).
The political world is now better understood as a complex and ever changing ecology of interdependencies, shifting needs, priorities and alliances. Below the post Cold War surface fundamental change is less likely to have occurred. Some argue that nation states are in decline as transnational corporate entities rise in power, for example; others fear that the new nationalism being unleashed in the early nineties will be worse than the Cold War itself. The need to rethink long held assumptions about how the world—including the United States—is fundamentally configured rhymes with the simultaneous process taking place on a sociocultural level. This development involves people insisting on reevaluation of both identity and difference.
Identity in the current world context is problematic, at worst fractured, impure, imposed, constructed of empty signs, and at best mobile, hybrid, multilayered and complex. Difference, the external assignment of identity, results from a society's tendency to create an Other, and the struggle for those cast in such a role to resist it, and demand self definition and equal power. Identity and difference are most dramatically effected when geopolitical change creates refugees, emigrants, and exiles. Less apparent are the slower changes of Diaspora, and of people who find themselves living in an internal exile. These latter cases include, for example, members of third world cultures living in the first world, gays and lesbians who must navigate the waters of being out, or the poor living in a media environment of apparent universal wealth.
The international political map is undoubtedly being transformed, but the deeper political conditions, here and abroad, which demanded a Cold War have not changed. These political conditions often require that the Other be demonized in order to create political coherence. With the loss of the Eastern bloc as an easily readable threat, smaller and smaller groups have been auditioned as substitutes: millions of homosexuals, thousands of artists, down to the single persona of Saddam Hussein. This exhibition seeks to address artists' reactions to both the Cold War and resistance to this reductive naming of groups as Other. It presents work that addresses a reformulation of political and cultural boundaries without employing outmoded models, work that sees world culture as a chaotic and constantly evolving complex of tradition, innovation and mutual influence, with all societies valued and contributing equally.
Twentieth century artists have offered many models for accepting contradiction and complexity in the world and rejecting simplistic analyses. For example, during the Vietnam War, John Cage explained that he chose not to distinguish sound and noise from music, for fear that he might then be tempted to accept externally assigned distinctions between, say, Viet Cong and other Vietnamese. Earlier in the century Marcel Duchamp was fascinated with the physicality of the artistic mold, because the mold defies either/or configurations of problems, simultaneously containing the positive, the negative and a third thing, the mold itself. In Out of the Cold begins at that point where our cultures are informed by at least as many possibilities. It contains work and artifacts that address the military realities of the past several decades, as well as work about the struggles of people to understand their identity given the effects of a century and more of geographic and intellectual migrations.
June 1993