Third Text, Vol. 23, Issue 5, September, 2009, 605–615

Third Text

ISSN 0952-8822 print/ISSN 1475-5297 online © Third Text (2009)http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals

DOI: 10.1080/09528820903184864

Which Histories Matter?

1

Anthony Gardner

ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER CRISIS

At the risk of adding to the cottage industries of crisis and self-pity,I have to admit to finding it hard not to be pessimistic about the statesof art practice and discourse in recent years. The desires for radicalcross-cultural engagement that propelled the second wave of biennialisa-tion during the mid-twentieth century – the hope that drawing practitio-ners together from the globe’s so-called peripheries could forge newpaths of connection and new internationalisms in art, stretching from1950s São Paulo through Sydney in the 1970s to La Habana in 1984 –have seemingly been expunged by the spectacular return of ‘grand tours’or the expediency of art as a sideshow to the Olympics. ‘Criticality’ isnow little more than a hollow catchphrase for our creative economies(though whether it was ever anything else remains open to question),while opportunities for writing contemporary art history critically orcriticism historically have become increasingly rare, eviscerated alongwith other disciplines in the humanities by the corporatisation of univer-sities, or beholden to artists and institutions demanding to edit evennon-commissioned texts before granting reproduction rights for imagesor quotations. Independent art analysis, and perhaps art analysis ingeneral, would appear to have been asphyxiated in the name of‘accountability’, resulting in a condition with which many of us wouldbe familiar these days. This is the intellectual retreat to the consolationsof the well known and well rehearsed, and to sources whose qualitativevalue can be easily measured because they are cited so often.

Witness, for example, the recitation of a familiar roll-call of namesfrom recent European philosophy – Jacques Rancière, Giorgio Agamben,Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy, Chantal Mouffe, Antonio Negri – ininnumerable English-language essays and books, catalogues and evenartists’ statements worldwide. For all their obvious importance, these arethe ‘proper names’ of ‘theory’, the buzzwords or ciphers that stand forthe limits of intellectual endeavour at the exclusion of MandawuyYunupingu, Valeri Podoroga, Rastko Mo nik and other equally signifi-cant figures whose perspectives remain largely marginalised in contem-porary art discourse. In a similar vein, we can think of the yearning in

c

1. The ideas formulated in this response have benefited enormously from conversations with a range of people in numerous sites across the globe. In particular, I wish to thank Rex Butler and Robert Leonard in Brisbane, Blair French and Reuben Keehan in Sydney, and Leon Wainwright and Huw Hallam in the UK for their generous debates about whose histories and which histories still ‘matter’ in contemporary art.

606

such otherwise vibrant discourses as Europe’s new institutionalism toreanimate the North Atlantic canon of institutional critique from the1960s and 1970s, returning to the all-too-seminal line-up of MichaelAsher, Daniel Buren, Hans Haacke, Robert Smithson et al so as to reviveart’s critical possibilities today.

2

This reinvestment in the Western artcanon may be a source of comfort for some historians and critics, fearfulthat the hegemony of their heritage may be corroded by the (alwaysimminent) decentralisation of art’s genealogies. It is, more accurately, aform of intellectual containment – or, better still, intellectual

protection-ism

– in which the geo-cultural status quo is reinforced amid some of themore insidious threats of ‘globalisation’.

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has not necessarily been immune from this drive to defusethe connections, as well as tensions, between different histories andknowledges of art traced within contemporary practice. The compart-mentalisation of art by region or nation that has resurfaced in recentissues of the journal – the Balkans in 2007, Socialist Eastern Europe in2009, and Turkey and the ‘very special British issue’ of 2008, to name afew – paradoxically risks binding the highlighted debates and art worksstrictly to regional contexts and relevance, even as it disseminates aware-ness of those contexts to an international readership. Old boundaries arethus potentially redrawn so as to demarcate one region or culture fromanother, provincialising art according to familiar maps and borderlinesrather than recognising how such contextual histories can leach acrossdivisions and become entangled in unexpected and complex ways.

3

Rasheed Araeen’s call for responses in this issue arguably follows a simi-lar intent, for the historical avant-garde is made both to epitomise thefailures of artistic modernism and to proffer alternative prospects forreimagining art to come. This is, of course, a story of recuperation andregeneration familiar from Walter Benjamin, Peter Bürger and theirantagonists in the American magazine

October

, relayed through anequally familiar return to the European canon of art as the basis fromwhich, or so Araeen claims, ‘humanity can move forward’. Howeverpressing his provocations may be, then, Araeen’s recourse to an avant-garde beleaguered by Europe’s ‘First “Great” War’ remains strangelyself-limiting, reinforcing the well-worn perception of European historyas both the world’s devil and its saviour, and blinded to the realities ofother modernities and other histories that can be traced from otherlocales.

4

This is not to deny the absolute significance of the politics of memorytoday, and especially within attempts to rethink the cultural conditionsof the contemporary. Yet, while I bear great sympathy for Araeen’s callsfor action, returning to specific histories of the ‘avant-garde’ remainssomewhat problematic, for it still leaves open the question of

which

histories serve as the basis for ‘legitimate’ critique, and thus

which

avant-garde, or even

whose

avant-garde, can guide new engagements with art.What knowledges and histories lie dormant outside Araeen’s, if notnecessarily

Third Text

’s, conceptual frames? And how can these beremobilised as a font for contemporary collective action not just within aspecific region but in ways that can bring still-marginalised historiestogether within truly global conceptions of art practice and art writing?This was

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’s original brief back in the 1980s. It remains anexceptionally pressing concern today, as evidenced by the ever-growing

2. Evident in such important collections of essays as Nina Möntmann, ed,

Art and Its Institutions: Current Conflicts, Critique and Collaborations

, Black Dog Publishing, London, 2006; and Gerald Raunig and Gene Ray, eds,

Art and Contemporary Critical Practice: Reinventing Institutional Critique

, Mayfly Press, London, 2009.

3. Similar analyses of provincialist hierarchies in contemporary art emerge in Leon Wainwright, ‘New Provincialisms: Curating Art of the African Diaspora’,

Radical History Review

, 103, winter 2009, pp 203–13.

4. See, for example, John Clark’s extensive analyses of differing modernities in Asia and their effects on global histories of art: John Clark,

Modern Asian Art

, Craftsman House and G+B Arts International, Sydney, 1998; and John Clark,

Histories of the Asian ‘New’: Biennales and Contemporary Asian Art

, forthcoming; or the similar remodellings in Kobena Mercer,

Cosmopolitan Modernisms

, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2005.

607

push to conceive cosmopolitan and ‘global art histories’, especially in anEnglish-language academe made even more self-conscious in the wake ofpostcolonialism.

5

Moreover, it is a concern already shared by numerousartists worldwide, including Lia Perjovschi from Bucharest and TomNicholson from Melbourne, two artists whose work I want to sketch outin the following pages. Both artists have remobilised dissident aestheticsand potentials that do not belong to the ‘avant-garde’ espoused byAraeen; they have instead sought to develop art historical constellationsthat destabilise geo-cultural hierarchies and may thereby open out alter-native paths for the ‘move forward’ that Araeen proposes.

REMOBILISING DISSIDENCE

The first such constellation is Lia Perjovschi’s

Contemporary ArtArchive/Center for Art Analysis

, or

CAA

(1985–2007), a long-termproject developed in the Romanian town of Oradea, then based in theBucharest apartment shared by the artist and her partner Dan, fromwhich it became a mobile work travelling across continents and nationalborders.

6

Since the early 1990s in particular, the

CAA

has hosted in-depth discussion projects that repeat the form and structure of discus-sions staged by nonconformist artists throughout Central and EasternEurope from the 1960s to the 1980s. This was the phenomenon ofApartment Art, or Apt-Art, in which underground or dissident gather-ings, exhibitions and discussions were held in the relatively private envi-ronment of the home rather than the public space of the city or amuseum. It was, in other words, a means of creating a quasi-publicsphere that refused to conform to Communist party ideology, but couldonly viably do so through a clandestine informality that did not raise therepressive force of Communist authorities.

7

Open Studio

, 1996, photo courtesy: Lia Perjovschi

The content of the

CAA

’s more recent conversations has been slightlydifferent from those in late Communist Apartment Art, however, forthey have generally involved discussions between people from disparatecultures about the canon of art history, its inclusions and exclusions(especially as based on nationality and gender). These debates were oftencongenial, sometimes abrasive, but always highly charged, with refer-ence points drawn from presentations by invited scholars and artists, aswell as the archive of books, videos, journals and exhibition cataloguesthat filled the Perjovschis’ home – texts donated to the Perjovschis by artinstitutions around the world and which were often far too costly formost of the

CAA

’s participants to own, given Romania’s relatively lowaverage monthly wage. These debates also informed the self-determinedconcept that the Perjovschis used to describe their artistic methodology.This was the idiosyncratic theory of dizzydence, a mix of aesthetics andpolitics that the Perjovschis defined in the following way: as a retracingof dissident pasts, within the dizzying array of received discourses towhich contemporary art seemingly must cater so as to be deemed ‘rele-vant’ in our globalised age.

8

Curators from Austria, Germany and Romania in CAA

, 2005 photo courtesy: Lia Perjovschi

The backbone of both dizzydence and the

CAA

was thus the meetingof ideas, the possibility for informed debate and the catalysing of newconceptions of art through that debate. Differences of opinion and of arthistorical knowledge were thereby foregrounded at the

CAA

through the

5. For example, James Elkins, ed,

Is Art History Global?

, Routledge, London–New York, 2007; Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann,

Toward a Geography of Art

, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2004; or the special issue of the

Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art

on ‘World Art History’, 9:1–2, 2009.

6. Interview with Dan Perjovschi, Bucharest, 30 November 2006, author’s notes.

7. Alla Rosenfeld and Norton T Dodge, eds,

Nonconformist Art: The Soviet Experience 1956-1986

, Thames & Hudson, New York, 1995

8. Interview with Dan Perjovschi, op cit; see also Kristine Stiles, ed,

States of Mind: Dan and Lia Perjovschi

, exhibition catalogue, Duke University Press, Durham, 2007.

608

Open Studio, 1996, photo courtesy: Lia Perjovschi

Curators from Austria, Germany and Romania in CAA, 2005 photo courtesy: Lia Perjovschi

609

participants’ vocal exchanges, testing how different local historiesconflicted or corresponded with each other across temporal and spatialborders, or whether various cultural politics – including dizzydence itself– could be effectual in actuality rather than in theory. On the one hand,then, it was through the connections made between the

CAA

’s discus-sants, both in its Bucharest home and through Perjovschi’s worldwideforums, that points of contiguity, difference and correlation began toemerge between peoples, their frames of knowledge and opinions. It wasthrough these conversations that awareness of cultural histories couldbubble back to the surface of thought, ensuring profound, inter-culturalconnection and friction between audiences worldwide. On the otherhand, while aesthetic politics of dissident Apartment Art and its remobil-isation as dizzydence provided the frame for these debates, the conflictsover their efficacy or viability beyond Romania were continually destabi-lised, undercut by uncertainty and their inherent and forceful fragility.Rather than a stable, canonical frame through which to present contestedhistories – a circumstance that arguably subtends Araeen’s formulationfor ‘moving forward’ – Perjovschi presented something more complex: awill to refuse her practice, or indeed marginalised nonconformist prac-tices in general, a kind of art historical hegemony, even as she drew thespectres of dissident pasts back into shadowy presence.

Such globally mobile revenants have been significant throughoutEurope since the 1980s, but most particularly in the wake of communistrepression (we can think of the work of Ilya Kabakov, the Ljubljana-basedart group IRWIN or Paris-based Thomas Hirschhorn in this regard, forexample).

9

Yet it would be wrong to brand such spectres as these asstrictly European phenomena. For a number of artists in Australia,contemporary art histories can also be traced through dissident localpasts, albeit in different manifestations from those lurking in Perjovschi’sapartment. One example of this can be found in the work of a Melbourne-based artist, Tom Nicholson, and its hauntings through the media of themeeting and the march.

Since 2003, Nicholson has proposed, and occasionally staged,collective actions that seek to retrace significant or potentially revolu-tionary events from various cultural histories. In

Marches for a MayDay, Sydney

(2005), Nicholson organised two banner marches to beheld on consecutive days at dawn through the streets of Eastern Sydney.The two routes were slightly different. The first approximated the shapeof the national border constructed between Cambodia and South Viet-nam in 1954, a line retraced across the Sydney street directory and thenthe city itself, from Waverley Cemetery to the beachside suburb ofBronte. The second route roughly charted the shape of the borderbetween Cambodia and Vietnam imposed in 1975 at the end of theVietnam War.

10

Nicholson’s banners were thus suspended within arbi-trary approximations in Australia of the shifting divisions between arti-ficially constructed nations in Asia. This suspension within the arbitrarywas matched in at least two other ways. The first relates to the imageson the banners, which were derived from Jacques-Louis David’scommemorative painting of Marat’s last breath, suspended in oil andcanvas between survival and death. Nicholson translated the image ofMarat’s face from the horizontal to a fronto-parallel plane, drawingand redrawing Marat’s visage by hand and computer to create twelve

9. I go into this aesthetic of remobilisation in greater detail in Anthony Gardner, ‘Aesthetics of Emptiness and Withdrawal: Ilya Kabakov and Actually Existing Democratization’, in

Transforming Aesthetics

, eds Jill Bennett et al, forthcoming; see also Charles Green and Anthony Gardner, ‘The Second Self: A Hostage of Cultural Memory’,

A Prior

, 16, spring 2008, pp 228–47.

10. Interview with Tom Nicholson, Melbourne, 14 August 2008, author’s notes.

610

distinct pixellations of David’s revolutionary image. These bannerswere subsequently presented in a range of contextually rich locations,highlighting the historical and interpretive polysemy of the bannermarch itself. Four were displayed atop Melbourne’s Trades Hall build-ing in 2005, suggesting correlations between Nicholson’s marches andthe trade union movements that neoliberal governments in Australiaand elsewhere have consistently sought to eradicate; another wound itsway along a gallery floor, like a trademark scroll of felt by the art-politician Joseph Beuys, but in a way that made Nicholson’s image ofthe revolutionary unviewable.

Tom Nicholson,

Marches for a May Day

, Sydney, 2005, lambda print, 136

×

125 cm, photo courtesy: Christian Capurro and courtesy of the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne and Sydney

The banners’ processions through Sydney’s streets and cemeteries metwith other contextual histories too. They at once alluded to the proces-sion of religious (and, Nicholson has noted, particularly Catholic) iconsthrough the public domain, or the photographs borne by family and

Tom Nicholson, Marches for a May Day, Sydney, 2005, lambda print, 136 × 125 cm, photo courtesy: Christian Capurroand courtesy of the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne and Sydney

611

friends of the recently deceased (a sight most familiar in recent yearsfrom news reports from Palestine, Iraq or Latin America).

11

For someviewers, the marches have recalled the pompous processions of statepower under European communism, while Nicholson’s walks throughthe Western Australian town of Kellerberrin, where he held a residencyin 2004, were interrupted by white locals asking whether he was allright, because only Indigenous people would walk across country. Thecustom for Kellerberrin’s other residents was to drive to their destina-tion, even if that destination were just down the road.

12

That something as simple as a public act of walking can bring suchdissonant perspectives together, informed as they are by varyingaesthetic and cultural customs, may clearly raise problematic view-points, as in the case of Kellerberrin.

13

For Nicholson, however, suchconjunctions can also spark potentialities, drawing together oftenisolated pasts – dissident and not, forgotten and canonical – in ways thatquestion the frames of global art histories in much the same way asTerry Smith has argued: namely, ‘[to] think difference and connection atonce … so as to capture the complexities of the relations … betweenthem’.

14

It is important to note, though, that whereas Smith has insistedon capture, Nicholson’s meetings of history are fragile and inconclusiveso that the surety of any one perspective or historical frame is perpetu-ally suspended in doubt.

This was especially clear in another work of Nicholson’s from 2005,called

2pm Sunday 25 February 1862

. Here, Nicholson presented aseries of posters proposing a march toward Acheron, a country town inAustralia’s south-east. What was unclear, however, was whether thisproposal was a memorial to, or a call to re-enact, a moment in Australiancolonial history that was of great yet forgotten importance. This was thelong march made by Simon Wonga, William Barak and other Aboriginesfrom the Wurundjeri peoples (together with the Scottish missionary JohnGreen) in the early 1860s from Wurundjeri to Taungurung country. Anumber of factors made this historical action remarkable. First, it wasmade in defiance of the Australian Aboriginal Protection Board’sdemands that the Wurundjeri people stay where they were, locked in aprison camp run by the Protection Board. Second, the crossing of bordersbetween different peoples’ countries sparked the development of a new,transcultural nation in the nineteenth century – what is called the Kulinnations of people from many different lands across the south-eastern tipof Australia. And third, this act of marching across borders ultimatelyled to the establishment of one of the few success stories from any regionof the former British Empire: the semi-autonomous camp at Coranderrk,where the Indigenous peoples were able, with relative prosperity, toconjoin their laws and practices with those of the settlers (that is, untilthe slow asphyxiation of Coranderrk by settler authorities toward theend of the nineteenth century).

15

Tom Nicholson,

2pm Sunday 25 February 1862

, 2007 (detail), charcoal drawing, stack of 2000 off-set A1 printed posters, framed photograph and found book with charcoal markings, dimensions variable, in ‘Regarding Fear and Hope’, curated by Victoria Lynn, Monash University, Museum of Art, Melbourne, photograph courtesy: Christian Capurro and the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery,Melbourne and Sydney

Regardless of whether his action was a memorial, a proposal for anevent long past or a call for re-enactment, Nicholson intended for hisproposal never to be actualised. If its retracing of dissidence in Australiasuggested a foundation in the past for future transcultural relations, thenthat foundation had been ghosted by decades of neglect, retraced in turnby long histories of racist actions, and eroded by what Nicholson callsthe ‘negligible intervention’ of the poster.

16

If the poster proposed a

11. Ibid

12. Ibid

13. This polysemy is, of course, also charted most famously in Michel de Certeau,

The Practice of Everyday Life

, trans Steven Rendall, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1984.

14. Terry Smith, ‘World Picturing in Contemporary Art: The Iconogeographic Turn’,

Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art

, 6:2, and 7:1, 2005–2006, p 27

15. On the history of Coranderrk station, see the important accounts presented in Diane Barwick,

Rebellion at Coranderrk

, Aboriginal History Inc, Canberra, 1998; and Jane Lydon,

Eye Contact: Photographing Indigenous Australians

, Duke University Press, 2005, Durham, BC, pp 33–72 especially.

16. Interview with Tom Nicholson, op cit

612

meeting and a march by Wonga, Barak and their families, then thatprojected march was not to come, but nearly a century and a half toolate. Nicholson’s proposed meeting-point of different temporalities,actions and cultures thereby remained suspended, open and precarious,an uncertainty reinforced by disputes about the actual date of this dissi-dent act. (Some accounts suggest it took place in 1862, others in 1865,while more recent historical scholarship has suggested that the marchtook place in 1860. All of these texts have, however, been consulted bythe artist, who knowingly plays on the ambiguity of dates and recordshere, destabilising historical certainty once again.)

17

In a similar vein, and again in 2005, Nicholson returned to anothermoment of transcultural possibility, pasting up thousands of postersacross Melbourne during the night over the course of ten nights. Thework, entitled

Action for 2pm Sunday 6 July 1835

, proposed a publicmeeting at a site that the Indigenous peoples of the Wathaurung countrycall Beangal, and that non-Indigenous people know as Indented Head.This was the location where a convict by the name of William Buckley(pictured on the poster), together with some of the Wathaurung peoplewith whom he ‘scandalously’ lived for thirty-two years after escapingfrom prison, met with Melbourne’s so-called ‘founder’, John Batman,to negotiate new non-violent relations between Australia’s settler and

17. Lydon, op cit, pp 60

Tom Nicholson, 2pm Sunday 25 February 1862, 2007 (detail), charcoal drawing, stack of 2000 off-set A1 printed post-ers, framed photograph and found book with charcoal markings, dimensions variable, in ‘Regarding Fear and Hope’,curated by Victoria Lynn, Monash University, Museum of Art, Melbourne, photograph courtesy: Christian Capurro andthe artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne and Sydney

613

Indigenous populations. Again, Nicholson announced a meeting ofpotential transcultural politics from the past that both could and couldnot be for the future: that could provide an alternative conception ofcontemporary social and race relations, but which was proposed for1835; and that could be seen by the public in the morning going toschool or to work, but which could just as easily be torn down or pastedover before a broad public saw the announcement. At stake, then, was adesire to test the possible tensions between the spectres of dissidenthistories – of the Wathaurung and the whitefellas, or of the Kulin andthe Greens at Coranderrk – and their evanescence in the present, a stakethat Nicholson made especially clear in a time-lapse photograph of himpasting up a pair of posters as a trace of these haunting happenings inthe middle of the night.

Tom Nicholson,

After Action for 2pm Sunday 6 July 1835

, 2005, Lambda print, 130

×

100 cm, photograph courtesy: Christian Capurro and the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne and Sydney

‘MOVING FORWARD’ FROM THE EDGE

The question to ask now is: What actually emerges from Perjovschi’s andNicholson’s practices? Each remobilises forgotten or nonconformist

Tom Nicholson, After Action for 2pm Sunday 6 July 1835, 2005, Lambda print, 130 × 100 cm, photograph courtesy:Christian Capurro and the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne and Sydney

614

histories from their specific local contexts: for Nicholson, proposals forpast collective action, especially between settler and displaced peoples inAustralia; for Perjovschi, a reframing of Apartment Art from late-communist Romania. Each draws these histories together with estab-lished canons of art or situations familiar from other cultures, so as totest the possible connections and frictions that can emerge throughcontiguity. For Perjovschi again, this has comprised dialogues and vigor-ous disputations within the

CAA

, so as to re-evaluate the multiple trajec-tories of art’s histories according to the perceptions presented by peoplefrom different locations worldwide. For Nicholson, the concurrence ofhis banner marches and proposed meetings refuses to divorce local tradeunion movements from the image of Marat or processions of sacred andsecular icons. Moreover, if the collective march of workers cannot bethought of in isolation from other historical contexts, as suggested bytheir retracing of imposed borders between countries, then perhaps wecannot isolate them from other historical marches, such as the Wurundj-eris’ defiance in crossing borders so as to develop the Kulin nations andtheir collective autonomy.

Perhaps of greatest importance, though, are the possibilities forcontemporary art history that emerge from these artists’ works. This isnot just in terms of the contiguities within each singular practice but, inthe spirit of their methods,

between

each singular practice, even when(as in this instance) the artists may know little of each other. Whatmight it mean to think of the Bucharest-based Perjovschi and theMelbourne-based Nicholson together? The responses – or, rather, thefurther questions – may span a continuum from the broad to the rela-tively specific: Is it possible to consider the defiance of Australia’s colo-nial norms – such as the coexistence of the Wathaurung and Buckley, orthe development of Coranderrk – alongside distinct actions of dissi-dence toward the communist state? Is the conjunction of these historiesa sharing of singular contexts, or a levelling of histories for the sake ofcorrelations between art from disparate parts of the globe? What mightthis contiguity reveal about the afterimage of previously distinctdiscourses, of postcommunism and postcolonialism, and the correla-tions or ongoing frictions between them? And why are these spectralreturns so insistent now?

For Jacques Derrida, these remainders from the past were alsoreminders of sorts: a reminder that, despite the implosion of Europe’sEastern Bloc, alternatives to a triumphalist neoliberalism were still possi-ble, that new politics could still emerge to counter history’s putative end.These were what he called the spectres of Marx, lurking within andthrough the globalisation of North Atlantic capital.

18

For DipeshChakrabarty, these remainders and their reframing of dominant socialpower and

its

construction of history were already considered by Marx:they were, Chakrabarty suggested, spectres

within

Marx.

19

For theartists in this response, however, these hauntings are perhaps betterunderstood as spectres

after

Marx, or the effects of different notions ofMarx. They are the ghosts of nonconformism to communist repressionand of workers’ collective actions for new conditions of labour. Indeed,these spectres are not just after Marx, but spectres before Marx (as withWilliam Buckley) or well beyond Marx’s conceptions (as with Wonga,Barak and the persistence of the Kulin peoples). They are the revenants

18. Jacques Derrida,

Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International

, trans Peggy Kamuf, Routledge, New York–London, 1994

19. Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Universalism and Belonging in the Logic of Capital’,

Public Culture

, 12:3, 2000, pp 668–72, 676

615

of displaced pasts from displaced ‘peripheries’, drawn together beyondthe periods and places to which they have hitherto been confined.

At the same time, though, we should remember that these spectresneither speak for each other – the best ghost stories, after all, alwayshave their own elements of surprise – nor do they speak over each other.Unlike proposals to ‘move forward’ by returning to the avant-gardecanon, the practices of Perjovschi and Nicholson are too precarious toinsist on any inherent stability in art’s histories past and thus to come.While these practices present contiguities between specific local historiesand other cultural contexts, the disputes, the delays and the surfeit ofpossible referents through which these spectres return undermine anystable solidity in perspectives of history. This is not a weakness within orbetween these artists, though, but may be a significant strength. Forwhat these contiguous histories may present is a fragile chorus ofmemory that, though recounting different pasts in diverse languages, canpotentially come together to pierce the increasingly amnesic conditionsof global neoliberalism. In the process, they may also reveal a hint ofwhat knowledges still lie within art, how we are to push them forward,and thus what contemporary, critical and truly global art histories havethe potential to be.