Globalisation and its Discontents - Generosity and Exchange

Fisher Jean, "Toward a Metaphysics of Shit", Documenta 11. Platform 5. The Catalog, Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2002, pp. 63-70.

Jean Fisher lectures critical studies at Middlesex University and the Royal College of Art in London. She is editor of Global Visions: A New Internationalism in the Visual Arts and Reverberation: Tactics of Resistance, Forms of Agency in Trans/Cultural Practices. Her discussion on Globalisation and its Discontents alludes to Sigmund Freud’s book on Civilization and its Discontents, where the individual quest is for freedom, and civilisations contrary demand is for conformity and repression.(1) According to Fisher, the by product of globalization (and civilization) is the production of ‘waste and wasteland: an abject excess of unproductive expenditure – of shit, garbage, disorder, discarded ideas, histories, ideologies, and people’ as a result of the global world of capitalism'.(2) The discontents or otherness expose unresolved conflicts and disjunctions in cultural flow in different contexts. The complexities of globalization and the disjunctures between economies, cultures and politics have been given a framework of cultural flows by Arjun Appadurai. As professor of Social Sciences in New York he explores the fluid nature of the five dimensions of cultural flow as categorized by ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes and ideoscapes.(3) The suffix of scapes points to the fluid nature of these cultural flows in a disjunctive global world resulting in cultural chaos, fractal societies and discontent. Fisher comments that this is fertile ground for art that deals with untranslatable, postcolonial, transcultural issues that attempt to connect a past with the present through lost histories, ideologies and people.

Fisher posed the question of whether art can function as an effective mediator of change or resistance of hegemonic power.(4) Art can act as an effective mediator of change through the universal desire for exchange. This can be achieved through actions of forms of expression and collaboration to contribute to a reinvention of humanist principles of ethics and justice. Politically motivated artists like Fiona Jack desire to rewrite history through ‘tricky tactics’ as a potential agent for change. She seeks to do what Richard Serres identifies as the universal desire for exchange that depends on networks of communication, differing methods of communication, for translation of concepts and the expansion of vocabularies and experiences.(5) Jack’s ideas around borders and boundaries are played out, or translated in projects both on the local and global front. Her work is marked by anti-authoritarianism, often a protest action or critique on post-colonialism. In April 2008, Jack explored ideas about land ownership and Auckland history in collaboration with iwi from Ngati Whatua o Orakei as part of a documentary by TVNZ. The tribe were squeezed by urban encroachment and lost the last remaining block of tribal land at Okahu Bay. With the exchange of knowledge with local iwi, Jack rewrote the history of the people and ‘brought to life the ashes of Ngati Whatua o Orakei’.(6) It was a grass roots protest action of rebuilding a palisade at Okahu Bay that had been burnt to the ground by the Crown in 1943. The project connected the past to the present to mediate the production of new insights and relations through exchange of knowledge of the histories and ideologies. Jack works through generosity and exchange to produce a new language. She has long engaged with the use of mediascapes, such as TV or billboards to achieve a political voice to expose unresolved conflicts and cultural exchange through the media. Her art is a successful mediator that anchors the actions of the hegemonic power of the past in the present, through generosity and exchange of knowledge.

(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_and_its__Discontents.htm. 10 August 2008.
(2) Fisher Jean, ‘Toward a Metaphysics of Shit’, Documenta 11. Platform 5. The Catalog, Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2002, pp. 63.
(3) Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation, ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996, pp.37.
(4) Fisher Jean, ‘Toward a Metaphysics of Shit’, Documenta 11. Platform 5. The Catalog, Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2002, pp. 64.
(5) Fisher Jean, ‘Toward a Metaphysics of Shit’, Documenta 11. Platform 5. The Catalog, Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2002, pp. 64.
(6) http://www.nzherald.co.nz/topic/story.cfm?c_id=355&objectid=10505261. 10 August 2008.