Works-of-Art vs. Artefacts
(Blood, honey, guns'n'pumpkins: Exhibiting the Balkans)

1.

In 1911, the young Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (later Le Corbusier) hit the road to visit many parts of Europe that he marked on his map either by I (Industry), K (Culture) or F (Folklore). As all parts of France and Germany, and most parts of Central Europe had been marked with Is or Ks, the further East Le Corbusier went the more the letter F appeared. When he came down to Belgrade, he was disillusioned by "this ridiculous capital, dishonest, dirty and disorganized", but attracted by exquisite pots, costumes, carpets and musical instruments he encountered in the Ethnographic Museum. By following the origin of some of these objects he found himself greatly enjoying the countryside and the authentic, "natural society", coloured by "Tzigane" music, ruby-red wine and chamomile fragrance. The folklore he appreciated signified for him the celebrated defence "from the invading and dirty Europeanization". These comments warned about the perils of modernization in regions still unprepared for it, and where the folkloric, ethno tradition, appears to be the only authentic culture capable of producing cultural value. In the course of the 20th century the distinction between inauthentic, imported modernist culture that produced local simulations, and the authentic, pre-modern, ethno-culture, influenced the generalised reading of culture in the Balkans, as if there was no universalist potential of Modernity, and as if there could be no Modern art produced in economically under-developed countries.
As a consequence, the works of art (which usually means paintings, sculptures and other works produced within the framework of "Western" modernism) were not ascribed any international market value, but as artefacts ("man-made objects charged with cultural meaning and offering indications on a larger cultural situation"), they were considered quite valuable. This has created tensions that are still shaping decisions on the value of works to be shown in artistic context but coming from economically underdeveloped societies. To illustrate this, one can evoke the almost proverbial figure of the Western curator traveling to economically underdeveloped countries (usually classified under geographic terms as are "the East" or "the South") and trying to find art for some exhibition in the West. This curator, if traveling to Africa for instance, would meet two types of art, as it was nicely put by Igor Zabel:

One was the product of Western-influenced intellectual elites, of people who considered Western forms in society, economy and also art to be universal. The curators from the West, however, could hardly see "authentic" art in these works. Most probably, they understood them as provincial copies of Western originals; but for them they were non-authentic not only because they were copies, but also because they were signs of loss of the roots, traditions, and thus the very identity… It is not a surprise then, that they preferred artists who were openly using the "indigenous" traditions; for them this was the genuine, real African art. Local intellectuals ("Westernizers") were, of course, shocked: for them, these works were extremely bad, non-authentic folklorist art, a false, nostalgic image which does not correspond to the reality of the developing, modern Africa any more.
Under these circumstances, to be progressive means to be "inauthentic", whereas to be locked within ethno-myths means to be "authentic". As this tension was recognized, the curatorial tendency has recently been to reconcile this division and to combine both aspects in order to create new artistic value. This tendency marked also the recent interest in the Balkans and their culture. If we take for example exhibitions like In search of Balkania (curated by Peter Weibel, Eda Cufer and Roger Conover) in Graz (2002) or Blood and Honey (curated by Harald Szeeman) in Vienna (2003), there has been an ongoing perplexity between expectations of "art-ness" (a search for works of art that fit the "standards" of the West, with its historical narrative and market elaboration) and expectations of "ethno-ness": a search for authentic artefacts that reveal the mythical status of this region as defined by the very titles of these exhibitions. As Balkania is a desired mythical territory (unavoidably resembling Ruritania from the novel, and later the film, The Prisoner of Zenda ), we enter the site of imagination that situates political and historical conditions as meta-political and meta-historical. Blood and Honey - the meaning of two Turkish words, Bal and Kan, that are allegedly the etymological root of "Balkan" -, again turns this region into a realm of the myth, that serves as an archetypal "explanation" of that frightening combination of ongoing conflict and violence (as if this is reserved exclusively for this region and not an overall condition of humankind) and sweetness of fantasy of some lost Arcadia. Both exhibitions and their politics of display are attempts to locate the potential market value of art practices coming from this region by exploiting the trends of commodification of ethno as cultural genre.
Like the young Jeanneret, curators coming from developed market-economy countries have usually been fascinated not so much with art works that they encountered (seen as more or less successful "copies" of Western Modernism), but with manifestations of ethno-culture that coloured and made exciting their visits. Jeanneret's fascination with 'Tzigane' music is now standardised, and the most internationally successful cultural products exploit this fascination: films by Emir Kusturica or music by Goran Bregovic. The same applies for 'authentic' living environments that combine mise-en-scene of pre-modernism with mise-en-scene of legacies of real-Socialism. The desired objects are those that illustrate the overall cultural condition, but made and presented in the field of art. This has produced the situation in which the figure of the artist is seen in accordance with the dominant mode of an "art-works producing subject", but his or her product is taken under consideration as an artefact. I think that this distinction is crucial. The core of this perplexity is in the very status of modes of display structured in Modernism and the colonialist legacy that is now questioned but still instrumental in processing cultural value.

2.

When taking an example of Mark Rothko's legacy (his works were dispersed in a great variety of art museums so that as many people as possible would have access to them), Mieke Bal argues the following:

The dispersal of the works of a great innovator of Western art seems to represent the exact opposite of the concentration of "ethnic" art in Western museums under the deceptive denominator of "artefacts". Yet … this dispersal has something in common with the colonialist legacy of the ethnographic museums. What happens when works like Rothko's figure, ideally, in every art museum of the world is that a single meaning, a particular aesthetic conception, one concept of what is "art", is repeated and thereby somehow imposed in many different contexts. Thus an essentialist and centripetal idea of artistic value is produced or at least underwritten by a seemingly generous gesture. For those who believe in Rothko's greatness this may be self-evidently right and no problem at all. But that self-evidence is precisely the issue… Semiotically speaking, this omnipresence of Rothko sustains a particular strategy of cultural imperialism, namely repetition. Indeed, by the repeated encounter with the same style or concept, the public is bound to get used to the idea which the particular work represents.

What is at stake here is first of all an analysis of the ideological distinction between ethnographic and art museums. The ethnographic museum collects artefacts, man-made objects charged with cultural meaning and offering indications on a larger cultural situation. The art museum collects works of art that are viewed as "standing for an aesthetic", they are "considered metaphors, transferring their specific aesthetic to the one current sufficient to make the work readable, but readable as art, regardless of what it could tell us about the culture it comes from." The ethnographic museum is reserved for art that does not have any ultimate historical meaning, that is "out of the pale of history" (Hegel), and that is based upon the notion of difference. The art museum is based on recognition and sameness. Regardless of cultural contexts, it produces a single meaning. The fact that modernist art is still viewed as incomprehensible for many museum visitors bespeaks the very symptom of the Modern Art museum: the works collected and exhibited do not indicate relations between a culture and its artefact, but act as against it, in the province of the personal story of an author or of an "universal" story of aesthetic and its development. The art context generates the revival of ethnographic colonialism through re-affirming the anthropological notion of "cold cultures" that try to preserve their cultural identity by constantly reproducing the past. "Cold cultures" may have now reached the stage of producing works that might be situated in the known history and in the museum that will define something as art.

The distinction between ethno and art is maintained when applied to products of Western culture. It is almost impossible to persuade, say, a Swiss artist, that his art should be read through analysis of traditional (authentic?) ethno environments represented by cows on high mountains and cuckoo clocks, i.e. this may only happen if he or she is deliberately playing with this myth. Yet Balkan artists have to play with their myths in one way or another if they want to be interpreted at all. As a reward they are institutionally elevated into an art context and not presented in an ethnographic context that they would presumably find inappropriate or even offensive. Again there is only one figure of authorisation here: the curator. And there is only the aesthetic criterion (taste) that remains instrumental in proclaiming an artefact as a work of art. In this signifying chain, it is the curator/ ethnographer that extends the traditional role of connoisseur whilst new artefacts are added and classified in accordance with the ideology of celebrating difference, otherness, and exoticism. The contemporary art curator elevates cold artefacts into warm works of art.