Cargo cult in New York
Paraculture, an exhibition of eight Australian artists, shown at the Tribeca Gallery in New York earlier this year, is part of an exchange between Artists Space in New York and Art Space in Sydney. The American work will be shown here later this year. Paraculture presents an interesting forum in which to explore the issues of center/periphery, translation, contextuality and internationalism, those problems which haunt particularly shows that cross international and cultural boundaries. Thomas McEvilley recently referred to these issues in a reply to critiques of the international show Magiciens de la terre (Magicians of the Earth) held in Paris last year:
All the criticism of the show that I have seen fails to confront the monumental fact that this was the first major exhibition consciously to attempt to discover a postcolonialist way to exhibit first and third world objects together ... The question is this and this only: as we enter the global village of the 90s, would any of us rather that the door remained closed(?).1
While McEvilley's polemic obscures a number of important issues he does raise the central problem: how does one curate international shows in the light of the contemporary saturation of world power? The recent Paraculture exhibition is no less interesting than the Magiciens show from this standpoint.
Like 'Magicians', Paraculture is an attempt to exhibit work within the framework of polarizations set up by imperialism and colonization. Unlike Mr. McEvilley I do not think that the world is in a post colonial period; given the contemporary economic situation I would suggest rather that imperialism since World War Two has shifted from a reliance on political strategy to that which coerces primarily through economic