<eyebeam><blast> museums on the move

[Hans Ulrich Obrist <HUO@compuserve.com>]

Concerning the museum discussion: 
http://www.artnode.se/artorbit


The globalizing modernization as a form of social, economic and cultural
development involves processes of "invasion" of international capitals
and global capitalism. It also unavoidably opens up a window towards
Western cultural modes and values promoted by the late Capitalist media,
especially electronic media. These media have been considerably
influenced by the Western modes and turned towards a commodity
orientated mode of production and consumption. This is obviously opposed
to the established official ideology and its implicit cultural values.
Confrontations and conflicts between the two camps have become a driving
force in Asian urban cultural life for the last decade. There is a
tension between mondernisation and tradition which is embodied by
constant shifts of openness, freedom claims, criticism, oppression and
resistance... However, in the long run, and for the common interests
which are mainly to increase the condition of investment and
development, local and national authorities and international
corporations have tried to go around the ideological obstacles in order
to attain a certain compromise. Culture, or creative activities,
including art, and especially popular culture and media, are being
deliberately sterilized into commonly acceptable and profitable
formulas. One of them, as a Hong Kong television tycoon puts it, is that
the TV programs should be "no news, no sex, no violence." One of the
results is that, since the early 1990's the Hong Kong based Star TV has
succeeded in covering almost all major cities in Asia with its
spectacularly aseptic entertaining through music videos or soap operas.
All this actually means an indirect, invisible and almost "comfortable"
censorship and deliberated reduction of spaces for  non-commercial
cultural activities. Especially endangered are those for experimental
activities and critical voices. On the contrary to the boom of new
skylines full of high rising buildings and commercial spaces, artists
and intellectuals are losing spaces and infrastructures for creation. An
increasingly important new task for Asian artists now is to invent
alternative "sub-spaces" or non-institutional "artist-run-spaces". This
is often spontaneous, ephemeral, highly flexible and even immaterial.
Process counts more than the object. Good examples are artists' museums
such as Tsuyoshi Ozawa's "Nasubi Gallery" or Judy Freya Sibuyan's
"Scapular Nomad Gallery". Both structures are extremely flexible museums
without fixed locations which migrate within the city  and permanently
question their own parameters. They are situated inbetween  situations -
they are "Museums on the Move". Other artists like Lin Yilin, Shi Yong,
Chen Shao Xiong, Liang Juhui or Arahmaniani develop direct tactics of
intervention in urban space through their mostly ephemeral actions.These
gestures are often temporal interruptions of the high speed of urban
mutation in order to open a kind of "emptiness", or moments of
suspension, in the very centre of construction turbulence:
"Detournements", supplements , shifts or disturbances amidst traffic and
business. In other works, alternative languages, informal expressions
and temporal actions are used as effective strategies of intervention.
The urban flaneurs are now turned into city guerrillas or what Geert
Lovink calls "camcorder kamikazes" who are rebellious users of the
camera instead of passive consumers (see David d'Heilly or Ellen Pau).
The heroes of tactical media are all kinds of activists, nomadic media
warriors, pranxters, hackers, street rappers....

From Hou Hanru & Hans Ulrich Obrist , Cities on the Move
http://www.artnode.se/artorbit/



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