Unsettled Visions: Contemporary Asian American Artists and the Social Imaginary - Brossura

Machida, Margo

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0822342049 ISBN 13: 9780822342045

Casa editrice: Duke Univ Pr, 2009

Riassunto

In Unsettled Visions, the activist, curator, and scholar Margo Machida presents a pioneering, in-depth exploration of contemporary Asian American visual art. Machida focuses on works produced during the watershed 1990s, when surging Asian immigration had significantly altered the demographic, cultural, and political contours of Asian America, and a renaissance in Asian American art and visual culture was well underway. Machida conducted extensive interviews with ten artists working during this transformative period: women and men of Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Vietnamese, Korean, and Japanese descent, most of whom migrated to the United States. In dialogue with the artists, Machida illuminates and contextualizes the origins of and intent behind bodies of their work. Unsettled Visions

is an engrossing look at a vital art scene and a subtle account of the multiple, shifting meanings of “Asianness” in Asian American art.

Analyses of the work of individual artists are grouped around three major themes that Asian American artists engaged with during the 1990s: representations of the Other; social memory and trauma; and migration, diaspora, and sense of place. Machida considers the work of the photographers Pipo Nguyen-duy and Hanh Thi Pham, the printmaker and sculptor Zarina Hashmi, and installations by the artists Tomie Arai, Ming Fay, and Yong Soon Min. She examines the work of Marlon Fuentes, whose films and photographs play with the stereotyping conventions of visual anthropology, and prints in which Allan deSouza addresses the persistence of Orientalism in American popular culture. Machida reflects on Kristine Aono’s museum installations embodying the multigenerational effects of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and on Y. David Chung’s representations of urban spaces transformed by migration in works ranging from large-scale charcoal drawings to multimedia installations and an “electronic rap opera.”

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

Margo Machida is Associate Professor of Art History and Asian American Studies at the University of Connecticut. She is a co-editor of Fresh Talk/Daring Gazes: Conversations on Asian American Art, winner of the Association of Asian American Studies’ 2005 Cultural Studies Book Award. Machida curated the groundbreaking 1994 Asia Society group exhibition ASIA/AMERICA: Identities in Contemporary Asian American Art. She is a co-founder of the Asian Contemporary Art Consortium and Godzilla: Asian American Art Network (1990–2001).

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UNSETTLED VISIONS

contemporary Asian American artists and the social imaginaryBy Margo Machida

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2008 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4204-5

Contents

list of illustrations......................................................................................ixpreface....................................................................................................xiiiacknowledgments............................................................................................xixintroduction Art, Asian America, and the social imaginary a poetics of positionality.....................11 A Play of Positionalities reconsidering identification..................................................172 Othering primitivism, orientalism, and stereotyping.....................................................573 Trauma, Social Memory, and Art...........................................................................1204 Migration, Mixing, and Place.............................................................................194Epilogue toward an Ongoing Dialogue.......................................................................271notes......................................................................................................283bibliography...............................................................................................321index......................................................................................................353

Chapter One

A Play of Positionalities reconsidering identification

This book takes it as axiomatic that contemporary identifications and affiliations are complex, multidimensional, and fluid-a continually evolving play of positions constituted through and derived from transactions with language, art, customs, ideas, politics, spirituality, and history. Identities are aptly described as names for the divergent ways we are positioned both by and within accounts of bygone times. Simultaneously mediated by tradition and change, interpellated by operations of power, and increasingly shaped by the imperatives of a globally dispersed yet ever more integrated world economy, such positionings index the continuum of circumstances, experiences, and narratives by which individuals and groups both make and take meaning from their times, their journeys around the planet, and the places in which they live.

For my purposes, a positional framework needs to be expansive and open ended, providing a context for grounded inquiry and ongoing dialogue. At the heart of my investigation is the question of how artists of Asian heritage, whether foreign or U.S. born, conceptualize the world and position themselves as cultural and historical subjects through the symbolic languages and media of visual art. This approach to positionality must be responsive to the contingent, shifting, and frequently ambivalent nature of social and personal identities in a multiply determined world, and to new ideas emerging from arenas of intellectual discourse. It should also allow scope for acknowledging the realms of the emotive and affective, including the nuances and richness of collective imaginings. It should recognize the need for belonging, stability, continuity, and origins, and the impact of individual standpoint and agency on both the artistic imagination and the cultural record. Although not in itself a theory, the critical resonances and antireductionist implications of positionality make it a robust device for exploring and mapping visual art and artistic practices informed by a poetics of self- and collective identification. Positionality also takes into account the self-conscious, and at times quite idiosyncratic, subjectivities through which it is given expression. The term likewise seeks to denote and acknowledge the significant shifts that have occurred in the demography and cultural politics of Asian America over the last four decades, which in turn helps to trace and contextualize the artworks and concerns of the artists in this study.

Since the 1970s, the term positionality has been used to frame a spectrum of social critiques that point to the situatedness of our knowledge of and actions in the world, which are intertwined with different places, shifting contexts, and unequal access to power and resources-including expressive resources made available through educational, gender, and class privilege, among other factors that are pithily referred to as "positions of enunciation." This move to rigorously scrutinize the epistemic, material, and discursive positionings of oneself and of others, and to grapple with realms of difference within and between groups, has had transformative effects in the academy and on post-1960s social movements more generally. One thinks, for instance, of the foundational challenge posed in the 1980s by the critique of hegemonic Western feminisms that would take "woman" as a naturalized category of analysis, thereby assuming the homogeneity of women as a group. In a similar spirit, this project (and the decade of research during the 1990s on which it is primarily based) insists on the recognition and careful elucidation of different positions articulated by artists of Asian background through their work-ranging from strong assertions of ethnic heritage and community, and unifying cultural symbols, to deconstructive critiques and antiessentialist postures.

The political space of the nation that Asians negotiate is usefully framed as simultaneously "juridically legislated, territorially situated, and culturally embodied." While each of these realms must be considered, the arena of national culture is where individuals are politically constituted as "Americans." Although Asians have historically been positioned, both legally and culturally, as outsiders to the United states, this position can be conceived as generative, in that the Asian American presence disrupts and challenges dominant representations of a unified, homogenous nation-state. Rather than entailing the recovery of some originary or essential social categories, such an evocation of Asian American culture as a productive site of alterity-one that is not simply imposed from without but also continuously constructed from within-meshes with and helps to contextualize the various strategies of agency and cultural intervention with which the artists in this study are actively engaged.

Matters of identity, identification, and affiliation continue to galvanize many Asian American artists, despite the prevalence of contemporary discourses that would discount the validity of such conceptions. Continued attention to positions based on social identification is motivated not only by the desire to retain cultural and political agency, and by the necessities of resistance against an ascribed status, but by the fact that identity is generally deemed foundational as a source of meaning. Indeed, the quest for larger identifications and affiliations is integral to the quintessentially human activity of trying to make sense of the world and our place within it. For example, the Filipino American artist and filmmaker Marlon Fuentes remarks, "I've been using my art in trying to create stakeposts or outposts, kind of an orientating device.... the images that I've been making are a way of reconciling myself to my own past as well as my own culture." That "orientating device" can draw on many elements for its imaginative constructions, each feeding into the ever more prolific and diverse production of Asian Americans in the arts. Alongside ancestry, culture, geography, history, and nationality, identities are constructed from multiple sources, including collective memory, class, caste, and gender hierarchies, apparatuses of power, ideological and religious beliefs, cultural conventions and expressions (including literary, artistic, musical, and culinary), and personal longings and fantasies.

Visual vocabularies arising from an ongoing search for self- and collective definition constitute what I term "iconographies of presence," which Asian American artists use in their work to invoke cultural commonalities and kindred histories in symbolically claiming a place for themselves in the social imaginary of the West. Whether in manifesting the sensibilities and struggles of Asians in U.S. society, or in aiming to transform from within the discourses and practices of Western art, such themes have the capacity to connect Asians in the United states to one another, and to communities of color both in the United states and abroad. By also introducing visual idioms, symbolic systems, and frameworks of reference from non-Western contexts or heritages (no matter how "modern" or hybrid), these artists broaden discourse and potentially expand the imaginative capacity to envision the world in more-complex terms as we must decipher the "image banks" of other cultures-including those within our national borders. In the process, questions are raised about the possibility of alternate commonalities and expressive conventions among peoples and cultures that are not necessarily conceived through, or directed toward, a nation's dominant culture. Moreover, since the visual tradition of a culture gives tangible form to the ways in which it sees itself and its worth in relation to other cultures, the significance of contemporary visual art in a globalized environment is not simply reducible to "formalist notions of aesthetic presence" or distancing abstractions like the autonomy of the art object.

While a shared heritage hardly means that a group speaks with a single voice, in light of the West's history of efforts to subdue and control others, the concept of a group possessing its own expressive capital can be extraordinarily meaningful to those historically denied access to adequate means of self- and collective representation. Contrary to expectations, such lines of inquiry do not inevitably encourage cultural polarization and division in their attempts to invoke and project the images and voices of cultural identities long denied, appropriated, or relegated to the margins. Rather, works by Asian American artists, as well as other artists of color, can help to instigate a re-examination of how U.S. culture is conceived by pointing equally to ever-growing realms of difference and plurality and to new possibilities of achieving knowledge and understanding across difference. Likewise, they move us to consider how such art has typically been positioned in art historical and critical discourses, which in turn calls into question the limited canonical grounds on which art (and the artists who produced it) have often been assigned value and place in the social imaginary.

Following a roughly chronological trajectory, in this chapter I review significant developments and tensions that have arisen around conceptions of Asian American art, and issues of identity and identification more generally. Drawing on recent writings by curators, artists, critics, and academics, I consider various pivotal moments, social and intellectual crosscurrents, contestatory methodologies, critiques, and responses that bear upon this contemporary cultural production, as well as on its circulation and valorization within the sphere of the United states and its prevailing "ethnoracial moral order." Although hardly comprehensive, this review nevertheless draws attention to certain salient and often convergent issues in Asian American communities, the U.S. art world, and the academy, while also offering a sampling of views on a swiftly changing milieu in which many are both participants and interpreters. Intended to be accessible to a nonspecialist readership, the remarks in this chapter are organized in sections that are broadly reflective of major sites in which the meanings of contemporary Asian American art have been constituted: identity politics, the community arts movement, and multiculturalism; globalization, localism, and the U.S. art world; and critical theory and articulations of difference. Throughout, the intent is to open up new spaces for critical discourse, by suggesting ways in which prior conceptions of multiculturalism, identity, and Asian American-ness can be fruitfully reconsidered and revitalized as part of a more heterogeneous array of cultural and critical practices-even if the disputes surrounding them can never be entirely resolved.

Setting the Stage

The growth of migration and the impact of accelerated transnational interchange, mutual redefinition, and hybridization are evident in various Asian American communities, transforming contemporary political, cultural, material, and intellectual life. In this volatile terrain where the global and local converge, and interculturality and polyculturalism have become bywords, social and cultural identification is continuously being reconstituted-especially as the United states increasingly turns its gaze toward Asia, with the rise of the Pacific rim as a major economic, political, and cultural zone.

Although questions of social identity and identification are compelling concerns for many in the twenty-first century, major alterations to the Asian American environment have particularly galvanized artists, writers, and scholars to vigorously question how they are defined and define themselves as individuals and groups-including notions of who, in the U.S. context, is recognized as Asian and who is not. With the emergence, moreover, of conceptions of multiculturalism in the 1980s, and the resultant backlash against these initiatives in the domestic sphere, much public controversy has centered on the potential divisiveness of difference as a defining concept-tensions reflected in ongoing debates about the significance of ethnicity, race, and non-Western cultural expressions in the arts. In this highly charged climate, artists, curators, critics, and scholars must deal with the pressures of a political and discursive environment in which art that asserts cultural and/or racialized difference-especially when it takes an overtly critical stance on domestic politics-is often dismissed.

At the same time, the advent of critical theory and the subsequent development of cultural and American studies inaugurated a significant trend toward rethinking the paradigms that informed ethnic studies and race/ identity politics both in the United states and abroad. Moving away from pluralism and multiculturalism, the focus shifted instead to how individuals and groups are privileged or marginalized by the ways in which a culture's dominant institutions construct, dictate, and enforce conceptions of truth and normalcy. One of the effects of these intellectual developments has been a heightened awareness, among artists, of the politics of representation and the role of visual culture in the construction of social identifications. the most fundamental notions of how individual and collective identities are conceived and constituted have been challenged on political, theoretical, and cultural grounds and remain a matter for sharp debate within both mainstream and alternative circles in the United states. As the terms by which a sense of Asian identification were understood and validated in this society were increasingly contested and destabilized, the expression "Asian American" itself-seen by some critics as an outworn label denoting a generalized Other-became one with which growing numbers found fault.

As a result of the convergence, in the 1990s, of postmodern critical currents and the often-envenomed rhetorics generated by the "culture wars," issues of difference, identity, and diversity in the United states are today commonly conflated with extreme forms of ethnic and racial separatism, radical counterassertions of non-Western and indigenous cultural superiority and primacy, and "victim politics." symptomatic of these developments is an often-quoted 1995 essay that expresses resentment toward artists who are perceived as manipulating or pressuring audiences into feeling sorry for them by making their "victimhood" the centerpiece of their work-an approach that allegedly puts such work literally "beyond criticism." the stark term "victim art" continues to resonate today, as it has been invoked to denigrate various types of politicized work, suggesting that these narratives of identity, hardship, and struggle are defined solely by appeals to recognize the pain, violence, and defamation inflicted on the artists' respective groups.

Aside from the foregoing types of criticism, which have come to dominate public discourse, attempts to enfold different populations under the rubrics of "Asian," "Asian American," or "Asian and Pacific islander" have also met with intense scrutiny from various ethnic communities. Such attitudes reflect larger intertwined debates, within and between Asian communities, regarding which peoples and cultures are perceived as Asian in the national imaginary, how different Asian groups define what is Asian in this society, and how those groups choose to define themselves.

Given the polarizing impact of such a discordant intellectual and political climate, even those in the American art world who do find conceptions of who "we" are and with whom we ought to identify meaningful nevertheless feel a deep ambivalence and discomfort in recognizing that aspects of these discourses and their representations can indeed be problematic. As a result, many contemporary critics are inclined to equate any interest in cultural specificity with cultural essentialism and cultural nationalism. In treading through such a dense political and intellectual minefield, artists and scholars alike find themselves subjected to competing and often overlapping pressures from various quarters of the art world and the academy, as well as from a host of Asian American groups and individuals with differing and sometimes antagonistic agendas.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from UNSETTLED VISIONSby Margo Machida Copyright © 2008 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Duke Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2009
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0822342049
• ISBN 13: 9780822342045
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 362
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile