{"id":429,"date":"2021-07-20T15:00:46","date_gmt":"2021-07-20T07:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/caarchives.org\/?p=429"},"modified":"2022-02-07T16:40:14","modified_gmt":"2022-02-07T08:40:14","slug":"beyond-the-global-vision","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/caarchives.org\/beyond-the-global-vision\/","title":{"rendered":"Beyond the Global Vision | Ding-Liang Chen"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\u3010<\/strong>by<\/em> Ding-Liang Chen, June 2021\u3011<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Although the projects of modernization in the past centuries have promised a more progressive world, such a globalizing force has resulted in various forms of precarities, ranging from environmental crises, uneven developments, to ideological disparities. In addressing the incommensurability \u201cbetween the ideal of the global and the reality of planet Earth\u201d in their curatorial statement of the 2020 Taipei Biennial, Bruno Latour and Martin Guinard invite the audience to not only ponder on such divided realities from differentiated ideas and viewpoints, but return to the material composition, elemental organization, and terrestrial condition of the Earth. Such a critical transition, as the curators believe, might enable a productive negotiation between antagonistic standpoints, and gesture \u201ctoward a \u2018terrestrial\u2019 mode of existence\u201d (n.p.).<\/p>\n\n\n\n The reception of the biennale, however, has emerged otherwise. Most of the reviews foreground the epistemological conundrum of the corresponding relationship between the curators\u2019 thesis statement and the artists\u2019 aesthetic production. With \u201cthe seemingly endless halls of infographics, sleek screens displaying statistics, wall-text art, science-fair projects, and documentation of good deeds performed,\u201d art critic Travis Jeppesen suggests, the biennale simply stands as a blatant performance of Latour\u2019s theoretical frameworks, while lacking necessary critical agency to reframe these Western narratives through localized artistic imagination and engagement (n.p.).<\/p>\n\n\n\n The biennale, in this regard, seems to be a curatorial version of what philosopher Ian Bogost terms \u201cLatour litany\u201d in Alien Phenomenology<\/em>. In coining the phrase \u201cLatour litany,\u201d Bogost foregrounds a specific kind of writing strategy that takes into consideration the diversity of things and objects, with a significant effect of decentering the humanistic sovereignty (50-51). The long-winded listing of critical jargons and their supporting evidence shown through artworks and technical objects in the biennale has ironically consolidated Latour\u2019s discursive authority as a Western theorist.[1]<\/a> One of the most salient criticisms, circulating among the reviews, lies in how the artworks had been rendered merely visual tools that endorsed the prevalence of the Western vision. While these attempts at dismantling Latour\u2019s curatorial authority seem powerful at the outset, the clear-cut binary codes of practice\/theory, art\/technology, and local\/global continue to dictate the reception of the biennale, so much so that a more productive evaluation of the biennale has been excluded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In sharp contrast to the aforementioned reception of the biennale, this essay argues that Yu-Hsin Su and Aruwai Kaumakan are two of the many artists that had productively engaged with this thesis exhibition and actively assembled alternative modes of terrestrial existence beyond the global vision of the Earth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Taking cue from Christopher Whitfield\u2019s review, the emergence of the global vision could at least be traced back to the rapid development of astronomy and space science in the Cold War period, when the crew of Apollo 17 took the very first photography of the whole terraqueous globe. Later known as The Blue Marble<\/em>, this clear global vision of the isolated and vulnerable planet set in the darkness of the universe has become an important signifier that stimulated later environmental activism in the 1970s. However, the globalism and the common humanity that this photograph assumes, as geographer Denis Cosgrove reminds us, has not only erased the imperial and geopolitical competition of Cold War space race, but \u201cestablish[ed] a transcendental, univocal, and universally valid vantage point from which to sketch a totalizing discourse\u201d (288).<\/p>\n\n\n\n