ARTICLE

the proVinciAlism problem

then AnD now
terrY smith

Provincialism appears primarily as an attitude of subservience

to a hierarchy of externally imposed cultural values. It is not
simply the product of a colonialist history; nor is it merely a
function of geographic location. Most New York artists, critics,
collectors, dealers, and gallery-goers are provincialist in their
outlook, attitudes, and positions within the system. Members
of artworlds outside of New Yorkon every continent, includ-
ing North Americaare likewise provincial, although in dif-
ferent ways. The projection of the New York artworld as the
metropolitan center for art by every other artworld is symp-
tomatic of the provincialism of each of them.1

These were the opening words of my essay, The Provincialism

Problem, which was published in the September 1974 issue of
Artforum. As one of the first comprehensive, critical descriptions of the
massively unequalindeed, iniquitousworld art system then preva-
lent, it has been much debated since. Today, however, critics respond
to it most often under headings such as The Provincialism Solution,
and the resultant rejoinder happily charts how much better things now

1 Terry Smith, The Provincialism Problem, Artforum 12, no. 1 (September 1974): 5459;
this paragraph is on page 54.

6 2017 ARTMargins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology doi:10.1162/ARTM_a_00164

 are for art, artists, and arts audiences.2 The worldwide spread of bien-
nials, the decentralization of arts support throughout Europe, seem-
ingly ubiquitous Internet connectivity, bustling markets, the surge in
museum buildings and expansions, the proliferation of foundations
and institutes, the international chains of residencies for artists, the
ease and constancy of travel, the emergence of a global artthese are
just some items on what seems an ever-growing list of both quantita-
tive and qualitative improvements since the articles first publication.
They resonate comfortably with the mantra that globalizing capitalism
and technological innovation are improving the quality of life for mil-
lions, and will inevitably continue to do so.
I am not so sanguine. Once we look at the distribution of these
improvements, and at their reliance on the massive exploitation of peo-
ples and the continuation of fossil-fuel economies, this picture freezes,
and then spools backward in time, faster and faster. So does the hope
invested by many in cultural globalism, understood as the positive
face of economic globalization. Read The Art Newspaper: globalized con-
temporary art remains, primarily, a convenience of the super-rich.
Economic globalization might have attractive facades, but capitalism in
all of its now-quite-myriad forms grows increasingly dangerous as its
roots poison the earth, enrich dictators, disable democracies, foment
wars, hobble technologies, and enervate subjectivity. Fortunately, resis-
tance and re-imagination are evident everywhere, not least in the con-
temporary art of the emergent commons, and in the growing art
historical and curatorial efforts to discern differential histories of art
during the modern period, specifically through journals such as
ARTMargins and projects such as Artl@s at the cole Normale
Suprieure in Paris. I will return to these issues at the end of this
article; but I will devote most of the text to setting out the specific
the provincialism problem

circumstances in Melbourne, London, Sydney, and New York that were

the genesis of The Provincialism Problem, highlighting those protago-
nists whose critical thinking about contested connectivity shaped it. I do
so in the hope that, by showing one example of how radical critique was
called into existence, something useful may be gleaned by those many
who are mounting similar responses to todays particular urgencies.

2 See, for example, Jennifer Allen, The Provincial Solution, Frieze d/e, no. 1 (Summer
|

2011), http://frieze-magazin.de/archiv/kolumnen/wie-ein-provinzler/?lang=en, and

smith

Mallory Testa, The Provincialism Solution, Das Platform/Contemporary Art (blog),

June 3, 2011, www.dasplatforms.com/writing/the-provincialism-solution.

7
 A View from the Empire (in Decline)
It is hard to say precisely when the idea of interpreting the connections
between the local art worlds that make up the international art world in
terms of a theory of provincialism became a conscious project for me.
Everyone coming to a love of art in a dependent cultural colonyas I
did, in Melbourne and Sydney during the 1950s and 1960sexperi-
ences the operations of such structures, knows them in an everyday
sense, as a pervasive and deep fact about their world, and about how
power arrives from the wider world. The panorama itself, and artistic
possibility within it, looks very different depending on where you are
your location, your viewpoint, your sense of agency, and your actual
effectiveness. For the generation preceding minethat is, for my
teachers and mentors in Australiaart became consequential, and
critical thinking about art mattered, when art had some significant
impact on critics in London.
In his presidential address to the English Association delivered in
1962, Sir Kenneth Clark noted:

In its simplest form, provincialism is easily recognized and

defined. The history of European art has been, to a large extent,
the history of centers, from each of which has radiated a style. For
a shorter or longer period, that style dominated the art of the time,
became in fact an international style, which was metropolitan at its
center, and became more and more provincial as it reached the
periphery. A style does not grow simultaneously over a large area.
It is the creation of a center, a single energizing unit, which may
be as small as 15th-century Florence, or as large as pre-war Paris,
but has the confidence and coherency of a metropolis.3

We might expect the patrician Clarklater Lord Clark, famous as

presenter of the BBC series Civilisationto rest satisfied with this defi-
nition, one that echoes political and economic imperialism to the point
of parody. But he does not. He points out the inevitable operations of a
counterdynamic: Just as provincial art fails from its lack of style, met-
ropolitan art fails from its excess, and there appear the familiar symp-
toms of over-refinement and academicism. ... Thus the provincial
artmargins 6:1

artist is launched on his struggle with the dominant style.4 Admitting

3 Kenneth Clark, Provincialism (London: English Association, 1962), 3.

4 Ibid., 34.

8
that British art, with the obvious exception of J.M.W. Turner, had
been, broadly speaking, irredeemably provincial, he identifies certain
characteristics of a positive and independent provincial art, which are
these: It tells a story; it takes pleasure in the facts; it is lyrical; and it
achieves a visionary intensity.5 A very British list, although he also
cites Caspar David Friedrich as an exemplar, and neatly encapsulates
Paul Klees intensity as micropolitan.
Clark was also aware that, in his own time, provincialism had
become problematic for artists in a particular way:

Granted that there are certain things which the provincial artist
can do, and others that he had much better leave alone, how deeply
should he study the art of the center? How far should he attempt to
master the weapons of an international style, even though he may
use them for different ends? This is not an academic question, but
a matter of vital importance to painters of the present day; because
since the war many of the most talented artists have come not
from the old centers of European art, but from China and Japan,
Australia and Indonesia, India and Mexico, and of course above
all from the United States of America. It is an unprecedented
situation, and the historian, who depends on precedents, must
approach it with diffidence. 6

Recognizing that there is no hiding-place, and that the painter

who tries to ignore what is vital in contemporary art will become a pro-
vincial in the worst and simplest sense of the word, his hope is that
the modern artist can pass through this dilemma by clearing his
mind of complacency, accepting the provincial virtues and relating
them to the dominant style.7 A very British, post-Empire solution:
making the best of ones poor lot.
the provincialism problem

Clarks acknowledgment that art from the new worldabove all,

US abstractionwas changing the metropolitan-provincial dynamic
was doubtless, in part, a response to exhibitions such as The New
American Painting. Organized by Dorothy C. Miller of the Museum of
Modern Art, New York, this survey of key works by seventeen mainly

5 Ibid., 9.
6 Ibid., 11.
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7 Ibid., 12. I cannot recall reading this lecture prior to writing the Artforum essay, nor dis-
smith

cussing it with Bernard Smith, but we certainly discussed Clarks attitudes to many
things, and I cannot believe that he was unaware of this text.

9
 Abstract Expressionist artists traveled to eight European countries in
1958 and 1959, including London in the latter year. In his introduction,
director Alfred H. Barr, Jr., noted of the artists, None speaks for the
others any more than he paints for the others. Their individualism is
uncompromising and as a matter of principle they do nothing deliber-
ately in their work to make communication easy.8 Within the Cold War
climate then prevailing in world politics, this contrast to Soviet Socialist
Realism was the main ideological message of the show, one of a series
supported by the US Information Service and, covertly, the CIA. Reports
of this cultural management surfaced in the late 1960s and again in the
mid-1970s, in articles in Artforum by Max Kozloff and Eva Cockcroft.9
The allegations have since been confirmed by the agents involved.10
Theories of conspiracy, however well founded, should not blind us
to the fact that even the conspirators were seeking advantage within an
already-existing cultural dynamic: that is, the internationalization of
art practice during the postwar period, especially that occurring
between the United States, Europe, and the cultural clients of both cen-
ters; and the parallel internationalization pursued by the USSR in its
spheres of influence. By 1964, in an essay in his collection The Anxious
Object: Art Today and Its Audience, New Yorkbased art critic Harold
Rosenberg could note that

a fairly uniform modern-art package today constitutes the pro-

duction of all countries in painting and sculpture, except those in
which governments interfere. The package contains X percentages
of the following: modified Cubist canvases and sculpture (in stone,
wood, metal); Action Painting in various thicknesses of pigment;
canvases bearing expanses of one or two colors terminating in

8 Dorothy C. Miller, The New American Painting (exhibition presented at the Museum of
Modern Art, New York, 195859). See the press release, June 8, 1959, https://www.moma
.org/momaorg/shared/pdfs/docs/press_archives/2488/releases/MOMA_1959_0054
.pdf?2010.
9 Max Kozloff, American Painting during the Cold War, Artforum 11, no.9 (May 1973):
4354; Eva Cockcroft, Abstract Expressionism: Weapon of the Cold War, Artforum 12,
no. 10 (June 1974): 3941. Among more recent commentary, see Frances Stonor
Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York:
New Press, 2000), and Ellen G. Landau, Abstract Expressionism: Changing
artmargins 6:1

Methodologies for Interpreting Meaning, in Abstract Expressionism: Context and

Critique, ed. Ellen G. Landau (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 1121.
10 Notably by Tom Braden, head of the International Division at the CIA, and Donald
Jameson, the case officer. See www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia
-weapon-1578808.html.

10
 hard or soft edges; free-standing constructions and reliefs
incorporating found objects or having the character of fragments
of rock or ore; compositions of planes in wire, cord, Plexiglas;
commodity (Pop) art, relating to mass consumption, marketing,
and entertainment; motorized or other gadget art.11

Although this looks like a casual listing of a variety of art styles

current in the First World, Rosenberg feared that it actually amounted
to little more than a pervasive aestheticism, that art-making was
becoming a matter of pictures relating to pictures relating to other
pictures, rather than to any visual or intellectual perception.12
Searching for the roots of this change, he read it as the manifestation
within art of what he called a world system, saying that a modernist
painter or sculptor in the most backward country of Africa or Latin
America (and in the large international exhibitions such countries are
now almost inevitably represented) is synchronized with a world sys-
tem to the same extent as the local oil refinery or airport.13 Rosenberg
took this analysis no further, remaining impervious to the centrality of
the New York art world in this allegedly world system. Yet his general
observation was important to those of us trying to understand this
system a decade later. (I was an avid reader of Rosenbergs writing
throughout this period, not least because I was writing a masters the-
sis on Abstract Expressionism and ethics.) The Cold War climate still
echoed in the mid-1970s: at the end of 1975, editors John Coplans and
Max Kozloff were sacked from Artforum for running articles, such as
the CIA exposs, my article on provincialism, Lucy Lippards article on
feminist art, Ian Burns The Art Market: Affluence and Degradation,
and others that were deemed too political.14

A View from the Provinces (in Revolt)

the provincialism problem

Bernard Smith was the best thinker in Australia about the relativities
of power within cultural flows between the great metropolitan centers
and their peripheries. His key books were built around specific proposi-
tions about these relationships. Place, Taste, and Tradition (1945) opens

11 Harold Rosenberg, The Anxious Object: Art Today and Its Audience (New York: Horizon
Press, 1964), 205.
12 Ibid., 211.
13 Ibid.
|

14 Ian Burn, The Art Market: Affluence and Degradation, Artforum 13, no. 8 (April 1975):
smith

3437. The origins of October magazine, as the organ of a less overt, more symbolic kind
of cultural politics, lie, in part, in this set of circumstances.

11
 with the statement: This study is concerned with the relation between
the course art has taken in Australia and the concurrent European ten-
dencies from which art here has drawn so largely.15 Chastising local
artists and writers for downplaying this relationship, he goes on to
insist that a national tradition was possible, but would only arise from
the gradual assimilation of many overseas tendencies as they react
upon the local conditions of the country. Thus, his focus is on the
mutations which have occurred in styles and fashions originating over-
seas as they have been assimilated into conditions, social, political,
moral, and aesthetic, existing in Australia.16 Noting that the general
tendency of modern art is toward an international fusion of many
national styles, Smith concludes that a national tradition in
Australian art should be sought for, not in the hopeless endeavor
to create an art form peculiar to this continentas aboriginal art
wasbut an art the nature of which will grow from the features of
a changing Australian society.17 In 1945, this was a work in progress,
and was led, in his opinion, by the most politically progressive artists,
such as the Social Realist Noel Counihan.
By 1962, he registered that some development had taken place,
enough to reverse his previous emphasis on external determination.
Australian Painting 17881960 opens with the observation that, while
in one sense, it may be said that Australian art is a European art flour-
ishing in the South-East Asian world, in fact, the social character and
composition of the new nation have influenced the course which art has
taken in Australia, with the consequence that Australian art has grad-
ually acquired qualities as distinctive as the social attitudes and speech
of Australians. He goes on immediately to note that this synthesis of
differences, this Australian tradition was less well understood by
Australian artists today than were developments in European art.18
Although Place, Taste and Tradition was based on lectures given
in 194142 through the New South Wales Teachers Federation Art
Society to small audiences consisting mainly of artist-migrants and
American servicemen on leave, and Australian Painting was addressed
to the general intelligent reading public and students, the first and key
artmargins 6:1

15 Bernard Smith, Place, Taste, and Tradition (Sydney: Ure Smith, 1945), 14.
16 Ibid., 21.
17 Ibid.
18 Bernard Smith, Australian Painting 17881960 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press,
1962), vii.

12
readers of both books were, in Bernards mind, practicing artists. They
were, after all, Australian arts primary producers. As a lover of art,
Bernard believed fully in their unique individuality; but as a Marxist
lover of art, he understood that individual consciousness was shaped
by social beingor social character,19 as he put it. No surprise, then,
that the interplay between the need to negotiate with external powers
that be, on the one hand, and instincts toward nationalism, on the
other, shaped the work of artists as much as did social attitudes more
broadly. Acting in a personal and social space between artists and their
society, the art critic was also subject to this play of forces. But he or
she had a special obligation to articulate the state of play at the present
time, so that artists and audiences could understand it more clearly.
The would-be historian had the further obligation of explaining how
the present situation came about, of showing which sets of forces deter-
mined present possibility. For artists and audiences in Australia, the
core forces at any given time were of two kinds: those originating exter-
nally, and those accumulating into our national tradition. If the
weight of one threatened to overcome the other, the critics job was,
first, to restore disequilibrium, then to place the balance of historical
proof, current description, and urging toward the future on the side
that would most strongly counter slavish, mannerist imitation of
imported styles, or if the lean was too local, shift the balance the
other way in order to counter a collapse into parochialism.
The shifting emphases throughout Bernards careerand
throughout those of all involved, including minecan be credited to
this need to walk along a constantly buffeted tightrope. Mostly, how-
ever, he invested his faith in the blend of innovation and tradition
as the deep source of the vitality of contemporary Australian art, a
national achievement that nevertheless required acknowledgment from
the provincialism problem

the London Critics. His view of the right balance between the local
and the international, at least at this stage, ends up rather close to Lord
Clarks formulation. It recognizes that the weight of power lies else-
where. Even in its realism, it remains, in a word, provincial. 20

19 Ibid., vii.
20 He was to emphasize the energy of the peripheries and their impact on the centers as his
thinking progressed. See Ian McLean, Reverse Perspective: Bernard Smith and the
Cosmopolitan Imagination, Journal of Art Historiography, no. 4 (June 2011), and my
|

Bernard Smith, the Art Historian as Hero, in The Multiple Legacies of Bernard Smith,
smith

ed. Jaynie Anderson, Christopher Marshall, and Andrew Yip (Sydney: Power Institute,
University of Sydney, and Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2016).

13
 Avant-Garde Art, Right Now, Right Here
By the late 1960s, however, the overall situation for art-making, both
within Australia and internationally, had begun to change, and would
do so in the next few years, really fast. Without recalling all the intrica-
cies of these changes, let me highlight one major difference between
Clarks and Bernard Smiths views, and those of certain younger-
generation artists and critics, such as myself. The key difference was
that, for us, a belief in avant-garde possibility had become absolutely
central for artists such as ourselvesindeed, in theory, for artists any-
where. Speaking, in 1970, of the Australian artists who took up color
painting in the mid-1960s, I put it this way:

Chance had provided a group of painters, all committed to the

study of color in painting (as opposed to the always tonal work of
preceding Australian painters), who had arrived in Australia from
formative overseas study at the same time, [with an opportunity
to] substantially advance Australian art. And this meant lifting
Australian art to an international level in terms of both its quality
and the intensity of its operation.21

Like those small groups of radically innovative artists in France,

Italy, Russia, and Germany in the early 20th century whom we
admired (almost) unconditionally, we fiercely believed that a group of
artists working together in Sydney or Melbourne could contribute in
original ways to the current international movement within artthat
is, to abstract painting driven primarily by a concern with color and
shape. In doing so, these local artists would not only help change art
everywhere, they would, given our previous provincialism, also be the
first avant-garde in the history of Australian art. Artists who showed at
the artist-run Central Street Gallery in Sydney, and those associated
with Bruce Pollards Pinacotheca Gallery in Melbourne, devoted enor-
mous energy to this end. So did exceptional patrons such as John
Kaldor, and operations such as the Power Institute of Fine Arts at
Sydney University, and especially the Power Gallery of Contemporary
Art (the foundation for Sydneys Museum of Contemporary Art), at a
time when the local state galleries rarely collected international art,
artmargins 6:1

instead relying on traveling exhibitions such as Two Decades of

21 Terry Smith, Color-Form Painting: Sydney 196570, Other Voices 1, no.1 (June/July
1970): 8.

14
American Painting (1967). The increased affordability of frequent
international travel and accelerated communication across networks
of like-minded artists were important factors in these efforts to inter
nationalize the local setting.
But the Color-Form painters failed to reach their lofty goal. More
than a matter of changes in styles of art-making, the real prize was to
create an avant-garde situation for art practice. As Ian Burn put it in an
essay written in 1967, after the incomprehension that greeted his work
Yellow Premiss (1965) when it was exhibited by Rudy Komon in Sydney
in 1966, the real change needed in Australia was one in which artists
could invest themselves, and realize their personal and social identi-
ties.22 Critics had an important role in helping to create such situations,
by supporting experimentality while at the same time exercising the
most searching judgment of the experiments. During his 1968 visit to
Australia, Clement Greenberg disparaged such ambitions, claiming
that, while a style of the 1960s was discernable in abstract art in
many parts of the world, it was only authentic in the hands of those few
artists who followed the thin line of modernist innovators, those who
had matched themselves against the Old Masters. Everything else, and
every other way of making art, he asserted, amounted to nothing more
than adopting an attitude.23
Although I strenuously resisted Greenbergs exclusive thinking,
and his reactionary view of avant-garde possibility, I quickly recognized
that he was right about the Color-Form painters. 24 Paradoxically, their
subscription to his formalism as their theory of art (something I had
shared in my first attempts at criticism) had limited their ability to
resist their work turning into stylizations of itself. Much to my artist
friends displeasure, I noted this as an already-existing historical fact in
my 1970 article for the journal Other Voices.25 After traveling to Europe
the provincialism problem

that year, and sharing the enthusiasm of my colleague Donald Brook

22 This set of six panels is now in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria. See Ian
Burn, Situation-Identity, in Modernism & Australia: Documents on Art, Design and
Architecture 19171967, ed. Ann Stephen, Andrew McNamara, and Philip Goad
(Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing and Miegunyah Press, 2006), 78389.
Unpublished and little circulated, I do not recall seeing this article until it appeared in
the Stephen, McNamara, and Goad anthology.
23 Clement Greenberg, Avant-Garde Attitudes: The Inaugural John Power Memorial Lecture
(Sydney: Power Institute of Fine Arts, 1969).
|

24 Terry Smith, The Style of the Sixties, Quadrant XIV, no. 2 (MarchApril, 1969):
smith

4953.
25 Smith, Color-Form Painting.

15
 for the experimental art that was being made everywhere around the
world at that time, including in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, and
Brisbane, I engaged in critical debates with Greenberg and his follow-
ers, such as Patrick McCaughey, whom I accused of suffering an
updated version of the cultural cringe identified by Australian
literary critic Arthur Phillips in 1950. 26
I will cite just one extract from these debates, because it is another
important piece in the jigsaw constituting the background to The
Provincialism Problem essay. It comes from the concluding section
of an unpublished lecture I gave to the Contemporary Art Society
(New South Wales Branch) on November 16, 1970, titled Changes
in Art and Criticism, arousing considerable controversy at the time:

There are a number of ways of changing this situation, but few of

them are available to the Australian artist who wishes to break the
inevitabilities of his provincial situation. There is no future in
turning back to the odd manifestations of peculiarly Australian
art, and there are no continuing traditions in Australian art worth
extending or building on. Without the social pressure of a metro-
politan centre, few if any artists in our provincial situation can
derive anything for their art out of the experience of being an artist
as such. The difficulties of qualified imitation, and of trying to
impose an avantgarde situation on Australian society, have already
been pointed out. There remain three positive alternatives: leaving
for the metropolitan centre and staying there; blatant imitation; or
directing oneself towards changing the nature of art.

I went on to note that the first option broke the visit-and-return

cycle so typical of Australian artists biographies, gave Arshile Gorky
as a clear example of great original art being produced on the basis of
unmitigated imitation over many years, and concluded with these
words about the third option:

26 Arthur Phillips, The Cultural Cringe, Meanjin, no.4 (1950); reprinted in The
Temperament of Generations: Fifty Years of Writing in Meanjin, ed. Jenny Lee, Philip Mead,
and Gerald Murnane (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1990), 1025. From page
102: Above our writersand other artistslooms the intimidating mass of Anglo-
artmargins 6:1

Saxon culture. Such a situation almost invariably produces the characteristic Australian
Cultural Cringeappearing either as the Cringe Direct [Yes, but what would a culti-
vated Englishman think of this?] or as the Cringe Inverted, in the attitude of the Blatant
Blitherskite, the Gods-Own-Country, and Im-a-better-man-than-you-are Australian
Bore.

16
 But to me, the challenge to fundamentally change art, to open it
out to the kind of moral and social relevance and pertinence that it
has not had (except fitfully) for centuries, is the most exciting alter-
native available to artists anywhere, including with no special pro-
vision Australia. It means a break with the Old Masters, it means
ignoring their standards. It means discarding the object from
sculpture, it probably means giving up painting altogether, it
means opening up buildings so that a box will never again com-
partmentalize a man. It means fundamental approaches which
are different to the metropolitan/provincial dichotomy, and which
could finally emancipate art in this country.

Acute observers will have marked a major shift in perspective

between the reach for avant-garde status to be secured by high perfor-
mance within international-style abstract art (as chronicled in the
Other Voices essay, written in 1969, published the following year) and
this aspiration: to fundamentally change art itself by questioning its
essential nature. The difference was already being named: Conceptual
Art, or conceptualism, more generally understood. In Sydney, this shift
was explored in The Situation Now, an exhibition Tony McGillick and I
curated for the Contemporary Art Society Gallery in 1971, consisting of
work that ranged from pure abstract painting to performance and con-
ceptual art. Among the ten Propositions that introduced the catalog,
the ninth reads:

The different sorts of new art emerging in Australia have yet to

break down the limitations that have always been present in Aus-
tralian art. There are still no great artists in this country although
there are some good ones. No new and profound ideas of what art
can be about have been introduced here. The basic pattern is still
the provincialism problem

that of stylistic change through the simulations of stylistic change

in art at the metropolitan centers. We still do not have a genuine
avant-garde in Australia (only an avant-garde relative to previous
Australian art). That the new forms of art are not specifically Aus-
tralian, that they are of a kind that is open, discursive and explor-
atory, at least establishes two of the conditions for a genuine
avant-garde to emerge in this country.27
|
smith

27 Terry Smith and Tony McGillick, The Situation Now: Object or Post-Object Art? (Sydney:
Contemporary Art Society N.S.W., JulyAugust 1971), exhibition catalog, 4.

17
 To aspire to fundamentally change the nature of art is to set a very
high bar, but it is one that has motivated me, and those with whom I
have worked most closely, throughout my life. It drove Art & Language
activity in New York, which brings us to the final element that shaped
my thinking about provincialism in the visual arts.

New York, New York

By December 6, 1972, I had been in New York three months, supported
by a Harkness fellowship to study graduate art history at New York
University and Columbia. I was already involved in Art & Language
projects, specifically the Annotations, precursors to Blurting in A&L
(1973). During that day, I sketched out a diagram entitled Models for a
Viable Notion of Artmaking. I distinguished between three types. The
contextual model lists the elements that I thought most shaped con-
temporary art, using the language most used within the art world: for-
malism, art theory, [art] spaces, post-object scatter, society touching art
at points. These poor formulations are contrasted with a metropoli-
tan/provincial model, which, as my diary notes for that day attest, I
intended to picture as an Image of Australias consciousness of itself.
The sketch tries to diagram the relationships between the metropolitan
and the provincial. The metropolitan mainstream is depicted as run-
ning left to right across the center, moving from early 19th-century
academic and minor arts along two axes centered in Paris and in
Germany, between which waves of avant-garde innovation push for-
ward, reaching (North) America by the 1940s. They culminate in the
1960s, but soon begin to break up and disperse to what I label, follow-
ing McLuhan, temporary global villages. New York is just one among
others in Germany, Holland, and London. The future is a big question
mark. Between the European and American mainstream and Australia
lies a Netherland, an unfathomable domain. Australia is envisaged as
a continent that shifts itself forward in time as a result of the push-and-
pull between the Outback and the settled coastlines; thus, it is imag-
ined as thinking at my back I always hear [not times winged chariot
drawing near, but] the empty continent pushing/withdrawing.
I was ignorant of the artistic revolution then underway at Papunya,
artmargins 6:1

a small town in the Central Desert, home to indigenous peoples no lon-

ger able to live on their ancestral lands, and to a group of men who
launched a painting movement that persists to this day. Broken lines of
arrows delineate the fragile yet continuous relationships between each of

18
 Terry Smith. Diagram
from diary entry,
December 6, 1972.
Ink on paper,
21.0 29.7 cm.
Image courtesy of
the author.

the changes in European and later American art, on the one hand, and
art-making in Australia, on the other. Note that these impacts go in both
directions, indicating not only the travel of artists back and forth, but
also the impact of antipodean artists on the centers. The relationships
the provincialism problem

are shown as channeling through Sydney and Melbourne, cities now

seen as within the chain of temporary global villages. The third type of
model is a sociological one. Thus my instruction to self: Superimpose
this on a sociological model of interactions and progress.28
My notes use the languages of art criticism, art history, and sociol-

28 Underlying my urge to diagram historical flows was George Kublers The Shape of Time:
Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), less for the
morphological determinism that, to me, limits his observations on provincialism, and
|
smith

more for his rare sensitivity to the mismatching differentials of artistic development dur-
ing the same times and places. See especially his chapter 4, Some Kinds of Duration.

19
 ogy as materials to forge what I label a viable notion of artmaking.
Where, you might ask, is the art practice in this? Among the dozen
members of A&L NY, Ian Burn, Mel Ramsden, and I were particularly
concerned with provincialism as a problematic. Ian and Mel had both
studied at the National Gallery School in Melbourne before leaving for
(or, in Mels case, returning to) England in 1964, and then going on to
New York in 1967. Like many others at the time, we were acutely con-
scious of geopolitics, especially the role of the United States in its hemi-
sphere and in Southeast Asia (particularly its war against Vietnam),
and of race politics within the United States. We talked constantly
about the influences of these forces on art worlds and about the roles
open to artists in countering their impacts. Grasping the situation in
all of its complexity was step one in efforts to transform it. In 1973, Ian
wrote an essay variously titled Provincialism and Art Is What We Do,
Culture Is What We Do to Other Artists. In the latter title, he was pun-
ning on a remark of Carl AndresArt is what we do, culture is what
is done to usaiming to bring out the power relations implicit in the
worldwide circulation of work by US artists, even those, such as Andre,
who saw themselves as Marxists who made art according to the same
values as a factory worker. Ian opens his essay with a set of questions
that he developed in direct discussion with Mel and me:

In what ways is a traveling exhibition of contemporary American

art useful or destructive? From where does the information come
for an Earthwork to make sense in Australia? Can we presuppose
that the viewer of a work by Donald Judd in Paris gets the same
information as a viewer in New York? Why do European collectors
prefer Art & Language texts in English over translated versions?
Why is it that the political concerns of many South American
artists have the effect of relegating them to minor status in
New York?29

The main body of the essay, however, consists of Ians careful

application of the linguistic theory we were reading at the time (such
artmargins 6:1

29 Ian Burn, Provincialism, Art Dialogue, no.1 (October 1973): 311; reprinted as Art Is
What We Do, Culture Is What We Do to Other Artists in Deurle 11.7.73: Art in Its Cultural
Context (Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle, Belgium, July 11August 12, 1973), exhibi-
tion catalog, and in Ian Burn, Dialogue: Australian Essays on Art History, ed. Geoffrey
Batchen (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1992), 131139.

20
as Wittgensteins idea of language worlds) to questions of the power
relations between art worlds.

What provincialism really means is that significant judgments are

being made according to rule-governing behavior in an ideologically
different context. ... This amounts to a cultural impotence for art-
ists in provincial contexts and, intentionally or not, sustains a cul-
tural imperialist policy on the part of those in the dominant
context.30

He points out that this means that those working in the dominant
contexts have responsibilities to those in provincial ones, above all to
share in working toward more dialogical and equitable relations
between contexts. He concludes with a rousing call:

We have to conceive of the game as no longer containing the trick

which enables Americans to winwe have to conceive of it as a
whole new game.31

I was writing my essay at the same time, and benefited from Ians
critical input, Mels, and that of the Artforum editors.32 I set out to
describe the game in full, in all of its dimensions. I wanted above all
to show that, in the current world circumstances, every art context,
whether it conceived of itself as dependent, dominant, or simply how
things are, had become provincial, in a mutually destructive spiral.
Conceiving a whole new game became a bigger ask, and was even
more urgently necessary.

Provincialism as a Problematic
The opening words of my 1974 article were cited above. I went on to
outline the dynamics of dependence in art-producing localities outside
the provincialism problem

New York, mainly in Australia, where, I argued, art changes at a second-

remove from the sources of stylistic innovation (for example, for much
of the 20th century, up until the mid-1960s, French and US innova-

30 Burn, Art Is What We Do, 136.

31 Ibid., 139.
32 Coplanss receptiveness to my viewpoint was due not only to his South African back-
ground, but to his experience with the magazine in San Francisco and Los Angeles
prior to its moving to New York in 1967. Interviewed about that period, he recalled that
|

California was regional, provincial, poverty stricken in comparison to the East Coast
smith

in Challenging Art: Artforum 19621972, ed. Amy Newman (New York: Soho Press,
2000), 27.

21
 tions were mostly filtered through the British art scene). I repeated a
number of the ideas already developed in the Australian debates
regarding the pattern of expatriation, of provincial artists being
condemned to follow or vary styles rather than share in, or themselves
originate, artistic change; their efforts were regarded by all, including
themselves, as somehow lesser (Sidney Nolan, a great Australian
artist; Jackson Pollock, simply a great artist). I commented that
a (perhaps) peculiarly Australian approach to creativity, reemerging
through successive imported styles, might be said to characterize the
work of a number of young sculptors who revel in their eccentricity
and awkwardness.33 I illustrated the article with images of installa-
tions by Ti Parks, Tony Coleing, John Armstrong, and Nigel Lendon,
and earthworks by Ross Grounds, Kevin Mortensen, and Bert
Flugelmans parodic Australian Cottage, all from the important 1973
quasi-biennial in Mildura, Sculpturescape. These works raised the
question Can the provincialist bind be broken?, to which I answered
(in italics) As the situation stands, the provincial artist cannot choose
not to be provincial.34
This extremely bleak statement occasioned much anguished and
angry comment, but it was, at the time, recognized as true. This, plus
the fact that it had not before been stated so bluntly, or in such a promi-
nent forum, I believe accounts for much of the articles impact. Yet I
was not offering a prognosis of the future, or outlining an eternal state
of affairs, but instead making a strategic statement about what artists
committed to genuine transformation were up against. We were con-
vinced that seeing this situation for what it wasnot a natural state
of affairs, but a systemically iniquitous cultural constructionwas
the first step toward its revolutionary overthrow. The second paragraph
of the article reads:

Most of us treat this projection as if it were a construction of real-

ityand it is, in the sense that it is almost universally shared.
However, those who are able to live adequately within the frame-
work of the respect for the essential differentness of diverse yet
related cultures recognize that this projection does not have the
artmargins 6:1

force of natural law. It is, rather, a viewpoint that, while effec-

33 Smith, The Provincialism Problem, 57.

34 Ibid.

22
 tively governing majority behavior, is as culturally relative as any
other. That is, it is one among many ways of defining the (differ-
ent) situations we are in.35

My second main theme, and perhaps the articles most original

(and antipodean) argument, was that provincialism pervades New
York, precisely in that the overwhelming majority of artists here exist
in a satellite relationship to a few artists, galleries, critics, collectors,
museums, and magazines like this one.36 The institutionalization of
accelerated avant-gardism in the New York art world made it the
agenda-setter, or rule-generator, for artists everywhere, yet institution-
alization required a bad faith sellout of genuine avant-garde practice
on the part of those who subscribed to it, and led to an isolation of
self.37 Despite this scenes claims to universality, I demonstrated that
a hierarchy of power operated within it, one that nominated a cluster
of art stars every few years to come out on top. Lip service to avant-
gardism as the driver of change in art meant that, every few years, a
few artists appeared to break the provincialist bind. But they could
not, I argued, be genuinely said to do so. My earlier point that as the
situation stands, the provincial artist cannot choose not to be provincial,
applied to artists in New York as much as it did to those working
elsewhere. The bind itself had to be destroyed, systemically, on a
worldwide basis.
Thus the third theme of the article: breaking the provincialist
bind. The original title for the essay was Provincialism as a
Problematicthat is, as a problem to be acknowledged, explored
together, and solved. I canvassed a number of small-scale moves
that could be made, updating and reassessing the options listed in
my lecture in Sydney in 1970. Making it in New York was no longer an
authentic path, because, as demonstrated, the scene was systemically
the provincialism problem

alienating. The Arshile Gorky option disappeared (even though it was

the one taken up most widely during the postmodern moment of the
following decade). Moving to the suburbs, or upstate, down South, or
to the West Coast, amounted, I felt, to a rationalized regionalism.38
In the end, the responsibility of each individual artist, critic, or

35 Ibid., 54.
|

36 Ibid., 58.
smith

37 Ibid., 56.
38 Ibid., 58.

23
 curatorall of us more or less subject to the pernicious destructive-
ness of provincialismis to refuse to instantiate this system in the
ways we go about our work. Critics should refrain from describing the
development of artists work as if it possessed a systematic, homo
genized immutability; art lovers should desist from retreating to
instinctual devotion to an amorphous metaphysical entity Art; and
curators should cease organizing international traveling shows that
imply a specious certainty of purpose and a misleading coherence as
a range of cultural products. Artists should not allow their works to
be described, understood, or exhibited in these ways. For them, trans-
forming art itself remained as the most viablein fact, only possible
option. This is what I believed Art & Language, for example, to be
doingand had argued just that in my article in the February 1974
issue of Artforum.39 We were inspired by Thomas Kuhns description of
how revolutionary scientists, working alone or in small groups, could
propose a new, partial, small-scale theory that, because it was a better
explanation of exceptional phenomena, could disrupt normal science
by engendering a paradigm shift in the entire field. 40
Each of my recommendations had certain qualities in common.
They did not call for everyone to follow a certain political program
(provincial art worlds everywhere were not going to sign up, overnight,
to membership with the International Socialists), but rather invited
art world actors to work in ways that would project our own uncertain-
ties and fallibilities undisguised and would, at the same time, value
the differences of the cultures relative to ours. I concluded with the
statement, There are no ideologically neutral cultural acts.41 This
was a rallying cry to act, counterideologically, within a context loaded
with negative ideologies. It was, essentially, an ethical appeal to all art
world actors to work together to create an open field of avant-garde pos-

39 Terry Smith, Art and Art and Language, Artforum 12, no. 6 (February 1974): 4952.
40 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1962). I have often been asked whether we were aware of Immanuel Wallersteins
world systems theory, or other Marxist macro-economics of the period. My essay is con-
temporary with Wallersteins first statement of this theory: The Rise and Future Demise
of the Capitalist System: Concepts for Comparative Analysis, Comparative Studies in
artmargins 6:1

Society and History 16, no. 4 (September 1974): 387415. His major books began to appear
two years later. We became aware of Samir Amins work when it began to be circulated in
1976, notably his Unequal Development: An Essay on the Social Formation of Peripheral
Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976).
41 All quotations in this paragraph are from Smith, The Provincialism Problem, 59.

24
sibility, one in which artists everywhere had the chance, could take up
the challenge, to transform art altogether, without the dice being
loaded against them because of where they came from.
In the closest, and keenest, commentary on my article, Heather
Barker and Charles Green remark that this was quite a wish list, and
one that was not going to be met ... for it was never clear why the per-
petrators of this system might wish to consider its victims and make
reparations, and it is no more clear today, either in the provinces or at
the centre.42 They are right about the situation in the early 1970s, but
they are wrong about today. Indeed, in their own article they pin-
pointed some of the elements that were, even as I wrote the article,
shifting the situation toward a point where the perpetrators would be
obliged to change their ways. They note that Artforums publication of
it was a recognition of the fact that conceptualist, ideas-based art was
being made in many cities around the world as well as New York: con-
ceptualism, Smith was presciently asserting, was a global movement.43
They go on to note my later involvement in the exhibition that finally
made this point, Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s1980s,
at the Queens Museum, New York, in 1999. 44 They also note that, by
making the provincialism problem an international not an Australian
issue, by setting out for a wide audience a coherent explanation of the
extent and strength of the provincial system, and by framing the issue
inside its political rather than its aesthetic context, I had identified a
way around subaltern status.45 This was, indeed, my main aim.
The Art & Language group in New York pursued these questions
avidly in our work during the following years. Substantial sections of
Draft for an Anti-Textbook, also published in September 1974 as an
issue of the Art-Language journal, were devoted to these issues. 46 The
Art & Language exhibitions in Australia during 1975 were designed to
the provincialism problem

highlight, and contest, them. 47

42 Heather Barker and Charles Green, The Provincialism Problem: Terry Smith and
Centre-Periphery Art History, Journal of Art Historiography, no. 3 (December 2010): 15.
43 Barker and Green, The Provincialism Problem, 11.
44 Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s1980s, ed. Luis Camnitzer, Jane Farver, and
Rachel Weiss (New York: Queens Museum, 1999), exhibition catalog.
45 Barker and Green, The Provincialism Problem, 15 and 16.
46 See Robert Bailey, Art Language International: Conceptual Art Between Worlds (Durham,
|
smith

NC: Duke University Press, 2016).

47 Terry Smith, ed., Art & Language: Australia 1975 (Banbury: A & L Press, 1976).

25
 Call and Response
I will not rehearse in detail the many subsequent responses to The
Provincialism Problem, nor explore the relatively few alternative mod-
els that were proposed. 48 Instead, I will comment on some representa-
tive examples of both from the years since 1974.
It is no surprise that artists active at the peripheries responded
first and most avidly to the article. Brazilian conceptualist Cildo
Meireles pirated it for the first issue of his journal Malasartes, pub-
lished in Rio de Janeiro in 1975. Meanwhile, a student in Sydney,
Imants Tillers, envisaged its dynamic in his Conversations with the
Bride (197475), which consists of 112 tripods on which miniature
paintings and photographs are mounted, in matching pairs, that merge
details from Hans Heysens watercolor Summer (1909) and Marcel
Duchamps The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1923).49
While postmodern artists all over the world adopted appropriative
techniques during the 1980s, the intensity of their use by Australian
artists, and their focus on the dynamics of periphery/center exchange,
may partly be a result of having their situation spelled out in such
uncompromising terms. Their strategy to break out of their subaltern
status was exactly that laid out in the essay: to show that every artist
everywhere is implicated in it, exaggerate it until it becomes intolerable,
show that it is a construction (a myth in Bernard Smiths terms, a
pataphysical fiction in Tillerss), and then make art about being in
such a situation. During this period, Tillers invested considerable
energy in theorizing art-world exchange based on a model of equiva-
lents, on physicist John Stewart Bells theorem concerning the impossi-
bility of the precise measurement of cause and effect between localities

48 Fonteini Vlachou draws attention to the values of a center/periphery as distinct from a

metropolitan/provincial critique in her essay Why Spatial? Time and the Periphery,
Visual Resources 32, nos. 12 (MarchJune 2016): 924. She references key texts by histo-
rian Carlo Ginzburg and art historian Enrico Castelnuovo (1979), and by Marxist art his-
torian Nikos Hadjinicolaou (1983). The former pairs Symbolic Domination and Artistic
Geography in Italian Art History is available in Art in Translation 1, no. 1 (2009): 548;
the latters Artistic Centers and Peripheral Art appeared in Kritische Berichte 11, no. 4
(1983): 3656.
49 Now in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. On Tillerss
artmargins 6:1

response to my 1974 essay, see Graham Coulter-Smith, IMANTS TILLERS: Inventing

Postmodern Appropriation, accessed October 20, 2016, www.shermangalleries.com.au/
artists_exhib/artists/tillers/nature.html, and Regionalism vs Internationalism,
accessed October 20, 2016, http://archive.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/exhibitions/
archived/2010/kaldor_projects/themes/regionalism_vs_internationalism.

26
and distances.50 A little more exact than the pluralist wishful thinking
that prevailed during the 1980s, this idea operates for Tillers as a gener-
ative metaphor. Over the years, he has created what amounts to an enor-
mous visual field upon which representations of all kinds can appear
and engage in symbolic dialogue, a kind of Internet of numbered panel
boards. He, too, has moved from the provincialism problematic through
an acute recognition of the dynamics of differences to imagining a
wordly art, most evidently in his multipanel painting Diaspora (1992),
subsequently developed into a ten-part series, his major work to date.
For obvious reasons to do with its being the bicentenary of British
Settlement, 1988 marked a resurgence of interest in the nature of
Australias national culture, one aspect of which was the degree to
which the local art world might have solved its provincialism problem.
An indicative set of responses may be found in the catalog to the 1988
Australian Biennale, subtitled From the Southern Cross: A View of World
Art c. 19401988. Curator Nick Waterlow noted that today it is possible
to live in Australia as an artist and exhibit with ones peers in other
countries fairly frequently, and while this may not be often enough, it
is still a great advance on the previous situation.51 Ever the enthusiast,
curator and reviewer Daniel Thomas summed up the situation in the
upbeat title to his contribution: The Biennale: How Australian Art
Escaped Provincial Internationalism and Joined the World in Its Own
Right.52 As proof, he cited improvement in the Sydney biennials, John
Kaldors projects such as bringing Christo to wrap Sydneys Little Bay
in 1969, the presence of Australian artists in overseas survey shows,
and notices in the international art journals. Critic Terence Maloon
was more circumspect, and more accurate:

To this day, Australian artists depend on foreign authority for legiti-

mation and also, to a considerable extent, to complete the meanings
the provincialism problem

of what they do. We continue to worry about provincialism even

though we have shifted into such close synchronization with inter-
national trends that Australian artists can anticipate and antedate

50 Imants Tillers, Locality Fails, Art & Text, no. 6 (Winter 1982). A parallel, and similarly
parodic, take on the exigencies of working in a provincial situation may be found in Ilya
Kabakov, Edward Gorokhovsky: Reproduktsiia reproduktsii (zametki provintsiala),
[Edward Gorokhovsky: Reproduction of a Reproduction (Notes of a Provincial)] a-Ya, 6
(1984): 8-12. I thank Michelle Maydanchik for this reference.
|

51 Nick Waterlow, A View of World Art, in 1988 Australian Biennale: From the Southern Cross:
smith

A View of World Art c.19401988 (Sydney: Sydney Biennale, 1988), exhibition catalog, 9.
52 In Waterlow, 1988 Australian Biennale, 1823.

27
 major swings of fashion and can contribute effectively to lively
debates in international journals and forums. In one sense, our
conversion to world-time represents progress; in another sense, it
has not affected the fundamental precondition of the provincialism
problem; the role of timekeeper and pace-setter is still not ours.53

The subtlest contribution to the debate was Ian Burns essay The
Re-Appropriation of Influence. Comparing a painting by Sidney Nolan
to one by Fernand Lger, he demonstrated that Nolan mediated Lgers
influence, consciously distancing himself from close imitation, instead
turning a selection of Lgers devices to his own, local and specific pur-
poses. Although Burn recognized that artists working at peripheries
often use a commitment in terms of style as a means of declaring an
allegiance or affiliation to an international movement, thus disen-
franchising themselves from local practices, he favored an alternative
approach, amalgamations of received styles, complex hybrids and
transgressions of pure styles that, he believed, has given rise to a lot
of the more distinctive art produced in this country.54 There is an obvi-
ous convergence here with Tillerss strategies, although Burn remained
aware that the center lay in wait to appropriate these innovations and
replay them to all its peripheries as its own invention.
In his various commentaries on The Provincialism Problem arti-
cle, Rex Butler emphasizes the paradoxical nature of claims for the uni-
versality of provincialism, and uses postmodern critiques of ideas of
the unoriginality of originality (that only the existence of preceding
copies make the recognition of originality possible) to claim that metro-
politan and provincial art make each other possible, that neither would
exist without the other.55 True, but this reverse circularity leaves us
where we were, except for those willing to keep going around in circles,
as many of the pluralist, anything goes artists and critics of the
1980s, it seemed to me, were only too willing to do.
More recently, he and A.D.S. Donaldson have claimed that, if one
tracks in detail the interaction between Australian and American art-

53 Terence Maloon, The Rope, The Clock, and The Gift, in Waterlow, 1988 Australian
artmargins 6:1

Biennale, 37.
54 Ian Burn, The Re-Appropriation of Influence, in Waterlow, 1988 Australian Biennale, 43
and 47.
55 Rex Butler, Introduction, in What Is Appropriation? An Anthology of Critical Writings on
Australian Art in the 80s and 90s (Brisbane: Institute of Modern Art; Sydney: Power
Institute, 1996), 26.

28
ists and institutions throughout the 20th century, one finds a traffick-
ing so dense that the provincialism problem disappears. Unfortunately,
their banishment of artists treated as central in most histories of
Australian art, and their long lists of mobile artists of middling and
low accomplishment, amount to a somewhat painful refutation of their
main claim. They totally miss the fact that provincialism was enacted
through the pattern of expatriation described above, and seem to
think that mere connection refutes the operations of cultural power.
On a theoretical level, they project backward in time my descriptions
of art-making within contemporaneity, and assert that we are justified
in seeing Australian artists active up to the 1960s as having always
been contemporary.56 Contemporary with other modern artists, both
in Australia and elsewhere, yes, of course; but, except in rare cases,
not in a relationship of equivalence with them.
One or two commentators have played shoot the messenger,
despite my clear statement of finding the picture I have drawn offen-
sive.57 An example is a 1988 essay by Bernice Murphy, Provincialism
Refigured or Culture Distorted?, in which she deplores a now largely
sterile debate about provincialism, rendered in terms that are patroniz-
ing, intellectually limiting and disturbingly chauvinistic.58 More
recently, the essay itself has been blamed for somehow causing the
condition that it actually set out to diagnose and oppose, specifically
for having a restrictive impact on thinking about Australian art before,
during, and after the 1970s.59

From the Provincialism Problem to Worldly Art

In an essay in the journal World Art, Ian McLean has rethought The
Provincialism Problem in contemporary terms. Recognizing that
world art reverses the artworld concept, as defined by philosopher
the provincialism problem

Arthur Danto in his famous article of 1964, McLean charts the preva-
lence of national art worlds during the 20th century, the ascendency of
New York as a meta-Artworld during the Cold War, and the more
recent emergence of the idea of world art, especially as globalization

56 Rex Butler and A.D.S. Donaldson, Against Provincialism: Australian-American con

nections 19002000, Journal of Australian Studies 36, no. 3 (September 2012): 305.
57 Smith, The Provincialism Problem, 58.
58 Bernice Murphy, Provincialism Refigured or Culture Distorted?, Art Monthly
|

Australia, no. 15 (October 1988): 13.

smith

59 Anne Sanders, Minefield: Revisiting the Historical Document That Is The Provin
cialism Problem, Contemporary Visual Art+Culture Broadsheet 40, no. 2 (2011): 11113.

29
 intensified after 1989. The New York meta-Artworld was able to rein-
force its claims to universality due to the worldwide economic and
political power of the United States. He argues that I showed that the
provincialist bind was not simply an after-effect of a powerful center,
but structured the very center of its power, thus its intractable nature
as a problem for all concerned. 60 In retrospect, he says, we can now
see that Smiths 1974 article does not so much announce the provincial-
ism problem as write its obituary ... in a concerted fashion, it first put
the Artworld on notice in the name of world art.61 McLean notes that,
today, World art is tolerant of local artworlds, such as indigenous ones,
and is predicated on the assumption that it is a zone of translation that
can move between artworlds and be in more than one simultaneously.62
He is using the term world art to mean something quite close to what
I mean when I speak about contemporary art in its relationship to the
broader world condition, for which I use the term contemporaneity.
As I said above, the main factors that led me to define the provin-
cialism problem in the way I did in the 1970s continue, in significant
ways, to determine the picture of contemporary art within the condi-
tions of contemporaneity that I have been outlining since 2000. In vari-
ous publications I have sought to show the structures underlying the
apparently formless, random, whatever sense of the contemporary
that prevails in art world discourse. What Is Contemporary Art? profiles
the operations of these structures within art practice, in museums, exhi-
bitionary circuits, and within art historical thinking. 63 A big picture of
the evolution of the metropolitan-provincial, center-periphery dynamic
within the worlds art soon emerges in the book. Since the 1980s, every-
thing to do with the visual arts, from the practice of individual artists to
the changing role of art within the international cultural complex, has
been affected by the interaction between two genuinely global forces:
the energies of previously colonized, rapidly emergent nations and peo-
ples, and the retreat, pushback, and adaptation to less commanding yet
still powerful positions by those who were colonizers.
In the visual arts, we have seen this, on the one hand, in the out-
pouring of work by artists from the South or the East; from devel-
oping and some poor countries; from Fourth Worlds, including
artmargins 6:1

indigenous artists, within the advanced or rich countries; and from

60 Ian McLean, The World Artworld, World Art 1, no. 2 (September 2011), 167.
61 Ibid., 166.
62 Ibid., 164.
63 Terry Smith, What Is Contemporary Art? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
30
the peoples in movement around the world. This is the art of transna-
tional transitionality. With biennials as their initial and continuing plat-
forms, these artists have energized art centers everywhere, creating a
more located, regional, lateral international art world than the strictly
hierarchical one that was so obvious in the 1960s and 1970s. Their work
has impacted on museum practice at the traditional metropolitan cen-
ters, is recognized in some critical writing and art historical accounts
(although acknowledgment that this is a deep, and permanent, world
historical change has been slow in coming), and remains instinctively
resisted by many key players. On the other hand, and at the same time,
the high modernist art centersespecially those, such as New York and
London, that remain market-drivenhave pushed back against these
energies of the Other, and reshaped their enterprises to take advantage
of the longevity, and continuing inventiveness, of some of the artists
who were crucial to the transformations of art during the 1960s and
1970s, and of the increasing concentrations of wealth on the part of
those willing to act as collectors, patrons, and philanthropists.
Modernism was revived, renovated, and revamped. It became, in a word,
remodernist. Taken together, these two developments may be seen as
indicators that the provincialism problem has, since the 1980s, been
recast by the inner contradictions of a globalizing world (dis)order. 64
All this became clear in the years around 2000, especially in
places that host major markets for art, concentrations of galleries, and
leading auction houses. The structure of the art market at its highest
levels is a concentrated version of the hierarchical, exclusionary rule-
setting that underlay the dominance of the metropolitan Artworld dur-
ing modern times. In our contemporary condition, the market is a
competitive global network, circulating around the home bases of
finance capital. For all its celebration of aesthetic values, it operates, in
the provincialism problem

essence, in predominantly economic terms and for primarily economic

reasons. This is the domain of the 1%. As David Hodge and Hamed
Yousefi put it in their post for the Supercommunity blog, contrary to
being solved, the provincialism problem has been neoliberalized.65

64 I offer a broad outline of how these interactions have played out in the worlds art since
the 1980s in Contemporary Art: World Currents (London: Laurence King; Upper Saddle
River: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2011).
|

65 David Hodge and Hamed Yousefi, Provincialism Perfected: Global Contemporary Art
smith

and Uneven Development, Supercommunity (blog), Day 34, June 20, 2015, accessed
October 20, 2016, http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/provincialism-perfected
-global-contemporary-art-and-uneven-development/.
31
 They highlight three factors that continue to exclude artists working in
colonized and postcolonial settings from realizing their full potential:
continuing disparities in institutional and education access in global
cities compared to the rest; a peculiarly Western type of formal com-
plexity (what I would call a reflexive remodernism) that prevails in art
schools and critical discourse; and a value system that prefers individu-
alism to collectivity in a context where the rewards are few and loaded
at that top. They conclude, The conduits connecting the provinces to
the global hubs still largely transmit value in only one direction.
Yet something else was happening during this period, and is
increasingly defining the present. Using currents as a metaphor for
these two forces and flows, I also identified a third one, emerging in
the years around 2000 as a supplement to them both, and driven by
energies that might eventually displace the binary dialectic to which
the dominant currents were subject. We see it in the new modes of
visual imagining enabled by social media, transient collaborations, and
experimental forms of life. Artists working within this current are
immersed in the issues of mediation, self-making, communality, and
connectivity within a relentlessly globalizing yet structurally dysfunc-
tional world economy, an immobilized, fragmenting world political
order, and an increasingly fragile planet. They are of course subject to
the distortions identified by Hodge and Yousefi, yet nonetheless they
remain dedicated to creating platforms that enable us to see our con-
temporaneity more clearly, but also more constructively. They are act-
ing within the politics of contemporaneity, which turn on the necessity
to move from the divisiveness of incommensurable difference to the
coeval connectivity required to face the already urgent challenges of
living in the Anthropocene. 66 They are piecing together a picture and
suggesting a world for art that, one continues to hope, will soon dis-
place the provincialist bind.

n o t e This article is based on a lecture given at the National Gallery of Victoria,

September 3, 2014. My thanks to Helen Hughes and the team at Discipline and those at
Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne, for organizing this event; to Rebecca Coates for her
support; and to Emily Siddons and Simon Maidment of the NGV for hosting it. I also
artmargins 6:1

thank the anonymous reader and the editors of ARTMargins.

66 See Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (New York: Henry
Holt, 2014) and Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism versus the Climate (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 2014).

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