Can We Still Use the Canon?Author(s): Russell FergusonSource: Art Journal, Vol. 58, No. 2 (Summer, 1999), p. 4Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/777942 .

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The texts by M6nica Amor, Okwui Enwezor, Gao

Minglu, Oscar Ho, Kobena Mercer, and Irit Rogoff published in the Winter 1998 Art Journal under the title "Liminalities" provide an eloquent survey of current thinking about relationships between local

specificities and the homogenizing tendencies of a global culture. Underlying such discussions is a

profound dissatisfaction with the ongoing power of an art canon that continues to reflect the world- wide hegemony of the industrialized Western soci-

eties, and of dominant groups within those soci- eties. In recent years the traditional canon has thus

increasingly been seen as a tool of exclusion that

Can We Still Use the Canon? has echoed broader

patterns of political and social domination.

Few now would deny, for example, the relation-

ship between the rising political and economic

power of the United States after the Second World War and the simultaneous rise to canonical status of its art.

Increasing attention to a broader range of world cultures and the emergence of an overtly articulated multiculturalism have by no means eliminated cultural hegemony. Especially in the United States, however, there has been some

progress, which it would be self-deceiving to

deny. Large surveys of contemporary art are now almost never the virtually all male, all white affairs that they were as recently as ten or fifteen years ago. Internationally, the dominance of New York has been increasingly challenged not just by eco-

nomically powerful centers such as Los Angeles or

Tokyo, but also by thriving artist-driven scenes in cities such as Glasgow and Mexico City.

Along with such gains for diversity, it is sometimes argued that the canon itself is not just reactionary, but also redundant. This position, I

think, reflects a utopian desire for a sphere of dis- course in which all cultural production can be received without invidious comparison to other works. Evaluative comparison, however, is integral to meaningful critical analysis. The attention given to the canon's functions of exclusion has some- what obscured its other function: that of providing a framework for discourse. This function is not

going away, as artists themselves are well aware.

They still tend to want admission to the canon

rather than an undefined place in a flattened-out

landscape. And indeed, every act of writing or curatorial practice, whenever it gets to the point of

naming a name, is participating in a certain level of canon formation, no matter what the intent of its author, no matter whether it represents a chal-

lenge to the status quo or a confirmation of it. No one writes about artists at random.

As curators, writers, or teachers, pretending that the canon does not or should not exist can

only blind us to our real relationship to it. We can

acknowledge it as a fictional, even arbitrary, con-

struction, but we should remember that fiction carries meaning, too. It is essential that the canon be contested, but perhaps it is a diversion to sug- gest that we might be able to abolish it completely. Any discussion of the work of specific artists will

inevitably draw them into some level of canonical

status, even if tacitly. We are all implicated in this

process. Rather than a complete destruction of the

very idea of the canon, it might be more produc- tive to think in terms of a multiplicity of (semi-) canonical narratives, to jettison the absolutist

theological roots of the canon in favor of a more

organic, more mobile, set of structures. We can do this without needing to embrace the unattainable vision of an entirely canon-free world.

These comments were prompted by my participation in a panel dis- cussion organized by M6nica Amor at ARCO in Madrid in February 1999, at which Carlos Basualdo, Guy Brett, and Okwui Enwezor also spoke. I am indebted to them for their responses.

Russell Ferguson The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

4 SUMMER 1999

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