Contemporary global art broadens art and artist through diverse international practices and politics, but emerges from the "spatial fix" David Harvey traces to globalisation: the post-1973 restructuring which internationalised and accelerated production, commerce, and finance to the benefit of neoliberal—and nominally postcolonial—powers. Geopolitical and institutional spatial discourses reveal the power gradient obscured by presenting the globalised as global.
Global trade has long relied on cartographers to categorise and claim the world. Mona Hatoum redraws the map. Multigenerational displacement informs Continental Drift (2000), in which a magnetic arm churns established geographies to suggest that as borders are imposed they may be deposed. Her 2015-16 retrospectives feature maps crafted from unconventional materials, using traditional methods, by Palestinian refugees, thereby transforming cartography from a static assertion to something dynamic and alive.
Tate Modern hosted her 2016 retrospective. Its corporate partner Bank of America holds $8.2m of shares in Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems; Tate Modern has accepted at least £50m from Len Blavatnik, whose foundation donates to the Friends of Israel Defense Forces and the Birthright Israel Foundation. Thus the organisation housing Hatoum's critiques of occupied Palestine accepts funding from those who perpetrate and benefit from Israeli apartheid.
The blurred borders between protest and establishment recall the articulation within the avant-garde text Murderous Humanitarianism of a "counterfeit liberalism" that obscures material power relations. Similarly, Enwezor describes contemporary curators "scouring [the world] for new signs of art", echoing extractive collecting practices of old, to expose the present's false postcoloniality: institutional actors based primarily in the neoliberal core retain the power to deem work 'art' and, through its exhibition, evidence their own progressiveness.
Diego Rivera's corporate commissions illustrate how institutions assimilate political challenge. Though a revolutionary communist, Rivera was celebrated by MoMA and commissioned by Ford to produce the Detroit Industry murals. Ford may have been murderous—the 1932 'Ford Hunger March' is better known as the 'Ford Massacre' due to fatal shootings perpetrated by police and Ford security—but he was no humanitarian: he was a vitriolic antisemite who accepted the Nazis' "highest decoration for foreigners". The Surrealist critique is nonetheless apt: Rivera's radical reputation became a corporate asset through which to appear progressive whilst ruthlessly suppressing organised labour.
Rivera's Rockefeller commission, Man at the Crossroads, depicted a figure caught between capitalist technology and socialist industry, as though waiting for Anthony Giddens to suggest a third way. It allowed Rockefeller to create a literal corporate facade: to deny workers power whilst depicting their labour as integral. This liberalism found its limits in Rivera's portrait of Lenin: when he refused to remove it, the commission was abandoned.
Can art be radical when its conditions of production impose such limits? Miwon Kwon's 'site-specificity' offers one response. Early installation art often operated outside the political strictures of institutional spaces; post-globalisation, its ubiquity within them suggests that either these strictures have loosened or installation's radical element is no more.
Hans Haacke exemplifies the transition from radical practice to institutionalised critique. Through the Art Workers' Coalition (AWC) in the late 1960s, he combined artistic production with direct action against establishment galleries. His MoMA Poll (1970) asked whether Governor Nelson Rockefeller's failure to denounce Nixon's Indochina policy would influence visitors' support for him, confronting a family embedded in the museum. David Rockefeller's office demanded its removal, but MoMA director John Hightower refused; Haacke linked this incident, alongside Hightower's tolerance of AWC protests and labour organisation, to his dismissal. MoMA Poll thus exposed the sanctions imposed when institutional critique exceeds acceptable limits.
Yet Haacke remained within the establishment milieu. In 2020 he became the object of the institutional critique he pioneered when artists hacked World Poll to "better express the political position of American museums" as inferred from anti-labour practices and relationships with the arms industry. Whether he endorsed the intervention is immaterial: repeated exhibitions of his Polls suggest galleries no longer feel threatened by them. Only unsanctioned intervention restored their disruptive force.
Perhaps radical art survives most clearly in acts not legitimated as art. Haacke's hackers, yes, but perhaps also Hinds Hall, the space occupied by Columbia students and named after a six-year-old girl killed by Israeli forces: is this not an installation? When Just Stop Oil daub gallery pieces orange, or Palestine Action slice Balfour's portrait, they create work that is unprofitable, unpalatable, and incompatible with a progressive veneer: it cannot therefore be deemed art, and must be carved out like a mural chiselled from a wall.