European Fusion

Until Maastricht, neither art nor culture were properly matters for the European Community. The Treaty of Rome contained only the little-resolved article 36 dealing with the protection of 'patrimoine nationale'. Of course the arts have been subject to the effects of other Community rulings such as those dealing with data protection, regional development and copyright. And British governments have largely been opposed to the EC taking on a wider cultural role, fearing that central directives would be nothing but troublesome, homogenising and expensive. A rather distancing attitude emerged in the British establishment by which culture - synonymous with cultural property - in the European context was either 'heritage' or 'contemporary art'. Heritage should preferably be kept in Britain (even if it was Italian or French in the first place, and, the Elgin Marbles notwithstanding, with a deal of sniffiness about our relatively clean consciences compared to the French who had collected works for the Louvre by force) but only if existing private or public bodies cared enough to pay for it. Contemporary art should be treated as economic goods produced by individuals or small businesses and should be traded freely between countries like cucumbers or furniture. In either case the message from government was no new investment (for preservation or promotion) over and above the present funding of the Arts Council, the National Museums and Galleries, the British Council and the National Heritage Memorial Fund.

Now an intriguingly bland passage in the Maastricht Treaty which has not been the centre of political or media attention reads: 'The Community shall contribute to the flowering of the cultures of the Member States, while respecting their national and regional diversity, and at the same time bringing the common cultural heritage to the fore'. Here for the first time culture is to be admitted within the domain, the 'competance', of the European Community.

However, the idea that Europe itself might be a culture, a collection of cultures or a contest of cultures is still essentially alien to the British establishment. Thus arts funding in the European Commission's Kaleidoscope scheme, which is now in its third year and helps arts organisations to create networks across Europe, has had, like all Commission schemes, only moderate encouragement from the Foreign Office or the Department of National Heritage. (I was happy to be a member of the jury in Brussels this year and can report that while the Commission officials did a remarkably efficient job in dealing with over 1,500 applications, they lacked 'cultural policy' of any kind by which jurors might be guided).

Since January 1 when the barriers were supposedly down, there has hardly been popular celebration, despite the efforts of the Prime Minister's Festival of Europe at the end of last year and the continuing European Programme of cities of culture. The 'new Europe' of the EC is without an image to compare with the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. A few press stories of punters loading up crates of beer in Calais, the continuing neo-fascist activity in most European states and the endless prevarication by the government over the terms of Maastricht itself have hardly been conducive to the picturing of a historic moment, never mind the ghastly shadow of political and ethnic conflict in the former Yugoslav states.

While the Arts Council press release welcomed the inclusion of culture in the terms of Maastricht in 1991, it also quoted Anthony Everitt as saying: 'I believe there has been a missed opportunity to recognise the contribution minorities from non-European backgrounds, resident in Europe, can make to the debate about the future "cultural" Europe.' Such a line continues from Everitt's work as Deputy Secretary General in the 80s when Gavin Jantjes was appointed to chair the Council's quaintly and contentiously termed 'Ethnic Minority Arts Monitoring Committee'. The 1989 report of that Committee pointed to Europe as a major area for interchange and debate, and Peter Blackman and Alex Ankrah (of ACGB Cultural Diversity and Women in the Arts units) have been doing good work ever since funding research and travel on the mainland for black British practitioners. Despite government indifference, a recent Arts Council meeting is said to have given its approval to an update paper on cultural diversity, including the European dimension.

The biting questions of 'Who is a New European?', as well as 'What is European Culture?', emerges most directly from the works in the In Fusion exhibition, originating at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, and curated by Gavin Jantjes, Elizabeth Macgregor and Roger Malbert. The works speak powerfully of colonisation, displacement, alienation and appropriation. Not, by and large, didactically, but as symptomatic of the politicised lives that the artists have themselves led. The eleven artists, who were born in Latin America, the Caribbean, the Middle East, Africa or China, all now live in mainland Europe. And thus emerges one of the central ironies of the exhibition: arguing for diverse cultures as central to the cultural development of Europe, it focuses only on artists who have not yet become widely recognised (in the terms of the mainstream magazines and dealers) and who inevitably 'appear' as more marginal than those who have already been taken up in the kunsthalle circuit. This may be seen as an essential but collectivising tactic and follows most closely on Richard Hylton's Shifting Borders (1992) for the Laing in Newcastle, on Rasheed Araeen's The Other Story (1989) and on Jantjes's own From Two Worlds (1986) for the Whitechapel. It also relates to the curatorial work of among others Eddie Chambers and Sunil Gupta, to the new proposals for an Institute of New International Visual Arts and to the work of an increasing number of independent galleries.

The international comparisons are more complicated. The Decade Show (1990) in New York and the current Whitney Biennial have both made telling impact as popular 'alternative' survey shows; several important African and Latin American contemporary exhibitions have been influential, including Guy Brett's Transcontinental and Ivo Mesquita's Cartographies, while the much larger Magiciens de la Terre (in which unfortunately, none of these artists were included) was blighted by a sense of re-exoticising the non-European, dividing it sharply from the 'central' western-based artists who made up half the selection. In comparison In Fusion seems small in scale, but purposeful, a pointed selection of less familiar mainland artists: emphasising the fact that they are Europeans of non-European background.

The Ikon exhibition opened with a brief 'load of rubbish' flurry (Daily Star, Daily Mirror, Daily Mail), caused by two Birmingham councillors 'complaining' about British Telecom's expensive sponsorship of an exhibition which included mud (Carlos Capelán) and suitcases (Claudio Goulart). Although it turned out that they hadn't seen the exhibition, the councillors chose well. For these, together with the work of Chohreh Feyzdjou, are the best works in the show, using the space to make effective and evocative installations. Capelán's work is peculiarly pungent, using the lower gallery of the Ikon to invoke a Cabinet of Curiosities. Roots, nail clippings, glass bottles and twisted hairs are mingled in display cabinets, surrounded by piles of leather-bound tomes (each held down with a single rock) and heavy carved furniture, but set within a mud-covered set of walls. On these walls are Kosuth-like quotations, some legible, some crossed through. Unlike Kosuth they seem to have a coherent purpose: taken from anthropologists and writers like James Clifford and Jonathan Friedman ('...only people go crazy, not cultures, not societies ...'), they force a meditation on the politics of cultural stereotyping. Who studies whom for what ends?

Feyzdjou's work is an accumulation of disturbing and sinister blackened rolls of canvas and paper, trays of apparently burnt objects, wax, hair and hide. (In a related recent piece, stacks of un-covered painting stretchers speak of no-speech.) The best, if grimmest, of the installations, it seems to indicate the hopelessness of art, at least of its resistance to translation. The audience is left staring at a memorial museum, systematically arranged by the artist and ironically entitled Products of Chohreh Feyzdjou. Once again the Gallery has been productively inhabited: the artist merges an image of the workplace, the studio (an extension of self), with the emotionally charged images of conflict and death. It is not meant as a happy sight/site.

It's Worth its Weight is a slogan lifted from a particular toilet soap by Claudio Goulart for the title of his installation of golden suitcases. Such soap was used for washing his mouth if caught lying as a child. Out of the suitcases come images from the cinema (Tarzan and Columbus films: the popular ideas of the 'jungle' and 'disovery') together with depictions of conquering brutality, old and new. Gold paint also features centrally in the work of (fellow Brazilian) Flavio Pons, where everyday things have been transformed and recycled into precious objects of display. In both works the utopian associations of the European idea of a new world are turned back into the base culture of exploitation that they have spawned.

When one considers Lea Lublin's Duchampian explorations, As M'Bengue's eclectic paintings or Ying Liang's drawings, the true diversity of the exhibition becomes apparent. Lublin has been tracking Duchamp's visit to Buenos Aires and produces some wonderful back-lit poster works based on Rose's Lime Juice as a new part of the Rrose Selavy mythology (here, like Elaine Sturtevant, is the other version of appropriation: reconception, adapting and improving the 'original'). The exhibition thus operates not on some simplistic idea of place or culture or environment, but on the highly conscious manipulation of interchange: the passage of cultural and political power.

The interchanges are mythic, symbolic and allegorical: a long way perhaps from the machinations of the policy makers of the EC or the Arts Council. Inevitably the exhibition spins off the walls in numerous directions (I have not mentioned the 'painted writing' of Ben Bella or the video-migration project of Benni Efrat). It turns not on differences of artistic typology, but on the diversity of cultural referent. Part of the exhibition's importance may lie precisely in the knowledge that it does come 'nationally' supported and sponsored, and in the case of the South Bank is a significant move on from the historical Exotic Europeans of 1991. If cultural policy is to mean anything in the new Europe, it certainly needs to create more opportunities such as In Fusion to see what the market ignores, to continue to turn heads beyond the standard Euro-American axis (and it does seem that the Antwerp city of Culture exhibitions in September may provide one such occasion). These artists help enforce a simple truth. Given that European cultural heritage has never just been the accretion of indigenous material, the interchange of all cultures both within and beyond Europe's boundaries is vital to its health and wealth.