Nationalism Under Attack by Localism and Globalism
Once again, national pavilions are featured in this year’s Venice Biennale,. While approximately 90 countries are participating in the most prestigious of all international art festivals, many of the artists selected to represent their homelands are dismantling conventional ideas about nationhood and national identity. The contribution by Tavares Strachan from the balmy Bahamas, for example, contains ice collected in the North Pole; Stefanos Tsivopoulos’s contribution to the Greek Pavilion contains footage of an African immigrant pushing a supermarket trolley through the streets of Athens hunting for scrap metal to sell; and at the Pavilion of Chile, Alfredo Jaar has created a scale model of the Giardini (a site at the Venice Biennale)emerging from a large pool of sludgy-green liquid before sinking back into its depths.Nationalism is further tromped by France and Germany because they swapped pavilions. Of the four artists on display in the French Pavilion, only Romuald Karmakar was born in Germany, and he is the son of an Iranian father and a French mother.
An ecologically themed attack on conventional nationalism takes the form of a garbage patch gathered from marine debris concentrated in the North Pacific Ocean by Maria Cristina Finucci, who is Italian born. The water and debris she is exhibiting is entitled “The Garbage Patch State” because these patches can be as large as the state of Texas!
Nationalism seems to be succumbing to the intrusion of two opposing perspectives – one is globalism and the other is localism. While nationalism is faltering, its two opponents do not seem to be equally matched. Globalism typically thrusts localism into a defensive posture.
Evidence to support this assertion is apparent in most peoples’ answer to the following question, “Would you prefer to take a trip on a bus or a jet?” Global superhighways, whether they are paved or electronic, offer excitement and adventure. In comparison, local trails near home often seem pallid and provincial. Despite the surge of initiatives among environmentalists to establish locally scaled endeavors such as local currencies, community gardens, neighborhood recycling facilities, district-based material exchanges, and regional trading partners, contemporary cultural norms still cluster around the glamorous images evoked by being a jet-setting globe trotter. Globalism is apparent in world music, world cups, world wars, world politics, world premieres, the World Wide Web, the World Trade Organization, and the World Bank. It is less apparent, but equally present, in paper clips, shoelaces, peanut butter, and combs. In all these ways globalism evokes the inspiring vision of melding “the ends of the earth” and its “four corners” into a unified sphere.
Go Local! campaigns may win the race toward environmental prudence and responsibility, but their wide-spread adoption seems to depend upon their ability to also excite and delight.