On delving into the actual possibilities of that integration, Barriendos asks:” Can the political role recently taken on by subordinate geographies be maintained now that the latter have been incorporated into the globalized visualization processes of otherness, or are their inter-cultural semiotic battles being weakened by the internationalist environments of global art?

Some of the leading voices in contemporary cultural thought have referred to this dichotomy, while qualifying forms in representation in very different ways: from Hal Foster who calls it ethnization to Arjan Appadurai who views it as disjunction, the paths taken to construct cultural meanings through art are very wide ranging. Currently it is not just a matter of exploiting the exotic from the traditional representational politics that upholds it; the complex network of institutionalized hierarchies that establish legitimizing criteria must be kept in mind, and the fight centers on finding the ways in which that process can be subverted. The new internationalism, trans-modernity, gnoseological mapping, geopolitical aesthetics and the post-Colonial condition are categories that form part of a language that implies the need for a territorialization of aesthetic analyses that work towards that end.

Barriendos therefore furnishes several examples to substantiate his views on how trans-national art exhibitions can act as a vehicle to help reconsider representational politics. In this regard the author provides very apt judgments that open up other perspectives on the complex machinery of cultural exchanges; he states that “representational politics stemming from the circulation of art can never be based on a multicultural superficiality”, while also calling our attention to the main factors that have a negative effect on their implementation.

At present art vies between its autonomy and the responsibility of representing socio-cultural content and values, making use of all the aspects that daily life and ethnicity provide. The direction taken by these two factors, either conditioning or interfering with each other, forms an active part of the competition over representation in the international world of art, a competition that bears different implications.

The post-Colonial condition, with its post-modern appearances, is the natural setting for those conflicts, which lead to different forms and types of curatorial policies fostered by “the cultural network woven around globalization”. The examination of the central issue of cultural exchange and its new internationalization is therefore carried out by continuously searching for its expression in the representational politics that the multicultural art scene implements through exhibitions, i.e., the most common object-based form of art practice. In this regard the author’s views on some of the paradigmatic exhibitions that have focused on the representation of otherness as a central theme. Deconstructing the practice of exhibition building is one of the most effective means of understanding the inner workings of the international functioning of art, which makes the critical discourse on the subject more effective.

The book’s bibliography substantiates the author’s line of reasoning and places the text within the complex network of reformulations of an aesthetic nature that outline the possibility of an alternative outlook. This in turn poses other questions and offers other answers to the problems of cultural exchange that art promotes internationally, and that often undermine our own certainties.

Magaly Espinosa
November, 2009.