Indigenous or Global? The Poverty of Art-Historical Terminology

For decades, expressions like ‘indigenous’ and ‘global’ have been used to refer to very different artworks, practices and artists. Whether justified or not, there are many reasons for this: the bi-cultural versus transcultural conception of culture; the pantheistic/animistic versus atheistic conception of the universe; the cyclical/circumstantial notion of time versus the linear one; affective presence versus market value. Departing from the idea that art (re) frames reality, aids communion (with human and non-human entities), and renders the invisible visible, this article ponders the cultural-epistemic genealogy of ‘indigenous’ and ‘global’ through a close reading of Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun and Ai Weiwei’s work. Placing engineered homogeneity in dialogue with standardised heterogeneity, it argues for a ‘mondialising’ practice which subverts the ‘immond-ness’ (un-world-ness) of globalisation.