Dr Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci chose to entitle his recent article “Dear Raphael and Umberto (TMIS, 31 July), referring simultaneously to two entirely separate affairs: an ongoing debate he is having with his ex-student Umberto Buttigieg, and an international, collective art exhibition I recently curated. While I find Dr Schembri Bonaci’s recent public correspondence with current students and ex-students rather intriguing, I will not discuss issues like censorship or the role of the Church here because these areas are not specifically linked to the exhibition I am involved in (I Fought the X and the X Won), currently on view at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Valletta. I prefer to assume that he combined his academic differences on censorship with Mr Buttigieg and his views on the exhibition in a single article mainly for the sake of convenience. However, while I should state from the start that I am sincerely happy to see that the exhibition elicited some form of response locally, I also think that his article unfortunately confirms the fact that convenient solutions are not always the best ones.

Dr Schembri Bonaci’s interesting historical and political line of reasoning in the first part of his article – focusing largely on his debate with Mr Buttigieg about Malta’s cultural insularity in the 20th century and the “reactionary role played by the Church” – leads him to a discussion of cosmopolitanism in international contemporary art, its alleged absence in contemporary Maltese culture, and, erroneously, an assumed relationship between this situation and I Fought the X.

In a nutshell, his argument in much of the second part of his article can be summed up as follows. If Maltese society is so “conservative”, “oppressive”, “tribal”, “clerical”, “provincial”, and “insular” (and, to make matters worse, it has been like this for several decades), how could an exhibition like I Fought the X reflect “the international, multinational, and broad-based tolerance of global ideas and values” that is characteristic of more cosmopolitan centres like London and Paris? The implication is that the exhibition camouflages or misrepresents a Maltese reality, but the real answer to this question, dear Giuseppe, is located in the one, crucial piece of information that your long article conveniently avoids to mention: that I Fought the X includes the work of 22 artists, 18 of whom are not Maltese. The seeds of the exhibition were sown abroad, in discussions between a number of international artists (two of whom became the exhibition organisers/project managers), and was first shown last April at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Cluj-Napoca in Romania. The catalogue was also published and designed outside Malta, and the exhibition’s first showing in Cluj was featured in several international magazines and newspapers, including Flash Art. It is also possible that I Fought the X will travel to another European country in the future, and the contacts created through the event are already having a snowball effect by generating further possibilities that go well beyond this exhibition and beyond Europe. A handful of the works in the exhibition were actually produced for and shown in other international contexts, and the list of important exhibitions and venues in which the participating artists have shown their work is so long that it would easily fill this whole page.

I am simply listing these facts to state what seems blatantly obvious to me and many others: that the exhibition neither intends to “promote Malta” nor is it about the importation of “the facade of Europeanism to our shores” (indeed, the very idea that it should be either one or the other is itself a provincial idea). Why would a group of international artists based in New York, Athens, Paris, Houston, Bratislava, Rome, Hong Kong, Beijing, Berlin, Tokyo, Vienna and other “cosmopolitan” cities want or need to reflect “the Maltese scene”? Why not reflect the Romanian scene, given that the exhibition actually premiered there? And, if we choose to follow the thread of this local version of a “reflection theory”, whose reading of “Malteseness” should young artists in Malta be expected to reproduce: the Church’s alleged provincial construal of things, the ideas of those who believe that only Baroque art was truly “Maltese”, or the “liquid modernity” of a Zygmunt Bauman which expresses the sense of continual transformation that young people everywhere, including Malta, experience?

Unfortunately, Dr Schembri Bonaci’s scholarly article offers no clarification, except a brief parting shot in the last paragraph that vaguely and nostalgically champions a “return to awe and beauty”. So, readers are left with a bleak lament and a Catch-22 scenario: we can only choose between a) being stuck in a Maltese rut and b) reflecting realities that are not really “ours”. The first option means that we are co-opted by a Maltese blinkered mentality and are therefore out of sync with the rest of the world. The second means that we are co-opted by a “consumerist-globalised society” and are hence out of sync with ourselves. Conclusion: Maltese artists are doomed to exist out of sync with everything and everyone (unless they are saved by awe and beauty).

Granted, Maltese society was dominated by an oppressive form of intellectual insularity for many decades of the 20th century and still struggles to rid itself of old-fashioned taboos, but, perhaps, it is precisely this stifling background that led so many Maltese artists to wander off and seek new pastures and ideas to graft onto their “native” roots, to paraphrase Nicolas Bourriaud’s ideas in The Radicant (2009). That they would want to do so should hardly come as a surprise to anyone in the field, because we have seen similar developments in bigger countries with more problematic histories, such as a number of countries in Eastern Europe and China. Whether individual Maltese artists like Frank Portelli succeeded in doing this well or not is another matter, and I would suggest that art historians study such artists on a case-by-case basis, avoid generalisations, and become aware of the fact that Maltese artistic identities are hardly ever formed exclusively in “Maltese provincial villages”. It is true that the art world – today more than ever – is entrenched in power struggles that tend to confirm the dominance of a few countries (which means that not all artists are “equal”), but this does not mean that artists’ works must always be measured against the backdrop of their geographic origins, as though artists are first and foremost some sort of representatives of their national identity. After all, only artists from the “periphery” are sometimes expected to hold their passports in full view and mirror their ethnicity and politically problematic backgrounds. All other artists are simply “artists”, unlike Kenyan artists, Romanian artists, Maltese artists, and so on. To lay such an obsessive emphasis on the nationality of artists and the country where they are based ultimately works only in favour of those who wish to maintain the dominance of the few.

Talking about power struggles, I wish to add that the whole point behind the notion of “winner” and “loser” in the exhibition is to challenge (rather than reflect) heroic avant-gardist manifestos and ideas. Most works in the exhibition deliberately dispense with an obvious illustration of winner or loser, and we are left wondering whether our daily struggles actually yield clear victories or failures. Naturally, those who would rather think that “art is dangerous when it is understood” will not appreciate this ambivalence, and will suggest that this “meaninglessness” is merely an oblivious reflection of our co-option by the establishment. Unfortunately, the history of the 20th century is replete with autocratic situations where the establishment forced the exact opposite (the necessity of a clear “meaning”) down the throats of hundreds of artists and writers (not to mention audiences), and I therefore prefer to follow Jean-François Lyotard when he writes in The Postmodern Condition that works of art “cannot be judged according to a determining judgement” and that these “rules and categories are what the work of art itself is looking for”.

Those who have worked with me closely enough know that I am intensely fascinated by developments in Maltese contemporary art, and around half the projects I am currently engaged in involve young and established Maltese artists, writers and other creative persons based in Malta. So, this debate is not about the renunciation of one’s nationality in favour of a superficial form of universalism. Nor is this debate about prescribing a “return to awe and beauty” from some prophetic, high moral ground. If we want to move on, we need to stop talking about origins and start talking about directions. And these directions are more numerous and complex than some of us dare to imagine.