My friend and colleague Dr Raphael Vella has written a most interesting and intelligent reply to my earlier article with many valid ideas (TMIS, 14 August). However, since I feel his points did not deal with my main arguments, I wish to clarify my line of thought further.

Reading Dr Vella’s contribution to this discussion made me recall Plato’s misgivings about the written word. According to Plato, this seismic invention was the source of havoc, universal misapprehension, and, worse still, oblivion. Reading Dr Vella, I felt this to be in some sense true. One can perceive an argument through one’s own pre-conceptions, not taking into account the content of another’s opinion. This begets a rather Beckettian communication, in which two people discuss a topic without being aware of the other, due to misconceptions concerning the argument and the person involved: and so the discussion keeps hovering in a vacuum.

First of all, I cannot understand why Dr Vella regards some of my considered thoughts to be ‘convenient solutions’. On the contrary, I constantly doubt my own research, and relentlessly underline the impossibility of finding solutions. One has to tackle each question in all its contradictory and paradoxical relationships to other questions. I constantly yearn to study the relationship between art and different modes of creative behaviour. Professing that there is any solution, let alone a convenient one, is ridiculous. Some of the questions proposed in my various articles and publications are radically new to Maltese scholarship, and have rarely been tackled before, and then only sporadically.

Dr Vella quotes me out of context, putting the discussion in the wrong gear from the start. He gives the impression that the role of the Church was central to my discussion. He unfortunately leaves out the bulk of my argument: it is an error to narrow down this debate to one of simplistic cause and effect. What I in fact stated in my previous letter was: “Narrowing down everything I was attempting to say into a simple discussion of art and the Church, as Mr Buttigieg has implied, is far from correct. Society is a good deal more complex... Society imposes its own values and mores in waves. Dominating the collective consciousness can be achieved through an alliance of different forces in society, all striving towards exerting power and the governance over all of us. A cobweb of complexities enshrining radical conservative forces overlap with other complexities: the turbulent relationship between the Church and the State, alliances of convenience, or adherences between the Church and specific political parties or institutions; this has always been, and still is, a predominant feature in Malta. Maltese society is based on tribal alliances, where allegiances and clan identities are corroborated by an instilled fear of change, backed up by the very same conservative powers’ own politics. Such a structured quasi-impenetrable triangle of the State, the Church and established institutions, along with such allegiances and relationships, also influences our relationship with art.”

Thus, limiting the discussion solely to the Church is unsatisfactory.

In his first paragraph, Dr Vella claims that I maintain there is an ‘absence’ of international contemporary art in contemporary Maltese culture. In fact I stated the contrary. My argument centres on the existence of a substantial strand of contemporary art within such an insular culture. This is what is exciting, and indeed forms part of my current research at the Warburg Institute. Dr Vella then asserts that ‘erroneously, [there is] an assumed relationship between this situation and I fought X”. Why ‘erroneously’? Of course there is a relationship between the exhibition I Fought X and the Malta art scene. Every exhibition has a relationship with the Maltese art scene in its complexity of contradictions and paradoxes. Isolating art events in Malta from their local and international context has been, in my view, the plague of our art studies and our artistic development. Such conservative thinking creates an insular balloon of emptiness surrounding Malta. I sympathise much more with Dr Vella’s thesis published in his exhibition catalogue, happily emphasising that ‘emptiness’ is the fundamental characteristic of art today.

Dr Vella resumes this misplaced logic when he tackles my main argument relating to the insular-cosmopolitan dichotomy in the arts. He de-constructs my arguments, sums them up, mistakenly, and attacks his own re-constructed thesis as though it was mine. He gives the impression that he is arguing my arguments, whereas in reality he is disagreeing with his own made-up series of arguments. My view was not whether, or how, in such an insular island as Malta I Fought X reflects global ideas and values, which in fact it did, and did very well! Putting other unwarranted words in my mouth, as for example, ‘the implication is that the exhibition camouflages or misrepresents a Maltese reality’ is simply not true. I did not say, neither do I believe, that these works had to represent Maltese reality.

I was even more surprised when Dr Vella accused my article of ‘conveniently avoid[ing] to mention...one crucial piece of information ... that the exhibition includes the work of 22 artists, 18 of whom are not Maltese’. Dr Vella calls this element ‘crucial’, and goes on to give a list of entirely valid international characteristics of the whole event. But I took it for granted that we were talking openly of the main artistic arguments concerning the international contemporary art scene, of which Malta forms an integral part. There was no hidden reason, as implied by Dr Vella, for my not mentioning this obvious element. For me it was indeed quite obvious, since my argument reiterated precisely the relationship between the international art scene, in which Dr Vella’s curated exhibition is playing its part, and both the historic and the current artistic scene in Malta.

Dr Vella goes on to blame me for mistaken reasons. He says that his 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’?

Dr Vella repeats the same faulty argument in his next paragraph: “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’.” As I was not saying that one has to promote Malta, or that one needs to reflect the Maltese scene (this is another important, but separate argument which desperately needs to be tackled in the near future), I must repeat my clarification, although Plato’s trauma still lingers in my head. My lifelong research is dedicated to the study of the insular-cosmopolitan relationship in international contemporary art. In my youth I explored those ideas in rebellious Milano. I also participated in artistic events in Moscow for many years at a time when Moscow, after its heyday as the avant-garde of modernism, was insulated from the artistic upheavals of Western contemporary art. Later, I experienced the struggle of Byzantine-Russian icon art in its struggle to co-exist with the post-perestroika invasion of ‘rubbish art’. My five-year art project with an insular Australian Aboriginal tribe Kuwinji-Gunbalanya gave me precious experience of how artists deal with an upcoming wave of radical modern innovations. The Maghrebian art world and its relation to the contemporary scene is another example. Studies of how the insular Malagian Picasso dealt with the Madridian cosmopolitan Velázquez; how the insularity of James Joyce formed the basis of today’s modernism; how the provincial Malevitch, Chagall and Kandinsky dominated the cosmopolitan world over four generations; Meyerhold, Arthaud in theatre, Nijinsky in ballet, Satie in music, the French novelists Camus and Céline, and innumerable other examples encapsulating this intriguing provincial-cosmopolitan tension form a major part of my studies. This was the gist of my argument, and why I wanted to introduce I Fought the X into this fascinating debate.

I have used Dr Vella’s impressive exhibition to bring in once more another new element to the Maltese art debate. It has nothing to do with whether the exhibition reflects Maltese reality or not. This, together with other such exhibitions, and Dr Vella’s own artistic works, as well as the exciting creations by other contemporary artists, such as Vince Briffa, Pierre Portelli and Caesar Attard, have for these last two decades formed part of today’s Maltese reality, and have changed our way of seeing (to use John Berger’s expression), and perhaps our way of thinking (to use T.J. Clark’s expression).

My interest in this question is to study and to participate in the relationship of works that were created and shown in an insular environment, and to see how they correlate with the globalisation of art, to use a cliché.

My concept of the ‘facade’, which Dr Vella seems to have also misunderstood, is vital for the Malta scene, and has nothing to do with reflections. Throughout the history of Malta’s artistic evolution we can find this phenomenon of the facade, which is in fact common to all countries and periods. We see the epicentre of a seismic art earthquake, the effects of which ripple over onto the first, second, third, fourth and so on waves, the last being a weak repercussion of the centre. For example, after the first Impressionist/Cubist/Expressionist waves we see secondary waves of similar ripples, misted with different schools of art and thought. After such a seismic crack, many artists import into their art praxis the facade of the original crack, but without its theoretical, philosophical, experimental groundings, and it thus becomes a manner (in Greenberg’s and Danto’s sense) and so dies. It is here that the insularity of Malta welcomes innovation, when such innovation is already no longer new. Studying this phenomenon is crucial.

I disagree too with Dr Vella’s concept of domination. I was not talking of the domination of a country or of a nationality, but of a social class, be it French, British, American or Alaskan.

I completely agree with Dr Vella’s view of the history of the 20th century, which “is replete with autocratic situations where the establishment forced... the necessity of a clear “meaning”... down the throats of hundreds of artists...” Besides the fact that what today is termed as contemporary art is itself an autocratic power, forcing its own meaning (even if meaningless) down our throats, Dr Vella seems to forget that his ideas of ‘meaninglessness’, ‘emptiness’, ‘nothingness’, ‘void’, and the need of a ‘lack of meaning’ are all the ideas of the very same early 20th century ‘heroic’ avant-garde manifestos, which he is so vehemently attacking. Dr Vella closes his letter with a worn-out 20th century avant-garde nugget of wisdom, telling us that now “we need to stop talking about origins and start talking about directions”. This is a direct, albeit perhaps unconscious, quote from the early Soviet radical Bolshevik left-wing organisation (LEF) declaration. One can also find subtle versions of this call, paradoxically enough, in various early Fascist/Nazi artistic declarations. We should not talk about directions without considering origins and sources. Separating these can be dangerous, as 20th century history has amply shown. The great modernist writer James Joyce stated, “We are what we were”: a minimalist phrase that nevertheless begets awe in all its beauty.

Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci

is an artist/lecturer in

the Department of History of Art

at the University of Malta