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for all their obvious differences, they picture travel and globalisation in similar terms, emphasising efficient passage and communication, distances easily bridged. Morris sketches what Tiravanija exemplifies: a nomadism that meets no resistance. And this understanding of travel in a globalised environment is perfectly in line with the neoliberal ideal of open, deregulated markets, in which flows of goods, people, capital and information are unimpeded by red tape, trade barriers or cultural difference. This model of artist as nomad is not the only one on offer. Other artists have put forward different visions of nomadism, and with them different views of globalisation, often picturing travel as fraught and communication across cultures as halting and eventful rather than ˇ fluid. Pavel Braila, for instance, in Shoes for Europe, 2001, filmed trains at a small, once-busy station on the border of Moldova and Romania as their wheels were being adjusted from the standard Western European gauge to the slightly wider Russian (and Moldovan) gauge and vice versa. Plainly, the cumbersome business of adapting the wheels, which takes over two hours, works in the film as a simile for the uncertain passage and tenuous prospects of many who pass through the station in search of employment in Western Europe. ˇ Braila’s image of travel is a potent counterpoint to Morris’s intimations of a fully networked, post-industrial environment. Here we are reminded that global integration develops unevenly, that it tightens the connections between major hubs but often largely bypasses smaller nodes – and that even as goods, data and capital move more freely between different regions, new barriers are being erected to migration. What makes Braila’s piece so effective is that it sets ˇ the aspirations of the economic migrant off against the hopes of earlier generations. Shooting the train at night, from close quarters and mostly from below, he gives it an eerie, monumental presence: the carriages take on a grandeur that recalls the modernist rhetoric of progress and proud industrial labour. From the paintings of Umberto Boccioni and Gino Severini to Sergei Eisenstein’s October, 1927, rail travel served as an emblem of the industrial energies unleashed by modernity. But in ˇ Braila’s film those echoes jar with the dreary surroundings and the creaking conversion of the train wheels. The artist alludes to the promise of modernity as it was perceived in the first half of the 20th Century and so provides an echo chamber for the disappointments that followed and a grimly ironic historical backdrop for the ˇ wanderlust of the migrant. You could say that Braila uses travel to suggest that hopes of betterment have been transformed from a public to a private programme. Nomadism is a constant theme in the work of Shimabuku, which, though much lighter in tone than Braila’s, also pictures travel as beset with obstacles and ˇ misapprehensions. In 2000, the artist caught an octopus in the sea at Akashi and took it to Tokyo, where he toured the fish market with it before travelling back to Akashi and returning the still-living octopus to the sea. The video of the trip – Then, I decided to give a tour of Tokyo to the octopus from Akashi, 2000 – is accompanied by a text in which the artist tries and fails to see the episode from the octopus’s perspective. The involuntary nomad here is beyond communication – and in that the octopus may be a stand-in for the artist himself on earlier journeys or for the tourist on a package holiday, isolated from his or her surroundings by the apparatus of organised travel. Language is also an obstacle in the work of Saki Satom, who has filmed the telling of stories in different languages. In each case she has then converted the tale into a short animation with the aid of crude drawings by a collaborator who could speak the storyteller’s language. Those viewers who don’t understand Hungarian, Icelandic or Punjabi are left to piece the tales together as best they can by referring to the animations. The work touches on the experience of deracination, drawing a parallel between our attempts to understand the various stories and the fumbling efforts of the visitor to get his or her bearings in novel surroundings. ˇ For Shimabuku and Satom as for Braila, new places are neither immediately accessible nor fully transparent to the traveller. Their view of travel chimes with the conceptions of cultural dialogue and translation that are developed in the writings of Sarat Maharaj, who has pointed out that difference is never fully intelligible, arguing more specifically that translation is not an untrammelled operation that simply ferries meaning from one language to another, it is an active refashioning that leaves residues of opaqueness. Opaqueness, obstruction, mistranslation: these are the leitmotifs of a view and practice of nomadism that attends to geopolitiˇ cal barriers (Braila) and to cultural and linguistic difference (Shimabuku, Satom). As these artists recognise, refusing the symbolism of unimpeded traffic is a precondition for a more fine-grained understanding of displacement and of differing local experiences of globalisation. In the work of artists like Tiravanija and Morris, the global reach of today’s art world is internalised and reproduced. The artist surfs the pathways of global travel and communications, miming the liquid modern and rehearsing a vision of globalisation that imagines the frictionless operation of global networks and so plays to the ideal of the open market. The one clear merit of their approach is that it gives the lie to the romantic localism of figures like Shaw and Lippard. At least artists like Morris – Franz Ackermann is another – are working to develop an iconography that is suited to describing the changing face of a globalising world. For Tiravanija and Morris, it’s a small world. For artists like Braila, Shimabuku and Satom, it isn’t. They ˇ follow the migrant and hapless tourist rather than the liquid modern; they are waylaid, held back and left speechless, presenting travel as a tissue of interruptions. And it is only, they imply, by drawing out and parsing those interruptions that the artist-nomad can begin to attend to cultural difference, and with it to the differential gears of globalisation. ❚

MARCUS VERHAGEN is an art historian and critic.

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