By Patricia H. Kushlis
Yes, I’ve read the mixed reviews about the USA Pavilion at the Shanghai 2010 Expo. The major complaint as I understand it is that the pavilion is too commercial – that it does not promote US values and society to the degree it should. That may well be so. But it seems to me the pavilion organizers were working against tremendous odds even to have a building up and exhibition running at all.
A little history is obviously in order. In 1994 the US Congress passed a law forbidding the use of US government funds to support US Pavilions at World Expositions. This was done in reaction to the way the government had handled the 2004 Barcelona Expo. It was obviously an overreaction passed in a time of American hubris based on the false premise that history had ended and the US was on top for the foreseeable future – so it didn’t matter what the country did or didn’t do abroad.
First things first: Revoke an outdated law
But this is not 1994, the US is no longer the sole super power and a law passed at a different time for inscrutable reasons needs to be revoked. It’s really simple: if the government, critics in the media and even some American taxpayers think it important for the US to put its best foot forward at major world exhibitions such as this one, then there needs to be a combination of government and private sector funding and cooperation that begins planning for the next Expo now – not next year or worse – shortly before the exposition begins. Moreover, the legislation also needs to include a directive that a core international exhibits service be established and funded by the US government and located in whichever piece of the US bureaucracy that can actually make it work now a decade after the demise of USIA where such a service used to be housed and functioned well.
Corporate America will foremost showcase corporate American interests
This time around, Hillary Clinton pulled the US chestnuts out of the fire – but only after being leaned on heavily by the Chinese government during her first visit there in 2009. Because of the Congressional restrictions and the George W Bush administration’s refusal to do anything to set the stage for participation in the exposition whatsoever, Clinton tasked one of her chief campaign fundraisers to pull the corporate funding together and established an Exposition committee. But this only happened at the eleventh hour - so what should any one expect. Corporate America is going to showcase corporate America – always has. Why should anyone think otherwise?
Applause for the American Chinese-speaking guides
The inclusion of young Chinese speaking American guides – a fact either ignored or if mentioned, applauded by the US media – was a brilliant stroke of learning from the past.
For anyone old enough to remember the US government exhibitions that toured the Soviet Union prior to 1991, the inclusion of young Russian speaking American guides ensured that the exhibitions – which – because they were run and financed by the US government (then USIA) include pieces on American values and societies – not just kitchens, milking machines, supermarkets and television sets. The guides themselves represented the epitome of those values.
Furthermore, not only did those guides provide the crucial “last three feet” of personal contact linking American and Russian citizens during the depths of the Cold War but over the years some guides became US diplomats – including John Beyrle, the current US Ambassador to Moscow, and his wife Jocelyn Greene –as well as specialists on Russia, the Soviet Union and the former Soviet Union in academia, the media and elsewhere.
Please, get real - it takes years to develop a special exhibit, not fourteen months
In one of the most unique critiques of the USA Pavilion, Ambassador Cynthia Schneider questioned why the pavilion was not run along the lines of a special exhibit at a private (or otherwise) museum where fund-raising and the exhibit’s contents take different tracks so that an exhibit does not end up a commercial display of wares.
I asked Dr. Steve Yates, the photography curator who spent over 35 years curating exhibits globally and several decades for the Museums of New Mexico for his thoughts on Schneider’s observation.
Here’s the major problem, he told me: today it normally takes between four to ten years to plan, research, collaborate and assemble a special museum-quality exhibition and make it work. Especially with fund-raising along the way. Repeat: four to ten years.
The USA Pavilion Shanghai Expo committee that Clinton assembled had a maximum of 14 months to do everything from soup to nuts. Yates further told me that the only option that might have been employed given the severe time constraints the committee worked under was to find a special exhibit that had already been shown elsewhere that was still available and could be rushed in and reassembled at the last minute. I certainly witnessed the lengthy lead time needed when the National Gallery of Art put on the special “Age of Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent” Exhibit in 1987. Even then there were numerous near-miss last minute glitches that had to be dealt daily to make the exhibit happen.
Roses not raspberries in order
So all things being equal, I think Clinton, the USA Pavilion private sector steering committee headed by Frank Lavin; Ambassador-at-large Elizabeth Bagley; Beatrice Camp, US Consul General in Shanghai; and US Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman as well as their staffs and others involved deserve bouquets of roses and kudos not huzzahs and raspberries for doing the very best they could within the limits forced on them and beyond their control. These restrictions are home grown. They can and should be changed. Now is the time to start.
January 2010 WhirledView post on the Shanghai Expo.