Art and Globalization 9780271072258

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A rt a nd Glob a liz ation

The S t on e A rt T h e ory I nstitutes

Edited by James Elkins

vol. 1 Art and Globalization

The Stone Art Theory Institutes is a series of books on five of the principal unresolved problems in contemporary art theory. The series attempts to be as international, inclusive, and conversational as possible, in order to give a comprehensive sense of the state of thinking on each issue. All together, the series involves over three hundred scholars from over sixty countries.

This series is dedicated to Howard and Donna Stone, long-time friends of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Art a nd Globalization edited by james elkins , zhivka valiavicharska , and alice kim

the pennsylvania state university press, university park, pennsylvania

Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data

Art and globalization / edited by James Elkins, Zhivka Valiavicharska, and Alice Kim. p. cm. — (The Stone Art Theory Institutes) Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: “Brings together historians, philosophers, critics, postcolonial theorists, and curators to ask how contemporary global art is conceptualized. Issues discussed include globalism and globalization, internationalism and nationality, empire and capitalism”—Provided by publisher.

isbn 978-0-271-03716-5 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Art and globalization. I. Elkins, James, 1955– . II. Valiavicharska, Zhivka. III. Kim, Alice. N72.G55A76 2010 701’.03—dc22 2009053930 Copyright © 2010 The Pennsylvania State University All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802-1003

The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of American University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ansi Z39.48–1992.

This book is printed on Natures Natural, which contains 50% postconsumer waste.

contents

Series Preface vii

first introduction James Elkins 1

second introduction Zhivka Valiavicharska 5

assessments Caroline A. Jones 129

Karl Eric Leitzel 138

Rasheed Araeen 140

Néstor García Canclini 142

Blake Gopnik the seminars 1. The National Situation 13

2. Translation 23

3. The Prehistory of Globalization 37

4. Hybridity 51

5. Temporality 63

6. Postcolonial Narratives 73

146

Marina Grzinic 148

Jonathan Harris 152

Anthony D. King

161

Ming Tiampo 166

Reiko Tomii 171

C. J. W.-L. Wee 176

8. Four Failures of the Seminars

Iftikhar Dadi

9. Universality 109

Hyungmin Pai 218

Partha Mitter 222

Carolyn Loeb 226

Suman Gupta 229

Saskia Sassen 237

Charles Green 241

Joaquín Barriendos 245

Nina Möntmann

John Clark

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214

158

7. Neoliberalism 85

Chris Berry

181

183

Mark Jarzombek 188

Tani Barlow 195

Esther Gabara 200

Ján Bakos˘ 205

T. J. Demos 209

afterword James Elkins 251

Notes on the Contributors 285

Index 291

series preface

In the usual course of things, art theory happens invisibly, without attracting attention. Concepts like picture, visual art, and realism circulate in newspapers, galleries, and museums as if they were as obvious and natural as words like dog, cat, and goldfish. Art theory is the air the art world breathes, and it is breathed carelessly, without thought. It is the formless stuff out of which so many justifications are conjured. Art theory also happens in universities and art schools, where it is studied and nurtured like a rare orchid. And art theory happens in innumerable academic conferences, which are sometimes studded with insights but are more often provisional and inconclusive. In those academic settings, words like picture, visual art, and realism are treated like impossibly complicated machines whose workings can hardly be understood. Sometimes, then, what counts as art theory is simple and normal, and other times it seems to be the most difficult subject in visual art. A similarity links these different ways of using theory. In the art world as in academia, it often feels right just to allude to a concept like picture, and let its flavor seep into the surrounding conversation. That is strange, because picture is so important to so many people, and the habit of using it so informally leads to wayward conversations. The books in this series are intended to push hard on that strangeness, by spending as much time as necessary on individual concepts and the texts that exemplify them. Some books are more or less dedicated to particular words: volume 1 focuses on globalization, translation, governmentality, and hybridity; volume 2 explores image, picture, icon, and iconophilia. Volume 3 is concerned with the idea that art is research, which produces knowledge. Volume 4 is about the aesthetic, the anti-aesthetic, and the political; and volume 5 concentrates on visual studies, visual culture, and visuality. This book series is like an interminable conversation around a dictionary— or like the world’s most prolix glossary of art. That isn’t to say that the purposes of these conversations is to fix meanings: on the contrary, the idea is to work hard enough so that what seemed obdurate and slippery, as Wittgenstein said, begins to fracture and crack. Each book in this series started as a weeklong event, held in Chicago. No papers were given (except as evening lectures, which are not recorded in these books). For a week, five faculty and a group of twenty-five scholars met in closed seminars. In preparation for the week they had read over eight hundred pages of assigned texts. The week opened with a three-hour panel discussion among the

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faculty, continued with four and a half days of seminars (six hours each day), and ended with a five-hour panel discussion, open to the public. All thirty-five hours of it was taped and edited, and the pertinent portions presented here. This series is a refinement of a previous book series called The Art Seminar, which appeared from 2005 to 2008.1 Like The Art Seminar, the Stone Art Theory Institutes are an attempt to record a new kind of art theory, one that is more inclusive and less coherent than some art theory produced in North America and western Europe since the advent of poststructuralism. The guiding idea is that theorizing on visual art has become increasingly formalized and narrow, even as art practices have become wildly diverse. Both book series are meant to capture a reasonable cross-section of thinking on a given topic, and both include people at the far ends of the spectrum of their subjects—so far from one another that in some cases they were reluctant even to sit together in the events, or participate in the books. Some conversations are genuinely dialectic, others are abrupt encounters, and still others are unaccountable misunderstandings. All those species of communication are recorded as faithfully as possible, because they are evidence of the state of understanding of each field.2 The Introductions to each volume are meant as straightforward and clear reviews of the critical situation leading up to the seminars. The Art Seminar books then had a set of essays to help set the stage for the transcribed discussions. There are no essays in this series, because it is not possible to usefully condense the hundreds of pages of texts that informed these discussions. (References to most of those readings can be found in the transcripts.) The omission of essays makes this series more “difficult” than The Art Seminar, but the literature of art theory has grown beyond the point where it can be helpfully anthologized. The books in this series are not introductions to the various subjects they treat, but attempts to move forward given the current state of discourse in each field. In that they follow the lead of the sciences, where more advanced textbooks necessarily presuppose more introductory material. After each year’s week-long event, the editors selected excerpts from the thirty-five hours of audio tapes and produced a rough-edited transcript. It was given to each of the participants, who were invited to edit their contributions and add references. After several rounds of editing, the transcript was sent out to people who did not attend the event. They were asked to write assessments, which appear here in the order they were received. The writers were asked to consider the conversation from a distance, noting its strengths and its blind spots, in any style and at any length. As the assessments came in, they were 1. The topics of the seven volumes of The Art Seminar: Art History Versus Aesthetics (2006), Photography Theory (2007), Is Art History Global? (2007), The State of Art Criticism, coedited with Michael Newman (2008), Renaissance Theory, coedited with Robert Williams (2008), Landscape Theory, coedited with Rachael DeLue (2008), and Re-enchantment, coedited with David Morgan (2008). All are published by Routledge (Taylor and Francis), New York.

2. One function of these two series is to demonstrate that different fields have different kinds of incoherence. The particular disunities of art criticism are discussed in an exchange at the end of The State of Art Criticism. The incoherence of theorizing on the Renaissance is the subject of another exchange at the end of Renaissance Theory. My own thoughts about the very strange second volume of that series, Photography Theory, are in “Is Anyone

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distributed to people who hadn’t yet completed theirs, so that later assessments could comment on earlier ones, building an intermittent conversation through the book. The Afterwords are intended principally to organize the ideas in the book, so they can resonate with future discussions. One of the central concerns of this series is making talk about art more difficult. For some readers, art theory may seem too abstruse and technical, but at heart it has a different problem: it is too easy. Both the intricate art theory practiced in academies and the nearly invisible theory that suffuses galleries and art fairs are reasonably easy to do reasonably well. As Wittgenstein knew, the hardest problems are the ones that are right in front of us: picture, visual art, realism. The purpose of the books in this series is to do some damage to our sense that we understand words like those. a special acknowledgment This is the kind of project that is not normally possible in academic life, because it requires an unusual outlay of time and effort: a month of preparatory reading, a concerted week without the distractions of papers being read or lectures that are off topic. The originating events at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago were called the Stone Summer Theory Institute, after Howard and Donna Stone, whose gift made this series possible. What is remarkable about their support is that it is directed to content and not infrastructure or display. In the art world, there is no end to the patronage of display: corporate sponsors can be found for most every art project, and galleries traditionally depend on individuals and corporations for much of their programming. In that ocean of public patronage there is virtually nothing directed at the question of what art means. The Stones’ gift is extremely unusual. Their own collecting interests, which include serious, ambitious postminimal art, are in line with the subjects of this series: the theories addressed by this series are only important issues if it is granted that the history of art theory exerts a pressure on the dissipated present, just as postminimalism is crucial mainly, and possibly only, for those who experience the modernist past as a challenge and not merely an attractive backdrop. So this series is dedicated to Howard and Donna Stone: if more patrons supported art history, theory, and criticism, the art world might well make more sense. Listening?” Photofile 80 (Winter 2007): 80. And I have ended the Art Seminar series with a look back at the different incoherences of all seven subjects: “Envoi to the Art Seminar Series,” in Re-enchantment, 305–10. (A similar Envoi will conclude this series.)

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the topics in this series Volume 1, Art and Globalization, is about writing in the “biennale culture” that now determines much of the art market. Literature on the worldwide dissemination of art assumes nationalism and ethnic identity, but rarely analyzes it. At the same time there is extensive theorizing about globalization in politics, postcolonial theory, sociology, and anthropology; volume 1 is an attempt to bring those discourses together with art-world concerns. Volume 2, What Is an Image? asks how well we understand what we mean by picture and image. The art world depends on there being something special about the visual, but that something is seldom spelled out. The most interesting theorists of those fundamental words are not philosophers but art historians, and this book interrogates the major theories. Volume 3, What Do Artists Know? is about the education of artists. The MFA degree is notoriously poorly conceptualized, and now it is giving way to the PhD in art practice. Meanwhile, conversations on freshman courses in studio art continue to be bogged down by conflicting agendas. This book is about the theories that underwrite art education at all levels. Volume 4, Beyond the Anti-aesthetic, is about the fact that now, almost thirty years after Hal Foster defined the anti-aesthetic, there is still no viable alternative to the dichotomy between aesthetics and anti- or nonaesthetic art. The impasse is made more difficult by the proliferation of identity politics, and it is made less negotiable by the hegemony of anti-aesthetics in academic discourse on art. Volume 5, Farewell to Visual Studies, is a forum on the state of the once-new discipline (inaugurated in the early 1990s) that promised to be the site for the study of visuality in all fields, inside and outside of art. Despite the increasing number of departments worldwide, visual studies remains a minority interest with an increasingly predictable set of interpretive agendas and subjects. Hence, our farewell.

first introduction

James Elkins

This introduction was read on the opening day of the event, July 16, 2007. I would like to propose two subjects to begin our conversations, but before I do that, I want to mention three of the concerns that got me involved in these issues and generated this event. These may be mainly my own interests, and I don’t expect that they will correspond to subjects we discuss over the course of the week. First: the art world produces an avalanche of literature—glossy art magazines, Internet blogs, catalogues and brochures, newspaper reviews—that is basically not read. Here at the School of the Art Institute, for example, we subscribe to about a hundred art journals and magazines, and across the street in the museum library there are another hundred; in my experience the majority go unread—unseen—even by students and artists most interested in the art world.1 In the world of art fairs, as opposed to biennales, there is virtually no writing that has any conceptual ambitions, or any ambitions to offer more rigorous analyses.2 The absence of critical readers—or, often, any readers—for these literatures of contemporary art is sometimes chalked up to the fact that such writing is an instrument of the market. That seems to me to be only a partial explanation. So I would be delighted if this event might function, in the end, to make life harder for people who write about contemporary art, and also for people who aim to account for the contemporary art world but do not address that wider nonacademic literature.3 1. The Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at the Art Institute of Chicago subscribe to approximately one hundred contemporary art journals, out of a print subscription of fifteen hundred. The John M. Flaxman Library at the School of the Art Institute, the companion library across the street—the one most used by art students— has 108 contemporary art journals. The list begins: Abitare, Adbusters, African Arts, Afterall, Afterimage, American Ceramics, American Craft, American Indian Art Magazine, Aperture, Area, Art and AsiaPacific, Art Calendar, Art Chronika, Art in America, Art India, Art Journal, Art Link, Art Monthly, Art Newspaper, Art News, Art Nexus, Art Now Gallery Guide, Art on Paper, Art Papers, Art Press, Art Review, Art Therapy, Artes de Mexico, Artforum International, Arts of Asia, Artus, Artweek, Asian Art News, Bidoun, Bomb, Cabinet, Calyx . . . The titles at that end of the alphabet include the few that are seen by a fair number of readers (Artforum, Art in America). Although there is no way to measure readership, I think the majority of journals go unopened.

This is what I mean by unread. Thanks to Susan Augustine, Pam Cipkowski, and Holly Dankert for this information. 2. Reviewing Basel Miami in 2007, Peter Schjeldahl says, “Talent counts; ideas are immaterial . . . A decade ago, much new art was eyebrow-deep in critical theory. Now it seems as carefree as a summertime schoolboy, while far better dressed.” I didn’t quote that at the round table, because Schjeldahl is typically hedging his bets: he isn’t for “critical theory,” but his piece complains about a condition that could—in theory as it were—be meliorated by an infusion of “critical theory.” Nevertheless, he is right about the absence of readable literature, “critical theory” or not. Schjeldahl, “Temptations of the Fair,” New Yorker, December 25, 2006/ January 1, 2007, 148–49, quotation at 148. 3. This is one of the arguments of my What Happened to Art Criticism? (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003), and it is explored by a number of the contributors to The State of Art Criticism, edited by James Elkins and Michael

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first introduction

Second, biennales and other international art events are sometimes analyzed as dichotomies of two different kinds of art, and I would like to problematize that. On the one hand, so it is said, there are artists interested in aesthetics—often, or normatively, painters—who want to continue various twentieth-century practices. On the other hand, there are artists interested in resisting globalization, commodification, or the machinery of the art market. That dichotomy is a trope in the literature on contemporary art, and I would like to find a way to say something interesting about the conditions under which it appears to be the most interesting way of describing the art world. There are, as a start, categories beyond those two. For example, there are artists who are taken as barometers of the zeitgeist, as Jeff Koons was; artists who are watched as market indicators, like Damien Hirst; and artists who transparently exemplify particular traditions, genres, or subjects, even when those traditions have long been exhausted. In other words, there’s an entire fauna of practices beyond the dichotomy of belated aesthetic practice and problematic antiaesthetic resistance. There is an intransigent essay by Benjamin Buchloh on the 2005 Venice Biennale, in which he castigates the German pavilion, curated by Julian Heynen. The German pavilion had two artists: Thomas Scheibitz, who was doing recherché paintings in a faux–social realist style; and Tino Sehgal, whose work was oppositional and antiaesthetic. For Buchloh, Scheibitz’s work is “desperate conventionalization” and Sehgal’s radicalism is “pointless,” but even so, they represent a characteristic desire on Heynen’s part to have both a “renewed . . . aesthetic convention” and the “radicality of the anti-aesthetic.” Buchloh says Heynen’s strategy “was to occupy two mutually exclusive positions simultaneously without having a real commitment to either one,” and he adds that this contrast is “typical of the founding contrast of the biennale, between propagandistic interests of the nation-state and critical projects of the avant-garde.”4 That twopart reading—in terms of aesthetic practice versus antiaesthetic resistance—is a strong but typical instance of the reading of biennales, which I would like to understand (to see what makes it seem plausible, makes it the optimal reading) and think beyond. (In that I’m in agreement with Buchloh.5) Thus, instead of being interested exclusively in art projects engaged in resistance, critique, and subversion, we might want to find ways to describe these inbuilt oppositions, and the entire dynamic of biennale culture in its totality of practices and discourses. We could spend equal time with contemporary international art that is unreconstructed, celebratory, nostalgic, “amnesiac,” as Buchloh calls it, aestheticizing, retrospective.6 For me, this is the function of an economic Newman, The Art Seminar 4 (New York: Routledge, 2008). 4. Buchloh, “The Curse of Empire,” Artforum 44 (2005): 254–58, quotation at 254. 5.The operation of the dialectic here, as a field that comprises contradictions and is comprised by them, is one I am assigning to my own exposition of Buchloh’s text. I do not see it in the text itself, which proposes a vitiated or overdetermined dichotomy.

6. “Amnesiac” appears as part of Buchloh’s invective against Scheibitz, which turns on the historical demands that make the sympathetic study of work like Scheibitz’s impossible. “Scheibitz’s shambles, paraded like the spoils of the former utopian aspirations of abstraction, shift uneasily between décor for a Dresden disco and the window display of a cutting-edge Swiss department store in 1959. Ranging in its pictorial vocabulary from Auguste Herbin and Victor

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first introduction

or sociological analysis; otherwise we are mining phenomena of globalization in order to create the strongest possible resistance, rather than trying to understand the generative conditions, the current states and processes of globalization. I am just as interested in what happens when Sehgal and Scheibitz are juxtaposed as I am in the way every serious art writer finds it unproblematic to ignore a painter like Howard Behrens: he is among the top three artists on the Princess and Cunard cruise lines, and has a global market comparable to any artist better known in the “serious” art world.7 Third, there is the question of the literature on artists who are understood as representatives of some local practice. I find that writing on them is often incomplete, even coy, when it comes to describing what comprises their local character.8 The art world needs signifiers of the local and national, but it is also coy about those same signifiers. The notion would be that visual art can somehow express cultures, places, nationalities, and communities, but that because it is visual those cultures, places, nationalities, and communities do not need to be articulated. It’s an enabling obfuscation, I think, and it permits some contemporary art to seem international, to seem to be about differences. So much for the concerns that got me interested in this subject. On to our event: the fundamental strategy is to bring together people from disciplines that do not ordinarily have much contact in order to do some serious work on the ways in which what is often called contemporary “international” art is conceptualized. In preparing the event, I was especially concerned with two phenomena: first, the huge amount of theoretical and empirical work that has been done on globalization in political theory and related disciplines, and the absence of serious dialogues with those bodies of knowledge when it comes to contemporary art writing; and second, the equally enormous literature of “premodern” forms of regionalism and globalism in art history, and the amnesia about that prehistory on the part of contemporary art writers. We have two art historians on our Faculty, Shigemi Inaga and Tom Kaufmann, who have an exemplary—I’m tempted to say unparalleled—depth of knowledge about certain elements of the history of the discipline of art history, and we have Fred Jameson and Harry Harootunian, whose analyses of the temporal conditions of modernity and its different experiences are among the most productive of any writers. My notion is to bring these discourses to bear on writing about international or global contemporary art. (In addition, we have an astonishingly high level of Fellows here. Five of the fifteen Fellows are either writing books on the globalization of art or already Vasarely to Klein, the installation amounts to a sum of the worst efforts of German and English painters of the ’60’s . . . all of whom tried to preserve the dilapidated remnants of European abstraction while buttressing their work against an onslaught of logic and lucidity from American Minimalism” (Buchloh, “Curse of Empire,” 255). 7. I thank Judi Behrens for this information. Howard Behrens is one of the world’s leading palette-knife artists; his circle includes Alexandra

Nechita, Martiros Meuchian, and Bill Mack, all (I am guessing) unknown to the participants in the Stone Summer Theory Institute. See www. howardbehrens.com. 8. An example of coyness is Francesco Bonami’s “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Agenda,” an essay for the New York Times on the current state of Chinese art. “The word on Chinese art right now,” Bonami writers, “is ‘Buy!’ but I’m not convinced we Westerners really understand what is

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have written books—that’s more than the Faculty has written!9 Several are senior scholars, attending as “students.” We represent, on a rough count, five or six disciplines with investments in these questions.) By the nature of things, this will be an uneven week: sometimes, I imagine, we will find useful things in social and political theory or in the history of globalization before modernism, and sometimes we’ll be listening politely to people in other fields—as one does in interdisciplinary conferences—wondering what in the world their work has to do with contemporary art. I think that is more than just an interesting risk; I think it is a necessary risk. Without it, the ocean of mediocre writing on contemporary international art will continue to swell, as oblivious of its deeper history as it is of debates over its fundamental terms, unchecked and uninformed by the astonishingly well-articulated discourses in neighboring fields. going on there.” He remarks on the market, but when it comes to saying what Chinese artists are doing, he says only, “Their capacity to devour and digest global ideas in order to create their own new aesthetic is simply astonishing.” Young Chinese artists, he says, work in several media at once—he says a typical artist might be “working on painting, sculpture, photography, video and (why not?) performance all at the same time.” But other than those two observations, both of which might be applied to artists in many other countries, and neither of which get near the question of what “their own new aesthetic” might be, he says absolutely nothing to answer his own question about the Chineseness of contemporary Chinese art. “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Agenda,” New York Times Style supplement, February 25, 2007, 71–78.

9. Among the Fellows, Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay was working on a manuscript with the title “The Rumor of Globalization: Decentering the Global from the Vernacular Margins”; Charlotte Bydler had published The Global Art World, Inc.: On the Globalization of Contemporary Art (Uppsala: Uppsala University, 2004); Pamela Lee was at work on a project titled “Forgetting the Art World”; Joyce Brodsky was working on a manuscript called “Transnational Art in the Age of Globalization”; and Shelly Errington had written The Death of Authentic Primitive Art and Other Tales of Progress (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

second introduction

Zhivka Valiavicharska

This introduction was also read on the opening day of the event, July 16, 2007. I would like to emphasize the need to bridge the studies of globalization with our attempts to analyze the “global” aspects of contemporary art. I am approaching the problems of globalization here from a materialist perspective broadly construed. Recently, we have seen a number of really interesting and carefully researched ethnographies of globalization, coming out of the interdisciplinary endeavors of departments such as geography, anthropology, and sociology. Such ethnographies employ different theoretical approaches to study the ways in which the advance of transnational capital in various communities changes their social structures, their class relations, and the meaning of their cultural heritage and cultural experiences.1 From looking at how state-owned foodprocessing factories in postsocialist Poland are privatized and reorganized, to how electronics factories in the Guangdong province of southern China bring into existence a female proletarian class for transient labor—these studies insist that the development of global capitalisms dramatically alters our subjectivities while also impacting our lives in very tangible, material ways.2 However, these are not simple arguments: it has been the role of some Marxist-historical and poststructuralist critical approaches, together with some careful ethnographic work, to argue against teleological accounts of capitalist development, and against claims about its homogenizing effects. In other words, we already know that the histori1. The following are some of my more recent encounters with some interesting collected volumes on globalization and global neoliberalisms; this is not an exhaustive list. On various cases of the global reorganization of labor and production, see Michael Burawoy, ed., Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections, and Imaginations in a Postmodern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). On the geographies of global material reorganizations, see R. J. Johnston, Peter Taylor, and Michael Watts, eds., Geographies of Global Change: Remapping the World (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002); David Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Geography of Uneven Development (London: Verso, 2006). On globalization, gender, and labor, see Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild, eds., Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002). For inquiries into some cultural aspects of globalization, see Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi, eds., The Cultures of Globalization (Durham:

Duke University Press, 1998). An insightful collective anthropological inquiry is Arjun Appadurai’s edited volume Globalization, Public Culture 12, no. 1 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000). On governmentality and biopolitics from global anthropological perspectives, see Aihwa Ong and Stephen Collier, eds., Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005). See also Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). On global governmentality and institutional critique, see Wendy Larner and William Walters, eds., Global Governmentality: Governing International Spaces (London: Routledge, 2004). 2. Examples are from anthropological research projects by Elizabeth Dunn, Privatizing Poland: Baby Food, Big Business, and the Remaking of Labor (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), and Pun Ngai, Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).

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second introduction

cal outcomes of developing global capitalism by no means follow inevitable or predictable trajectories. Rather, what actually happens is fully contingent upon specific cultural, social, and political conditions in any given moment and place, and the function and meaning of the institutions, practices, and discourses related to global capitalism are actively being transformed and reconfigured in everyday practice, producing new and unpredictable realities. In these critical discourses on globalization, the question of art is crucially and interestingly absent. So like Jim, but from the perspective of social and political theory, I would like to point to the disjuncture between various discourses on art (especially art-historical ones) and the critical discourses on globalization. And I would like to posit this gap as a central concern for our seminar. What I mean is that, with all the abundance of critical work on globalization, very few venture to study concrete instances of how contemporary art production, art display, and the production of various historical knowledges of art participate in, say, the neoliberal reforms taking place in postsocialist Russia, or the formation of a transnational business class in Hong Kong, or how cultural policy projects have employed the arts towards an eastward expansion of the European Union. Concerning the conceptual and analytic categories we’ll be using during the seminar: I am very eager to be a part of our discussions on alternative histories and alternative modernities—I am sure all of our Faculty will have much to say about this. Since most of the Fellows are also historians of some kind, I am hoping the following will be questions of central concern: How can we think of possibilities to write art history through events, through alternative experiences of time, and through the ambiguities of the everyday? Aren’t precisely these acts of radical rereading of history—the courage to tell a different story, and a true one, needless to say—what enable the present politically? I find these questions absolutely crucial when it comes to the pervasiveness, the ubiquity, and the immense institutional and discursive force that master narratives of art have. During the seminars, however, I will be also interested in juxtaposing these sets of concerns with another mode of interrogation coming from critical space studies. Critical geography has made the claim that social and material relations manifest themselves geographically, that material inequalities inevitably acquire spatial or geographical dimensions. The development of transnational material relations, they say, is a historically contested process, which manifests itself in highly uneven global geographies, in these so-called geographies of power. Since so much of the art market and international art practices have to do with global travel, global art display, and global markets, I would be interested to see how we might link them to the unequal global spaces that transnational capitalisms carve out, what kinds of inclusions and exclusions are at stake there, and how these practices impact the lives of people. I am also hoping to bring to the forefront another major concern: that of art and culture’s stakes in neoliberal subject-formations. Perhaps we would have to revisit critically the autonomy, often taken for granted, of categories such as the

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second introduction

cultural, the political, and the economic, in light of some newly mushroomed practices and concepts such as “cultural policy” and “cultural capital,” which have taken on a very instrumental approach to culture to implement neoliberal economic reforms and to produce particular subjective effects. And one final point—perhaps I should have started with this—about our “gap.” It might be obvious to most of you here; for me it certainly has to do with the particular modes of interrogation that a discipline such as art history grounds itself upon; or in other words, how we can look at this gap as a symptom or a legacy of a particular modernity, examine it epistemologically, and study the conditions of possibility that enabled it—a genealogical approach would certainly yield interesting ways to understand how art-historical knowledge, its methods of analysis, and its set of assumptions were made possible within Western bourgeois sociopolitical conditions. Moreover, the very fact that this gap is visible and identifiable means that certain metadiscourses that can give us a way of approaching it do exist. In other words, what kinds of new discourses do we have that structure the gap’s visibility and its meanings? I’ll leave all these questions to the art historians and the historians of the discipline.

1. t h e n a t i o n a l s i t u a t i o n

Fredric Jameson led the first seminar. We began with a reading of his texts, including “Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue,” 1 and circled around issues of the nation, the nation-state, and the national situation. In the end the conversation turned to the place of the aesthetic in his analyses. In the seminar, he presented visual material including slides of work by Yin Xiuzhen, Jeff Wall, Pierre Bonnard, Martha Schwartz’s Village of Yorkville Park in Toronto, Greek geometric vase painting, and works by Leipzig school painters including Neo Rauch, Matthias Weischler, Tim Eitel, Christoph Rückaberle, and Tilo Baumgarten. The texts and the visual examples served as models for thinking about how the dialectic might yield—or is constituted so as not to yield—viable intermediate spaces, the ones that many artists and participants in the contemporary art world uneasily inhabit or desire. thomas dacosta kaufmann: My general question is: To what extent is what we refer to as globalization a new phenomenon? While I know most people here are interested in contemporary art, there are issues of the extent to which our concerns are just those of the present, and also of how thinking about previous times might illuminate our discussion.2 fredric jameson: I happen to think that although all sorts of international, nonnational, transnational relations existed before 1980, it is less interesting to say that those international movements were just like globalization, and more interesting to see how they are different from each other. I think the question always has to be: how are these things going on now different from what happened before? I would want to insist on the difference between the old imperialisms, which involve colonies, armies, and so forth, and whatever you want to call these forms of influence that take place after decolonization. “Cultural imperialism” is not enough; I think we need wholly new words. “Globalization” replaced “cultural imperialism” and other terms, and I think that’s very In these seminars, the notes have been added by the speakers, except in the italicized introduction to each seminar, where the notes are the editor’s, or where otherwise indicated. 1. Fredric Jameson, “Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue,” in The Cultures of Globalization, edited by Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 54–77; the seminar also read several unpublished manuscripts. 2. It is interesting to recall in this context that two of the three U.S. presidents at the beginning of the previous century, namely Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, were historians who had a “global” vision. For in-

stance, one of Roosevelt’s essays, which stems from a lecture he gave at the University of Berlin in 1910, was on the World Movement. Of course, you could say it was limited by the conceptions of nationalism at the time, and that it was Eurocentric, but it does address worldwide communication, the transference of ideas, and the fact that people in many places are aware when a scientific advance is made in Germany. Thus, even in the early years of the twentieth century, people thought about our issues pertaining to our topic in a broader scheme. In my mind, this points out that debates about the periodization of globalization are, like the phenomena described by this concept, not new.

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welcome, because it suggests not only different power and economic relations but also a different politics. The mediation of the nation is very important in this. Everybody says the nation is disappearing. On the contrary, it is dialectical: on the one hand there are places trying to be nations (the famous “failed states” that never make it); and nations that seem to be in crisis, and are weaker than others, and so forth. But then, on the other hand—and this is very important for our topic—there’s this thing that we’re in that is not really a nation. In the dispersed world of relationships, it remains a center, whether it is dispersed or not, and that throws a monkey wrench into the question of the nation. When you have something like the United States, which is not a nation in the traditional sense, which is really central, and toward which everything moves, but which you are trying to describe not in terms of imperialism or power but in some new way, you have a real problem, which I would call dialectical in nature: it is not easy to solve. The reason there are still nation-states is that in this new system, governments have a function, and that is to ask their labor unions to take cuts, to ask their nation to tighten its belt. Without a national government, or a sense of the nation, nobody would be doing that. So the continued existence of nation-states is tied to labor, as many other things are. But in any case I don’t think it does us any good to talk about unities beyond the nation. On the other hand, regarding the national: I think that artists work in the situation of the national, so to say they are nationalist or antinational is to remain on a level of ideology, of personal opinion, and so on, which may not be very useful. It may be better to see how they participate in the work of the nation, how they undercut the nation’s ideologies. It is not just a matter of patriotism: it’s a matter of deeper obligations. There is only the national situation. People work in that, and what they can do they do in that. What they can’t do is dictated by that. It’s a boundary that cannot really be transgressed. So, how to discuss all this? There are some tried and true ways of talking about things like art, which might be a starting point. They are economic categories: production, distribution, and consumption. We can go through each and note differences from past processes. In the realm of production, there are new technologies, and also new raw materials. One of the characteristics of art in globalization is the use of new materials; I think, for example, that the emergence of photography as a fine art is a phenomenon specific to postmodernity or globalization (I don’t distinguish here between those two terms). Whereas the great modernist photographers were minor artists, and photography was a minor art, now all that has changed. That’s just a sign of changes in production and raw materials. Such changes can be profound: for example, I was in China for the first Rauschenberg show. The Chinese had no idea what postmodernity was; their idea of art was modernism. The Rauschenberg material made an enormous difference, and now there is a Chinese postmodernism (not to say that the Rauschenberg show was the imme-

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diate cause). There have also been changes in the objects that are produced. Are these objects? Are they texts, processes, installations? And if there is an object, is it symptomatic of the changes, of the new realities? In what ways does the work register symptoms of these underlying economic social realities? It has to, but maybe it does so in new, unexpectedly complicated ways. What about when the work tries itself to represent its new context, and the new processes? Are there modes of representation of globalization that one might talk about? Can they be successful? Would they be political, for example? (One would think that once the object is isolated, it can be talked about in certain ways, and that is the beginning of political consciousness.) Or is the new world system ineffable, and therefore impossible to represent? So those are some problems that arise with production. Concerning distribution, there are new forms of communications (including conferences like this one); the transformation of the museum; the coming-into-being of festivals, biennales, and so forth; the new art networks; and other phenomena. These various forms of distribution are very much concerned with getting the product to the United States: this is the center. Artists want their work to be looked at by us; otherwise the work does not really exist. So one form of resistance is to do work that doesn’t want to be looked at by Americans, that is indifferent to American reception. As an example, there is the film by Wong Kar-wai, about two gay guys who go to Buenos Aires.3 This is a movie with no American audience: it has Argentines, people from Hong Kong, and the gay community, but no one is looking over their shoulder. There are no Americans in the audience. So we have the possibility of objects that we can’t see, or that we are not meant to see. As for consumption: I think an excellent way of talking about it is in terms of constructing subjectivity. Art and culture program people to live in this new world of globalization, and in particular in its new spaces. I think a work of art might first and foremost have that function; it could also work on daily life, because that is the ultimate form taken by our existential reality. It can be worked over, transformed, worked on. And finally there’s that old thing, ideology, which is still around: the ideas people have about globalization and the free market are certainly part of what the artwork works on, and it is very much involved in consumption. james elkins: The economic reading has wide resonance in contemporary art, but it may be significant for our conversations that within art history, specifically economic readings of art are a minority interest. (I am thinking, for example, of macroeconomic work by Hans van Miegroet, Neil De Marchi, and Gary Schwartz.4) So the connections you propose would produce an interesting collision of discourses. 3. Chun gwong cha sit (1997), directed by Wong Kar-wai; international English title: Buenos Aires Affair; U.S. and Hong Kong release: Happy Together.

4. Hans J. van Miegroet and Neil De Marchi, Mapping Markets for European Paintings in Europe, 1450–1750 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2006).

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I wonder, too, about the effect economic analyses might have on that endless ocean of art writing that I was vilifying. [See the Introduction, which was read before this seminar.] I think that literature has a limitless capacity to absorb discourses. I remember hearing that plastic garbage, thrown into the ocean, slowly abrades, and that in some parts of the open ocean what appears as water is actually a soup of microscopic particles of plastic. That’s how I imagine that a serious economic analysis would be received in the art world: it would be everywhere, but never solid, never visible as an object that might provoke resistance, with which someone might collide.5 fredric jameson: Well, these are not necessary economic categories: they are really philosophic. But that kind of analysis always feels like debunking. You can see it most clearly in Pierre Bourdieu’s work. Everybody thinks that when he’s done with something, he’s torn it to pieces. We are talking about the law of value, and how art criticism establishes the value of something. If you insist, as Bourdieu does, that the gallery has the function of establishing these values, and that makes the art market go around, then people think, “Oh, well, then, the work is nothing; it’s just conspiracy and manipulation.” But it is important to know that the work has its own value. Those two things are dialectically exclusive, not exclusive in some either-or way. I think one has to be able to include a discourse of intention, manipulation—what you’re calling the narrowly economic, meaning the market and so forth—without allowing it to seem that it means the end of the analysis of the work in terms of specifically aesthetic values. james elkins: I agree, it is necessary, but extremely difficult. Bourdieu has that effect on art history students, as if a switch is turned on, and the work is exposed as a naked object. shigemi inaga: Bourdieu was talking about cultural capital, capital culturel, and he was trying to enlarge the concept. There is a fundamental ambiguity in his strategy: was he trying to apply financial capital to other areas such as human relations and culture? Or was he trying to modify the very notion of capital from its Marxist definition? I wonder if people tend to interpret—wrongly—the cultural capital in the former sense. But in my opinion what he tried cannot be reduced to the simple application of the notion of economic capital to others areas, including art. If it were the case, we would have to deny any specific value to art. pedro erber: If I may return to art practices within a national framework: I remember Fred’s comment yesterday that artists working in “smaller countries” must intervene in their national contexts, which is where their works can find some kind of political resonance. You contrasted this to the situation of American artists, who are unlikely to intervene in something exclusively national. But, if that’s the case, isn’t it due, to a large extent, to a generalized blindness among critics and schol5. See in this regard www.artfacts.net, which provides a mathematically elaborate method of ranking artists’ performances in the market. Those data are used primarily as a promotional

feature of the Web site. They have not, as far as I am aware, been studied or used by any academic historian or critic.

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ars in the United States and Europe to the international or transnational implications of the works of artists in those “smaller countries”?6 In this sense, maybe one of our roles as scholars or critics would be precisely to recuperate these voices into the international discussion, where they belong and can resonate. fredric jameson: A national situation is always a failure. So these countries are busy thinking: what went wrong? They ruminate about it, they argue about it, they appeal to foreigners, they talk to their imaginary partners abroad. The artists are working on that stuff: what is the matter with daily life, what is wrong with us, why do we have so much disorder, or so much order—whatever the case may be. I think you have to say that art takes place in the national situation. We have been talking a lot about how, when a foreigner looks at the art, the content immediately evaporates: this is a way of putting it back in. Further, nationalism isn’t such a bad thing; as Deleuze once said, it’s fine until they have founded their nation. A nation is something that has a flag and an airline. Once the state is running, then they start oppressing other people. But until then, the construction of the nation has very interesting moments: the construction of collectivity, of subjectivity, and so forth. Indeed, Partha Chatterjee has pertinently analyzed the way in which any nationalism, to be productive, has to be more than a mere nationalism and to have goals beyond any simple national ethnic self-affirmation. The Cuban Revolution is an excellent example of a unique nationalism that fulfilled itself in socialism. When we talk about the United States, we always have to reckon in that difference. That is what would make a discussion of these problems dialectical. Because otherwise, if all nations are the same, then we are the same as everybody else. Michael Hardt and Tony Negri constantly got attacked for their book Empire because, I think, everybody had read Wallerstein, and they knew that this wasn’t an empire anymore, in the classical sense. But I told people, the authors are thinking of the Roman Empire. America is like the Roman Empire in that in Rome, everyone is a citizen, and everyone is equal, but in moments of crisis one of them takes precedence over all the others. Then things subside, and everybody is equal again. I think that’s the dynamic we’re facing here. And one final point about leaning to read visually: one wants to avoid culturalism. We don’t want to hear what’s culturally unique about the Japanese, or 6. In a historical key, the fate of the works of the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica is a poignant example. Although he lived, worked, and exhibited abroad for short periods of time, Oiticica was mostly inserted in the local context of art in Brazil, and more specifically Rio de Janeiro. However, despite the intimate ties of his works to the national and even more so to the urban social context of Rio, its implications go far beyond those local specificities. Oiticica thought and wrote of his work always in the broader context of contemporary art history and repeatedly reflected on his place and that of other of his Brazilian counterparts within that context. In spite of critics such as Guy Brett who very

early on perceived the significance and radical originality of Oiticica’s works, the history of his delayed recognition in the international arena tells much about a certain lag in the historical perception of historians and critics in Europe and North America concerning intellectual and artistic developments in so-called peripheral countries. The main reference for Oiticica’s texts in Portuguese is the collection Aspiro ao grande Labirinto (Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 1986). Two of his texts were translated in Alberro and Stimson, Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999). See also the catalogue Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Color (London: Tate, 2007).

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the Bengalis, or any group. That is really a dead end. But since the beginnings of anthropology, culture has been the place where collective specificities have been assigned. Those are very troublesome traps one wants to avoid. harry harootunian: I like your conception of the national situation. But regardless of what it is, or when it is, you really do get back to the problem of uniqueness, even if in some inadvertent way. You are still obliged, or compelled, to index the category of the nation as a unit: a unit of explanation, or analysis, or interpretation. That immediately opens the way for all those claims of irreducibility. Nations are not alike. They all clamor they are different from everyone else. It seems to me we have set up a paradox with the conception of the nation, or national situation. What interests me is how we might get out of it. What other kinds of units might be entertained? keith moxey: Perhaps that speaks to the apparently intractable philosophical issue of universality and particularity that seems to be haunting this conversation. The stakes for art history are both historical and aesthetic. The discipline’s understanding of history has been operating on a vaguely Hegelian notion of teleology, which has become harder and harder to sustain in the face of the incommensurability of global cultures and the distinctiveness of their approaches to the past. The other side of the coin, the aesthetic side, is also up for grabs because of a new awareness of the vitality of contemporary artistic production in locations far removed from traditional centers of critical power. On the one hand, you have a book like Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe, which challenges some of the basic assumptions of Western historiography as completely inadequate for dealing with other parts of the globe.7 On the other, some of the basic strategies of aesthetic theory, the dissolution of the subject-object relation, for example, have traditionally been based on Western models of subjectivity. To return to the issue of universality and particularity: every theoretical attempt to relate them to one another seems to get in trouble because there is no negotiating the gulf that separates them. And yet, as Fred said this earlier, an awareness of genders, classes, and so on need not dissolve the entire notion of aesthetics; indeed, we may need art theory more than ever just to account for different points of view. suzana milevska: The issue of universality and particularity in terms of national identity and globalization in Europe is inevitably linked with the issues of belonging and participation. There is still a contradiction, especially among the candidate countries for accession, between the desire to acquire European citizenship (and thus to belong to the European “family”) and the inherited belonging to a certain local cultural or ethnic community. The urgent question here would be how to reconcile the historic belonging with participation that tends towards belonging without belonging. The disposition of the expectance within these two 7. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

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kinds of belonging radically differs: while the former, the belonging to a certain national identity, can hardly be circumvented, the latter is in the realm of longing for participation in democratic processes and is projected in future. Most European cities are marked by multicultural heterogeneity: the society built up on migration, deterritorialization, ethnic differences, and cultural diversities. This self-aware resistance to fully immerse in the larger European “family” by accepting of any proclaimed universal (read: Western) values gives way to a call for tolerating and integrating differences and for societal tolerance towards different cultural appearances. Different cultural insignia, ethnic dresses, hats and caps, veils and scarves are seen in any European city today. Nevertheless, all these “head coverings” also keep us apart, give way to a certain tension between the cultural, ethnic, religious, or other particularities, between already belonged and the not-yet-belonged. keith moxey: Fred, one of the qualities of your essay on the philosophical implications of globalization is its capacity to articulate several sides of the issue. On the one hand, there is a rather critical account of Néstor García Canclini, who characterizes the cultural implications of globalization in a positive light, and on the other hand, you present your own apocalyptic account of the homogenization/ Americanization of the world by something known as “late capitalism.”8 So in that essay, you come out the realist and he comes out the starry-eyed optimist— so I was wondering if I could turn the tables for a moment, and ask whether or not the prospect of the inevitable coming of predicted revolution might not also be a utopian gesture. When labor is fully commodified, then presumably the revolution will come about, and this ghastly process in which we find ourselves will somehow come to an end. Wouldn’t that be a utopian view, one which might balance your criticism of someone like García Canclini, who sees hope in the process of hybridization? fredric jameson: Well, Marx doesn’t really say “revolution,” but he says that the resilience of the system will break down. That resilience is a lot more obvious today than it was in his generation. What Marx says, very briefly, in the Grundrisse is that the system does not run into its final crisis until economic expansion is no longer possible.9 Utopian? Well, I have things to say on that in my book on the subject.10 I think of utopia as politically useful today, when nobody believes in the future. Utopia is an attempt to shake up the way in which we are completely submerged in our own present, incapable of imagining that it might change, and even incapable of the sense of change that was possible in the modern period (ideas of wonder-working chemicals, flying machines). Now that we have all that, it’s harder to imagine a qualitative change, although we have many more gadgets. 8. Jameson, “Notes on Globalization,” 66. 9. Karl Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (1857–61), English translation online at www.marxists.org/archive/marx/ works/1857/grundrisse/.

10. Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopias and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005).

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From a number of points of view, my diagnosis has been that people no longer think historically, and that does not only pertain to the past but also to the future. My idea in the book was that utopian production is the attempt to break through all that. What is important is not the shape of utopias (classic utopians had different ideas, for example Fourier, who has an immense scheme of things, very remarkable) but simply the attempt to break the hold of the imperious present on our imaginations. So I would think that is the justification for utopian politics. I don’t think I said anything about a revolutionary politics. What I’d say about hybridity is that I think it is an ideology, or it’s a commodified slogan, and people have gotten tired of it and moved on to the next product. We all have ideologies; I’m sure I have mine, but I don’t know what it is. García Canclini has a different one, which I think was very powerful at its moment—but it’s a market ideology, the idea that things will cross-fertilize one another. The case of hybridity is a little like Peter Wollen’s interest in tourist art.11 After all, if structuralism and poststructuralism have taught us that authenticity was an ideology, that the whole existential idea was bad, then why should tourist art be inauthentic? Now—you would know better than I—this has become a field of study; he has a chapter on it in Raiding the Icebox.12 For me that would be a more interesting argument than hybridity. michael holly: I am pushing here, trying to figure out what you mean by aesthetics. In the typescript of “Globalization and Postmodernity” [circulated to the seminar] you say that one of the “psychic and cultural symptoms” of globalization “included a growing predominance of the spatial over the temporal (which had been the dominant of an older high modernism) [and] a reorganization of the hierarchy of the arts in such a way that the visual image became the central aesthetic phenomenon.” And then a page and a half later, you say “the classic ideas of the autonomy of the aesthetic”—I love this image—“have vanished like the snow and glaciers of the ice age.” So when I put these two passages together, and think about your characterization of this generation as thinking more of ruptures than continuities, and when I recall that classic neo-Kantian high modernist thinker Erwin Panofsky, saying that from the wreckage of the old comes the new, I find myself wrestling with the idea that the aesthetic can be dispensed with altogether in postmodern ideas of what visual art is—or whether it returns in a completely new guise, and how you would characterize that. fredric jameson: I am not sure there is a right answer. First, I think classical aesthetics was always a kind of contradiction in terms. You don’t write an aesthetic anymore. They have tried to revive the theories of beauty, especially in France, but I don’t think it works to go back to some theory of beauty. If you have a historical idea of art, I don’t think you can have an aesthetics, which is almost by definition ahistorical. 11. For example, Lynne Cooke and Peter Wollen, eds., Visual Display: Culture Beyond Appearances (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995).

12. Peter Wollen, Raiding the Icebox: Reflections on Twentieth-Century Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993).

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But you are quite right to ask how I can use the word “aesthetics” and then later argue that culture and economics have de-differentiated and become the same. It’s a problem. I would rather say, and perhaps I should have said, “cultural” in that first passage. However, I think that if aesthetics is the practice of art, then there have been various attempts at emergent aesthetics in postmodernity. One is what used to be called “postmodernism”; that was certainly an aesthetic. I think there is a kind of artistic production that is specific to postmodernity in general, that is somewhat different from postmodernism as a style. I mean, if you can say that people doing modernist work today are really out of it, and that postmodern writers or painters are better, then there clearly exists some aesthetic-historical standard. But it is probably unwise to formulate that around a determinate aesthetic. Now, when I said that postmodernism is centered on the visual, I meant that each system of the fine arts, historically, has had a kind of center, and that of modernism was clearly poetic language; Greenberg says that. I think that was displaced, and now I would rather say space is the place of that aesthetics, rather than the purely visual, because I think that space has done things to visual art and visual objects. So you did well to pick that up; it is probably not the best formulation. But I guess I do think, in terms of the images I will be showing later on, that there are certain kinds and modes of art that are more interesting today, but as you’ve seen it’s a real problem because postmodernity is supposed to be beyond value. This is not supposed to involve value, in the older modernist sense, which was both commercial and aesthetic. There was a rising ladder of forms, as people up through Greenberg found new problems, and now, fortunately, we are in a different position because art is no longer Eurocentric and so forth. But what does one do with value in that case? It is an interesting contradiction as long as art exists under capitalism, where the law of value continues to exist. So Michael, you are right to think it’s my problem, but it is also a world problem, an objective contradiction. I remember one time someone was pressing Tim Clark to say something about installation art, or some such thing, and he wouldn’t do it. He said, My interest in all this has been with oil paint. Once that’s over, I am not so interested. michael holly: Farewell to an Idea. fredric jameson: Yes, it wasn’t only farewell to a revolution, it was farewell to painting. And I think that is an interesting, an honest reflection on how much taste is involved, in a material way, with history. So one can always regret people aren’t producing paintings, and at any rate I like installations and other kinds of work, but they are no longer autonomous artworks.

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simon baier: I would like to comment on two things. Adorno would say autonomy comes into existence because of the commodification of art, and not the other way around. I think it is clear from a historical point of view that there is no concept of autonomy before the commodification of art. If one follows this line of argumentation, which I think is very convincing, it is not so easy to designate in turn the commodification of art as the very force which in turn destroys its autonomy. It is a dialectical relation between the two. At the same time, it is I think very problematic to assume that only certain artistic forms of production, that is, painting, can aspire to an autonomous status, whereas other forms are excluded out of principle. If one would do that, one would need to specify what those principles are. Second: I am curious about your account of modernism, and whether you include the historical avant-gardes of the 1920s and ’30s, or whether you would conceptualize them as something completely different. fredric jameson: Well, Adorno doesn’t include them: he hates the avant-garde, so for him that is not art. Art is the great modernists. And for him commodification works homeopathically: the work feels the threat of commodification outside of itself, so it produces itself as a thing, as a commodity—and I think he means thingification, and not price. That thingification—in Baudelaire, for example, the sonnet form—protects the work against the market, or tries to, because nothing ever does. And if that is how you read Adorno, then you have to say the virus got too strong, and the defenses broke down. The artwork cannot turn itself into an object any more. It’s gone, that’s all. I don’t think that’s too out of keeping with Adorno’s pessimism. He was quite capable of thinking the end of everything, because even critical theory would have an end in his vision of the commodified society. What he would never have accepted is the idea of different kinds of art. If we had the word art for the older stuff, what should we call this new work? It’s a difficult question . . . At any rate, the one place that I recall in Adorno where you suddenly see a different Adorno is some reflections on contemporary music. It looks as though he was very tolerant of what Stockhausen and the others were doing, and he is surprisingly open to this because those are the artists—but it is very hard to find him reveling in the postmodern. He couldn’t have predicted it. It’s as in Hegel, who predicted that art had ended in philosophy, but it turned out that philosophy had fumbled the ball and modernism became the new absolute. That was the beginning of art’s vocation, not the end of it.

2. t r a n s l a t i o n

Shigemi Inaga spoke about historical misunderstandings between Japanese and Western art historians, with special emphasis on misunderstandings that are unavoidable because they are built into the structure of language. He opened with several examples of cross-cultural misunderstandings, and conversation turned to the obliviousness of the global art world to inbuilt problems of translation and understanding. The following excerpt presupposes Shigemi Inaga’s essay in the book Is Art History Global?1 shigemi inaga: My work has always dealt with problems inherent in cultural crossings. We tend to have the illusion that everything necessary for understanding each other in a global market can be gotten from a translation, but there are many reasons to doubt this. First of all, only very limited information can filter through cultural barriers. Among the papers I assigned for this seminar, for example, there is one on the assassination of the Japanese translator of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses.2 Another paper which I have written on the same issue was originally given at a seminar on “The Conditions of Reciprocal Understanding” held at the University of Chicago in 1992, and I was invited to submit it to Critical Inquiry, but it was rejected with the interesting note that it was “too ethnographic.” I wanted it to be theoretical, but it was regarded as ethnographic— bhaskar mukhopadhyay: It did not appear to be universal in scope, that’s what the judgment meant. shigemi inaga: Thanks for the relevant comment. This is precisely the problem. A simple reading of my paper would be enough to understand that the Japanese translator, Igarashi Hitoshi (1947–1991), was not an innocent translator but was one of the top Japanese Islamic scholars of the generation. As a translator of Ibun Sînâ (Avicenna), he felt it necessary to intervene into the affair as a third party, just like the case of a medical intervention. He took advantage of his solid philology in Islamic studies, and tried to criticize both the Western claim to freedom 1. James Elkins, ed., Is Art History Global? The Art Seminar 3 (New York: Routledge, 2006). The book was a starting place for the discussions throughout the 2007 Stone Summer Theory Institute (it is presupposed in this book). Six people in the seminar had contributed to that book (Shigemi Inaga, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Suzana Milevska, Keith Moxey, Charlotte Bydler, and Shelly Errington). 2. Shigemi Inaga, “Negative Capability of Tolerance: The Assassination of Hitoshi Igarashi,” in The Conditions of Reciprocal Understanding:

A Centennial Conference, International House, the University of Chicago, September 12–17, 1992, edited by James W. Fernandez and Milton B. Singer (Chicago: Center for International Studies, University of Chicago, 1995), 304–36. Further, Shigemi Inaga, “Freedom in Suffering and Freedom of Suffering: The Case of Japanese Translator of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses,” paper delivered at First International Conference of Literature and Religion, Chungnam National University, Daejeon; published in Literature and Religion 10, no. 2 (2005): 229–51.

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of expression and the Islamist self-righteousness in the Rushdie affair so as to serve as a mediator in the controversy.3 To take his case simply as ethnographic and to reject it as irrelevant with regard to our global concerns is more than symptomatic: it shows what “universal” means in North-American and English scholarship in critical theory. The death of a Japanese scholar does not deserve serious attention. Here is one parable which will show the other side of the same coin: Harry Harootunian talked about the Japanese philosopher Watsuji Tetsurô (1889– 1960), in connection with his comment that Japanese art occupies a kind of double register. This reminds me of another philosopher, Karl Löwith (1897–1973), who taught in Japan in the prewar period. He remarked that it was true that Japanese students were seriously studying Western philosophy, but their life was subdivided into two layers: it happened as if they studied Western philosophy in the first-floor classroom, but when the class was over they went down to a lower level, a lower floor, where they lived in a completely Japanese fashion—and it was beyond the German professor’s comprehension. For him, the problem was that there was no connecting ladder between the two floors. He couldn’t see any connection between their two levels of activities.4 pedro erber: But is this really particular to Japanese? Can’t the same claim be made about European or North American philosophy students? I know very few who actually live, so to say, “on the same floor” of their studies. shigemi inaga: You may be right, but Löwith himself saw a huge gap between Europe and Japan. In the European intellectual tradition, the philosophical vocabulary is closely connected with everyday life, and this is why Heidegger had to try so hard to “sublimate” philosophical terms out of the yoke of everyday existence (like Seiend and Fürsorge). Whereas the problem in Far Eastern cultural spheres under Chinese influence is that the basic Western ideas remain so alien and alienating that the translated philosophical terms circulate only on the “second floor,” without any linkage with vernacular language. This is also the case in Indonesia, as far as I know. Let me explicate further by taking the case of “literature.” The definition of “novel” as a literary genre seems to be self-evident, for Westerners who look into only Western translations. But if you have access to the original non-Western texts and compare it with the translation, many inconveniences become evident. It is well known that Tanizaki Jun’ichirô’s (1886–1965) Makioka Sisters (1948)5 looked so disrupted and fragmentary that the famous English translator, E. Seidensticker, had to re-create a coherent and continuous 3. Shigemi Inaga, “Additional Recommendations for a Dialogue Between Civilizations,” paper delivered at International Conference on the Dialogue of Civilizations, United Nations University, Tokyo, July 31–August 3, 2001, www.unu. edu/HQ/japanese/dialogue/dialogue-programmej.html. 4. Shigemi Inaga, “Philosophia, Ethica, and Aesthetica in the Far Eastern Cultural Sphere:

Receptions of Western Ideas and Reactions to the Western Cultural Hegemony,” paper delivered at “Culture of Knowledge,” International Conference, Ranscultra, Pondicherry, 2005 (publication forthcoming). 5. Tanizaki, The Makioka Sisters, translated by Edward G. Seidensticker (New York: Knopf, 1957).

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narrative. Otherwise the Western readers could have lost patience. However, by so doing, some of the key incidents of the novel evaporated as they had been suggested by these chronological disruptions or left silent by way of discontinuous narratives. The important “silence” was effaced by the continuous narrative. A similar thing happens with the Nobel Prize winner Kawabata Yasunari (1899–1972). Some Western literary critics continue to complain that Kawabata’s novels, like Snow Country,6 are, even in their English versions, too incoherent and incomplete to be entitled to be called finished novels. I will give one more example (among many others) to clarify the question. Consider Jun’ichiro Tanizaki’s famous essay. His In Praise of Shadows (1933)7 is regarded as the incarnation of Japanese aesthetics, but at the same time he was mad about Hollywood films. His writings mention a number of Hollywood stars, like Mary Pickford or Douglas Fairbanks, but according to a specialist, the first English translation had to omit them: the names were erased, probably by the clever judgment of the editor. These kinds of things (a sort of cultural censorship) happen often, and as a result you may have an exaggerated, purified, and “essentialistic” idea of what Japanese aesthetics is; the crucial elements in the original may be erased as irrelevant in English and cannot always survive the process of cross-cultural translation (which is no less technical than social), and the reality is hidden to the readers of the target culture (at the expense of the illusory communicability). james elkins: In English that book comes across as very “Western” and romantic in a nineteenth-century sense, especially, for me, the passages about the sensual beauty of dark, wood-lined Japanese toilets! I suppose the names of Hollywood stars would have ruined that for me. shigemi inaga: And the irony is that the Japanese writer is said to have preferred a Western toilet to the Japanese one. He seems to have hated the darkness that he praised in his essay. Here is an example closely connected with fine arts that we might discuss: there was a huge show at the Centre Pompidou in 1986–87, with the title Le Japon des avant-gardes. It was one of the first retrospectives of the avant-garde in Japan, and I discuss my experiences of it in Is Art History Global? 8 That moment is related to my current work on Japanese arts and crafts. Even today in most of the Western countries, crafts are not categorized at the same level as fine arts. But it was not the case in Japan, where the hierarchy was typically the product of the Western Renaissance as it was reinterpreted by classicism, where the “artists” 6. Kawabata, Snow Country, translated by Edward G. Seidensticker (New York: Knopf, 1956). 7. Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows, translated by Charles Moore (New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1977), Naomi, translated by Anthony H. Chambers (Tokyo: New York: Knopf, 1985), and Diary of a Mad Old Man, translated by Howard Hibbett (New York: Knopf, 1965) faithfully give names of Hollywood movie stars.

8. Shigemi Inaga, “Is Art History Globalizable,” in Elkins, Is Art History Global? 267. “By systematically eliminating every domain of artistic creation where no equivalent can be found in Western avant-garde, this huge exhibition helped the French public form a firm but tautological conviction: everything recognizable as partaking of the avant-garde in Japan is a Western imitation; and everything original in Japan does not fall into the category of avant-garde.

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wished to be socially distinguished from craftsmen. And if you think about the arts in a global context, the so-called fine arts turn out to be a modern Western invention that occupies only a small portion of the entire map of art, and there is an enormous “third world” of arts and crafts that is not treated seriously by Western historians.9 The issue is closely connected to the discussions we have been having regarding the possibility of a world art history. shelly errington: Would you please say more about how “crafts are categorized at the same level as fine arts”? By whom, and what are the hierarchies based on, and what is at the bottom if crafts are not, in Japan? Since the eighteenth century, arts and crafts were separated in the West, but apparently that doesn’t map onto Japanese art categories and hierarchies. Please say more on that topic. shigemi inaga: This is not so much a Japanese or non-Western issue as the specific Western issue. In Japan, at least up until the mid-nineteenth century, no clear hierarchy did exist according to genres (a modest ceramic ware by an unknown Korean craftsman with special provenance could be more highly appreciated than a decorative painting by a famous master), if not in each genre, where you can of course distinguish pieces for aristocratic clients and pieces for ordinary customers. I wrote a book on Manet, and I have studied the process of new canon formation in the second half of the nineteenth century.10 At the moment of Manet’s studio auction sale in 1884, his etchings and drawings were not yet as highly evaluated as the finished painting in the art market. But that hierarchy was on its way to collapse. The new category of estampe originale was introduced in the late 1860s so as to give to some etching or graving a higher artistic status. By the 1880s they were no longer regarded as mere reproductions and drawings were no longer categorized as preparatory state of the completed painting. Manet’s auction sale was a touchstone for this “revolution” in artistic appreciation. Hokusai’s evaluation and his high reputation in the second half of the nineteenth century in Europe must be understood in this precise Western context. His drawing model known as Hokusai Manga provided the Western vanguard artists—Manet being one of the first—with a precious model so as to invalidate academic criteria. It so happened that a Japanese print craftsman was venerated by liberal republican French art amateurs and Manet’s friends as the highest summit of Japanese art history, comparable to such Western masters as Michelangelo, Rubens, or Rembrandt. In contrast, modern scholars in Japan, equipped with newly introduced Western aesthetic value judgment and “enOnly the group Gutai 具体 attracted the French public’s interest because it had influenced the Parisian art scene and had therefore been authenticated a posteriori. The logical coherence of the selection in Le Japon des avant-gardes perfectly epitomized the grandeur and misery of auto-intoxication. Applying one’s own prefabricated category by force, to foreign realities, only testifies to the cultures’ mutual incommensurability.” For further theoretical reflection, see also Shigemi Inaga, “The Impossible Avant-Garde in

Japan,” Year Book of Comparative and General Literature 41 (1993): 67–75. 9. Shigemi Inaga, “Les traces d’une blessure créatrice: Yagi Kazuo entre la tradition japonaise et l’avant-garde occidentale,” Japan Review, no. 19 (2006):133–59. 10. Shigemi Inaga, Le crépuscule de la peinture: La lutte posthume d’Édouard Manet (in Japanese with French summary) (Nagoya: Nagoya University Press,1997).

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lightened” by the Western Renaissance canon, began to repudiate Hokusai and other popular ukiyo-e print craftsmen. The literati class in westernizing Japan was literally ashamed of the success of Ukiyo-e prints in the West.11 To return to Shelly’s question, I should say that the Western valuation of “high” fine art is very well studied, especially in connection with the idea of “artist” as individual creator of original pieces of fine art. The idea was elaborated in the siècle des lumières, and culminated in the formulation of The Faculty of Judgment (1790) by Kant. What is the consequence? On the one hand, the idea of fine art prevailed all over the world up until 1980s. And the studies of Western fine art saturated the discipline of art history. The academic market is now facing stagnation for lack of new material. On the other hand, however, the idea had to confront the non-Western world for the last two hundred years. Its exposure to the non-Western realities came to discredit its validity. The Western aesthetic hierarchy has lost its competence, especially in the current global situation. And yet the global art market still seems to remain clinging to this outdated idea of fine art of the Enlightenment. So what should be done about this triple imbalance? It is a rational choice to move to the “hidden” arena of fine art, or more precisely to see what has been hidden by the notion of “fine arts.” thomas dacosta kaufmann: Sotatsu is a good example of this problematic, because he made calligraphy and paintings, but also objects, and there are people like Zeshin who made objects—lacquer boxes. I am myself guilty of writing books that don’t pay as much attention to Kunstgewerbe as they perhaps should. I would propose it is not only the exhaustion of the study of fine art that would lead to the study of these sorts of objects. Alois Riegl, Julius von Schlosser, Ernst Kris, and others have dealt with such objects.12 It might be fruitful to consider the expanded sphere of what might comprise works of art, such as the Japanese sense before it was narrowed by contact with Western art history: porcelain, netsuke, many other kinds of objects— michael holly: So many of the Viennese scholars who formed art history were interested in the minor arts. It wasn’t just Riegl, but Franz Wickhoff and others—but the reason they turned to arts and crafts was because they could discern laws of stylistic change more transparently in the minor arts than in the great traditions of painting and sculpture. So really, it was an attempt to follow the Hegelian story into the minor arts. 11. Shigemi Inaga, “The Making of Hokusai’s Reputation in the Context of Japonisme,” Japan Review, no. 15 (2003): 249–79. 12. It is worth recalling that Riegl worked at K.K. Österreichisches Museum für Kunst und Industrie, what is now the Österreichisches Museum für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna, and

that Schlosser was head of the Sammlung für Plastik und Kunstgewerbe of the Kunsthistorisches Museum there. It is, however, perhaps not well known that Kris was also a curator in Schlosser’s department and that he wrote many books and objects related to objects in the collection of the museum.

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thomas dacosta kaufmann: It’s true that it’s easier to find laws in such objects, but there is more to it than that: Schlosser, who was a very great scholar of such matters, including wax portraits, is behind the idea, made famous by Gombrich, that there is no such thing as the history of art, there are only artists.13 Schlosser could have said as much himself, and the idea itself comes from Croce, not Hegel. Schlosser’s theory, then, was dissonant with his practice, but it is important to keep the practice in mind as well, because it provided the focus from which the Viennese developed their theories.14 keith moxey: It seems to me this turn to popular arts, folklore, and so forth had another dimension as well: it was an attempt to trace unique national characteristics by means of art. Art became the place where the passage of the spirit could be traced; according to Riegl, Kunstwollen differed with each national/racial community. shigemi inaga: In connection to the national/racial factor, let me add one more aspect in terms of museum politics of classification. In the Louvre, the Département des objets d’art was created as late as 1896: before that, the category did not exist. Under the Third Republic, that department became as important as the Département de la peinture because many precious treasures were transferred from the Catholic churches to the museum. Beside the Département des antiquités, the two departments became concurrent in budgetary terms. It was in the Départment des objets d’art that Gaston Migeon (1861–1930), for example, tried to enlarge the Japanese collection. But the discovery of the Japanese Buddhist antiquities from the eighth century at the Exposition universelle in 1900 inevitably made it impossible to classify Japanese art solely in the category of objets d’art. It is selfevident that the Japanese official side hoped to demonstrate that the Empire of the Rising Sun as a nation-state possessed the national treasures which could be incontestably classified in the category of “fine arts.” To be labeled as a not-civilized, barbarous country producing only minor arts was so humiliating. michael holly: This was apart from discerning any laws in stylistic change? It had to do only with the objects themselves? shigemi inaga: I think there is a tautological mechanism between objects and classifying law (if not laws of stylistic change), and the argument is somewhat circular: The framework of appreciation modifies the choice of the relevant objects, and the chosen objects reflect the implicit law (or criteria) in stylistic and hierarchical judgment. Let me add one more case to reply to Michael’s question. The first British Consul to Japan, Rutherford Alcock (1809–1897), published his first book in 1863, The Capital of the Tycoon. There he said no higher art existed in Japan and that the lack proved Japan’s delay. Later, in a book dated 1878, Art and Art Industries in Japan, he borrowed an idea from William Morris, and completely changed his idea—he said then that it is better that Japan has no higher art. 13. See E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art, 11th ed. (London: Phaidon: 1970), 5, originally published 1950.

14. And thus not necessarily from any a priori theories: this is quite clear, for example, in Riegl’s Spätrömische Kunstindustrie.

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thomas dacosta kaufmann: You mentioned art industry. That is also a key concept in relation to the change from the premodern to the modern: it is marked by the change from Kunstgewerbe to Kunstindustrie. It would be helpful to consider what the “industrial” aspect of this development might be, and why the latter word, or its equivalents, is used. It is found in Slavic-speaking countries, in German-speaking countries, and elsewhere, where the transformation occurred from craft to industrial production.15 So what you are saying is resonant with what was happening outside Japan at the same time. The question from a global point of view would be how much contact there was between these ideas. james elkins: I would like to ask the same questions in a different kind of way. Your initial anecdote about your reaction at the Pompidou is a very poignant one, and for me it works on two levels: on one level it is about the fact that the exhibition did not recognize or value art outside of Western categories. On another level, it is about your own anxiety, unhappiness, and embarrassment: you are suddenly required to be the expert, to speak for all Japanese art, and yet it is impossible to do so. You don’t pursue the second level, but you do say a lot about the first level. This makes me wonder what you consider to be solvable: I assume that the anxieties and discomfort of the person who must unexpectedly exemplify his or her culture is endemic, and has no solution, but I notice that your very detailed essay in Is Art History Global? (which I think is a truly exemplary essay, one of the best texts on cross-cultural understanding in the visual arts) ends with a complex “elliptical” model of the impossibilities of understanding. And I note that our conversation here has been following a path that is largely complementary to the path of your essay: we have been exposing some moments in Western historiography when minor and decorative arts were valued differently, implying perhaps that by understanding the past we might affect future developments. But it’s not clear to me that a conversation like this one can solve the problem, and the other register of your story—the personal one—seems irremediable. Both registers are fraught with misunderstandings, and neither seems closer to resolution now than before. So what might be solved here? shigemi inaga: The simplest way to reply to your question may be the opposition between two kinds of heterogeneity. Cultural heterogeneity must be represented: otherwise there is a flattened global market. But the heterogeneity must be an acceptable one, and if it is accepted, then it will fit with a conception of heterogeneity that is already presupposed at a meta-level. The acceptable heterogeneity implicitly presupposes admissible homogeneity. In contrast, an unacceptable heterogeneity is by definition discarded out of the playing ground. 15. This change seems to me to be reflected not only in the choice of words used in such books as Riegl’s, but in the nomenclature used for museums, such as the Österreichisches Museum für Kunst und Industrie in Vienna, or the Umeleckoprůmyslové Museum (Kunstindustrieles

Museum) in Prague, as well as in the response to the transformation of modern forms of production reflected in the reasons for the founding of the South Kensington, now the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

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So what is permitted in the art market is just the interplay between permissible heterogeneity (as for items in circulation) and the admissible homogeneity (as for market tolerance). Things advance within that zone, and if you are outside that zone, what you say is not communicable at all; you have to be literally “ex-communicated.” That would be an abstract way of explaining the issue.16 As I mentioned in the opening roundtable, there are kinds of literature that gain through translation—candidate of Goethe’s Weltliteratur—they get more readers, and it is assumed that they have a universal message.17 But there are also kinds that do not benefit from translation and do not easily cross linguistic boundaries: they are in the excluded zone, not in the zone of permissible heterogeneity but in the zone of impermissible heterogeneity. keith moxey: Permissible heterogeneity and acceptable heterogeneity are useful terms, and I just want to make sure I understand them correctly— shigemi inaga: Just one illustration to clarify my point. It seems that Western nationstates showed quite divergent judgment in their admission policies when they organized expositions universelles. Let me give a brief overview. It was in 1872 that the Japanese Meiji government officially took part in the Weltausstellung for the first time. At that point the Japanese government could not establish any clear distinction between “fine arts” and “arts and crafts” (or Kunstgewerbe) and presented their items in such confusion that the Austrian adviser, Gottfried Wagner (1831–1892), had to warn the Japanese that “fine arts” did not mean only technical merit but also had to manifest spiritual aspect (Idee) with expression de passion, if one may use the term from French classicism (1875). It was not until 1890 that the Japanese could finally establish the distinction between “fine arts” and “industrial art” or “artistic crafts” in the classification list at the third domestic Industrial Fair. But in the following Chicago World Fair in 1893, the Japanese delegation became nationalistic and insisted upon the specificities of Japanese arts and industry, which they claimed had no clear distinction between higher and lesser arts. They had a number of bronze wares with artistic merit be accepted, not in the section of applied arts but in the section of fine arts, as sculptures.18 The generosity of the American organizer allowed this exceptional treatment. However, in the following Exposition universelle in Paris in 1900, the Japanese delegation once again changed its mind and decided to faithfully follow the French hierarchy of fine arts so as to make clear that Japan was capable of presenting pieces of work worth being regarded as incontestably belonging to the category of beaux-arts. By the way, it is well known that the French authority 16. For further reflection on this idea, see Shigemi Inaga, “Between Revelation and Violation: Ethics of Intervention,” in Crossing Cultural Borders: Toward an Ethics of Inter-Cultural Communication—Beyond Reciprocal Anthropology, edited by Shigemi Inaga (Kyoto: International Research Center for Japanese Studies, 2001), 125–38. 17. David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).

18. Shigemi Inaga, “Cognitive Gaps in the Recognition of Masters and Masterpieces in the Formative Years of Japanese Art History, 1880–1900,” in Japanese Hermeneutics: Current Debates on Aesthetics and Interpretations, edited by Michael Marra (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2002), 115–26.

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at that moment was notoriously conservative in aesthetic judgment, compared to the previous Parisian Exposition in 1889. Thus, the Japanese had difficulty in accommodating themselves to the unstable “universal standard.” The typically Japanese aesthetics, as they conceived and promoted it, was balanced on the boundary of acceptable heterogeneity and unacceptable heterogeneity; and the Japanese side was also measuring the limit of the acceptable homogeneity of the “universal” marketplace in transition.19 keith moxey: There are all sorts of implications for the present. African photography, for example, succeeds at the moment because it bears the marks of its Africanness. If it didn’t, it would lose its appeal to the international market. james elkins: And for me, this is a fruitful restatement of a problem I raised in the opening roundtable, about how the international art market is “coy” about signs of nationalism and ethnicity: it requires them—they are permissible—but not if they appear overly articulated—beyond the admissible. shelly errington: That’s a general problem with arts that are from outside the centers of power, or anyway of art power, don’t you think? Painters want to be known as great artists, not great artists with a qualifier like “a great Native American painter” or “a wonderful woman artist.” But the unmarked category, the “universal” one, is the one that does not bear any marks of ethnicity except whiteness, which is unacknowledged. Artists from the peripheries also develop a market of collectors who want their art to have the mark of the peripheries. thomas dacosta kaufmann: Or there is the retrogressive movement of museum display exemplified in Berlin, where, if you are a contemporary non-European artist, your works may be shown in the center of the city, but the “traditional” non-European works are now back in Dahlem, far from the center of the capital, where non-European art, and especially what were regarded as ethnographic finds, had been displayed in the early twentieth century. So they are together again with the former ethnographic collections, in such a way that the East Asian collections are displayed in the same building once again with pre-Columbian, African, and Oceanic works of art. So there is a contemporary problem in museology as well. shigemi inaga: Yes. German reunification and the master plans at the Museum Insel completely dismantled the previous universal conception of the Dahlem complex. What remains now in Grünewald in West Berlin is like the ruin of the broken dream of the universal art museum. The reorganization of the British Museum after the departure of the British Library is another example. When the Museum of Mankind was dismantled the question was raised as to how to relocate the ethnological collection. There was a planning of creating permanent exhibition area for Asia at the Central Court of the British Museum, but the idea was finally modified. Instead, temporal shows, such as the Chinese First Emperor 19. For a more detailed overview, see Shigemi Inaga, “Images changeantes de l’art japonais: Depuis la vue impressionniste du

Japon à la controverse de l’esthétique orientale (1860–1940),” JITA 29–30 (2004–5): 73–93.

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as well as the Crafting Beauty in Modern Japan show, are currently realized at the Central Court exhibition halls in 2007. In France, le Musée Quai Branly finally opened its doors in 2006. It is well known that the original idea of reunifying l’art premier was abolished because systematic reclassification was impossible, materially as well as administratively. In the meanwhile, some ethnological objects which were judged worth being exhibited at Quai Branly were transferred from the former Musée de l’homme in Trocadero and the Musée des arts africains et océaniens in the Vincennes Park (which was previously the Musée des colonies established at the international Exposition coloniale in 1931). The criteria of distinction between ethnological objects and pieces of fine art in the selection process remain problematical, to say the least (the question was already raised by Guillaume Apollinaire), and the political will which was involved in the decision making inevitably affected the aesthetic criteria in a complicated manner. Thus, the main European capitals are now facing drastic modifications in museum politics in terms of presentation of non-Western objects. Judging from these three cases, it seems to me that the global vision of world art history is not easily materialized nor materializable in the gigantic museum complexes at the beginning of the twenty-first century. michele greet: I want to come back to Jim’s point about the history of reception. In my work I look at the critical reception of paintings by Ecuadorian artists working in Paris in the 1920s. There is a huge contrast between what Parisian critics praised and what Latin American expatriates living in Paris found admirable. The Parisian critics praised what they perceived to be an innate expression of primitivism, whereas the Latin American critics commended the artists’ bold appropriation of European avant-garde styles. I think the gap in this history of reception is extremely revealing because it demonstrates the kinds of miscommunication that continue to plague our understanding of cross-cultural exchanges. shigemi inaga: Yes, I did have precisely the same impression when I saw the film Tangos, l’exil de Gardel (1985) by Fernando Solanas with Marie Laforêt, in Paris about twenty years ago.20 The subtle combination of primitive savageness and urban refinement were carefully dosed so that it could be attractive enough to meet the Parisian public expectation while not betraying the susceptibilities of Argentinean immigrants. But the highly sophisticated artificial calculation was almost completely overlooked not only by (slightly caricatured) Parisian promoters in the film but also by most of the real film critics who commented on the film. This double blindness is another case of practice between the search for admissible heterogeneity and the compromise with acceptable homogeneity. And my question would be: do the same issues persist in the so-called global market? Are the problems I have been expositing still relevant in contemporary art? 20. Tangos, l’exil de Gardel, 1985, directed by Fernando Solanas, music by Astor Piazzolla, script and realization by Fernando Solanas,

photography by Félix Monti, choreography by Susana Tambutti.

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james elkins: Definitely, yes. I don’t think anything we have been talking about has been solved, and I don’t think anything has gone away: but it is massively ignored—it’s invisible. I wonder if the international art market is not suffused with an unanswerable optimism concerning the representation of cultures—an optimism that is camouflaged by the notion that visuality can somehow help communicate things that language cannot. The very idea that there might be limits to understanding across cultural practices is taken for granted in the humanities, but I think not as much in the contemporary art world, where it seems to be an article of faith that because the work is visual, it has the capacity to communicate immediately, without the barriers we associate with literary or linguistic translations. With Shigemi’s help, we have been considering such things as necessary misunderstandings, irreparable differences, and “permissible” and “impermissible” heterogeneities: these things are absent from the art world, except when they take the reductive form of rote acknowledgment of Otherness. For example, in an exhibition of Wenda Gu, there is no worrying about what cannot be understood of his Chineseness. It doesn’t come up in that way, I think because the work’s visuality is thought to permit it to simply be there, showing and not saying. Discourse can float above the artwork, maybe making contact here and there, as Lacan would have said, but it isn’t necessary to work hard on what cannot be understood. Shigemi, can you say something to that? shigemi inaga: For example, consider the problem of “revolution,” understood as a discontinuity imposed on the stream of history. The notion is of course Western. In Chinese there is the term gémìng, and in Japanese kakumei (using the same combination of the Chinese characters). In Beijing, I had a interesting discussion with Alain Rey, lexicologist and editor of the Dictionnaire Robert, shortly after he had written a book on the notion of “revolution,” that is, “Révolution”: Histoire d’un mot.21 He excluded the Chinese idea of gémìng from his consideration because he understands the Chinese concept as a vocation that the emperor received from heaven; according to him it has nothing to do with the Western notion of revolution. But the Orientals in the Chinese cultural sphere use gémìng or kakumei as a translation of the European notion of revolution. The Chinese “Great Cultural Revolution” is nothing but Wěng-huà Da-Géumìng. How, then, could it be possible to describe revolution at the global revel? This kind of miscommunication happens easily and frequently, in many contexts, without people who are relying upon translation noticing what is happening. harry harootunian: Shigemi, your observation about revolutions is apposite. There is also the concept of “state,” and its forms in Japanese and Chinese. The Japanese translation of state was kokka, which took the ideographs for realm (kuni) or country and family in Japanese; Chinese merely took this “translation” over and enunciated it as guojia. 21. Alain Rey, “Révolution”: Histoire d’un mot (Paris: Gallimard, 1989).

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There is an interesting multiple meaning, in which “state” also has the meaning “family.” In the West, nothing of the sort applies. You’re right, Shigemi, and it would be possible to go on and on . . .

shigemi inaga: There is also the question of “society.” When one of the first Japanese diplomatic delegations came to Washington, DC, in the middle of the nineteenth century, they tried to translate the American Constitution into Japanese. They had difficulty, among many others, in finding out equivalent of “society” in Chinese classics or in Japanese vocabulary. Nowadays the Western notion of “society” is automatically translated as shakai in Japanese and shakai is made into “society” in English. However, you need not be agnostic to question if a Chinese or a Japanese person who is using the term is precisely thinking of the same thing as “society” in English. Indeed, it took some twenty or so years before the Japanese could understand the difference between “society” and “company” by putting sha-kai for the former and kai-sha (reversed combination!) for the later, so as to make the difference clear. Once socially accepted, these translated technical terms become social convention. These terms look as if they were transmitting equivalent of Western ideas, but the implications are inevitably divergent from the original context. Whenever conflict happens in cross-cultural negotiations, the implicit gap becomes evident in a negative fashion. Of course, it is a basic political maneuver to bestow the common and unifying meaning on a term—like “society”—which, in reality, is endowed with extremely divergent and even contradictory or antagonistic implications—even within one language—according to political opinions. However, this is why we must be extremely careful about the illusion of equivalence and communicability which the translated terms tend to give us. james elkins: All this applies just as much to the foundational terms of art history and criticism. In Is Art History Global, there are thickets of confused lexica, involving such terms as “representation” and “picture.” The contemporary art world seems to be oblivious to these problems. The problems of translating words like “representation” are as immediate, as fundamental, as the problem of bowing at the opening of a martial arts tournament, or using the word “revolution” in a historical account. Instead of pondering these issues, the global art world pays a great deal of attention to local terms: if an artist refers to Sufism, the ninety-four tribes of Kazakhstan, or kumys (those are examples from my trip to Central Asia), a critic will want to explain them at length. Or if a Renaissance altar reminds a critic of a Peruvian huaca, she’ll mention it. But enabling terms like “refer” and “representation” go unnoticed—they are like commodities in the world of global art discourse. There is a deluge of mistranslations, but contemporary critics pay attention instead to these little evaporating droplets.

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harry harootunian: I think we in Euro-America have, by training and imperial disposition, always assumed that the conceptual language and cultural forms we’ve employed will always have transparent equivalents in the world outside, in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, in the regions of the Third World and former colonies. This “imperial” impulse has been an enabling condition of our area studies in the social sciences and humanities. It is not simply or only art history and criticism that has overlooked these fundamental problems and ignored the immense disparities between terms and forms we take for granted and their presumed equivalents. The problem with this kind of easy gesture to simply assimilate other cultural intensities is its putative grounding in appeals to universalism over particularisms. While the fundamental problem between translation and appropriation opens up a large gap interpreters in the human sciences have scarcely engaged, the principal result has been to tyrannize conceptions of chronology and periodization and the “authority” of the breaks each new moment is supposed to represent. The most recent declaration of the change from modernism to postmodernism is a case in point. Whether one is talking from disciplines like art history, history, literary studies, and so on, we seem to be bonded to forms of periodizing that have the force of natural dictations, even though they have grown out of a specific cultural experience and made to mark time in the histories of societies outside of Euro-America.

3. t h e p r e h i s t o r y o f g l o b a l i z a t i o n

Here the issue was the place of history and art history in conceptualizations of globalization. In contemporary art-market literature, globalization is usually presented as something that occurs exclusively in the present, that has no history beyond Documenta or the biennales. Here we try to see how art history might be implicated in globalization. In the first instance, there is the question of whether the globalization of the art world is a late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century phenomenon, or whether it repeats past formations. In that inquiry, art history plays the role of informant, providing pertinent facts. Then there is the question of the writing about globalization: Is art history itself a global enterprise and, if so, has it been so in the past? Can art history help think through these problems, or is it symptomatic of them? Do we understand how it implicated in nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and and globalization? The participants had read Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann’s essays “The Geography of Art: Historiography, Issues, and Perspectives” and “Pintura de Reinos: A Global View of the Cultural Field.1 thomas dacosta kaufmann: In Fred’s seminar, Keith Moxey brought up the question of universality and particularity, and of course that is a central issue for art history and for what art history has to offer in response to questions concerning periodization.2 The questions I would like to raise are: what can art history do in regard to conceptions of globalization, and what are the possibilities within art history for theorizing globalization itself? Historical considerations may help place our concerns in a broader perspective, and art history may offer what we call “objects” and “materials” as topics for discussion in reference to globalization. It may also help to think of objects (and artists) as agents and not merely as reflections of circumstances. To be sure, if we are going to be talking about history, we can emphasize breaks and ruptures and discontinuities, and thus consider issues of periods and periodization. But I would also like to stress conditions of continuity. I myself became interested in these sorts of questions when I started working on a Habsburg, Rudolf II, who happened to reign around 1600 in Prague. I began research on this period during the 1970s, when access to areas in Central Europe was rather difficult, and the time around 1600 in Prague was a period and a place that was relatively neglected. What I thought would be a direct, im1. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, “The Geography of Art: Historiography, Issues, and Perspectives,” Leids Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek (2007); “Pintura de los reinos: A Global View of the Cultural Field,” in Pintura de los reinos:

Identidades compartidas, edited by Juana Gutiérrez, 2 vols. (Mexico City: Fomento Cultural Banamex, 2008). 2. See Section 1 of the Seminars.

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mediate question of research turned into much broader questions of periodization, of valuation, of aesthetics and historiography—all having to deal with the constrictions of the discipline. So I ended up having all these theoretical concerns regarding the discipline of art history from what could have been strictly empirical questions. The problem that I sense is one of definition—and not just one of the “global” and “globalization.” What is the difference between global art or art history versus world art or art history, versus globalization, versus global exchange or cultural exchange? Of course, there is an old tradition of universal history. That is the nineteenth-century conception of world history, which is broken down into national and local distinctions. When it comes to a single story of world art, this question is very crucial. There have been efforts to write textbooks of world art and they have not been successful, but at least they attempt to consider all parts of the world.3 In relation to this problem, I have one more general theoretical point to make—about what might be said to be the ideographic versus the nomothetic approach—the former implying that if we are dealing with historical questions, we don’t have to pose laws, while the latter posits that there might be laws of history and we might be able to trace general patterns of development.4 Now, the question is: what are the possible uses of all these sorts of considerations for global art history, for global exchange, and so on? Fredric Jameson criticizes the argument that there has always been globalism, and says that something special has occurred since 1980. But even within the definition of the history of capitalism and world commerce—there are a number of historians, such as Immanuel Wallerstein, Andre Gunter Frank, and others, who have shown that global exchange begins with the early modern period and that there is continuity from the sixteenth century onwards—the question might then still be better posed, what is it about recent globalization that is different? shelly errington: Actually, if we mean geographically far-ranging exchange and trade, “globalization” begins much earlier than the sixteenth century, with the really worldwide Muslim traders. It is only the European “globalization” that we are heirs to now that begins then. But in any case, although a lot of historians, as you point out, want to assert that there was always globalization in that sense, it doesn’t really get to the problem, which seems to me much more about narrative than about the facts. michele greet: It seems to me there is a separation between art historians who focus on the contemporary moment (post-1980s) and the impact of globalization on artistic production, and those who focus on global exchange in more historical 3. To clarify: the distinction here is between world art, the history of art of all parts of the world, and global art history, an art history which would treat all parts of the globe as interconnected. 4. In Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Toward a Geography of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 2004), I argued for an ideographic approach, which I would also argue is more appropriate in general for questions of historiography. This of course runs counter to the assumptions of the traditions of Hegelian and Marxist writing about history.

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periods. Yesterday, in Fred’s seminar, it was presented as a break; but I wonder if we could talk about how our current moment can inform the way we look at these ideas of global exchange in historical periods and how these two levels of analysis intersect. thomas dacosta kaufmann: I think that art or art history is rather more in need of a theory than capable of presenting one. If I may speak from the perspective of art history—the discipline developed in the nineteenth century (as distinct from other discourses in which I am also interested, which are the precursors of art history)—it grew in a period which also saw the foundations of the nation-state. In some instances you can see this connection rather directly: for Berlin, which was the foundation of the Prussian state (and was also where Hegel worked for a time), was one of the first places to have a chair of art history. Similar things happened elsewhere, and so questions tended to be framed in national terms. We can refer to the approach to history writing I have mentioned as a precursor to globalization, because it is related to conceptions of universal history or historiography. Particular kinds of works, such as histories of the art of all times and places, could, however, also be related to national questions.5 It strikes me as peculiar that when you have practices that transcend national boundaries and address global issues, they end up being called “international styles.” The style of the year 1400, for example, is often called the International Gothic. I myself might have talked about “international mannerism,” another term that is often used. These phenomena have not been adequately conceptualized; the ways such practices work on a world scale and the phenomena related to them have sometimes been addressed in the past but require much further attention. james elkins: The fact that art history grew up along with the rise of the modern nation-state also raises questions about the limitations of current art-historical practices, which may still be in thrall to the nationalist impulses that seem in retrospect to have driven so much earlier scholarship. No one thinks of this now!—I’d say as art historians, we all imagine that nationalist motivations are a thing of the past. But at least I might say, speaking for myself, it does strike me that my own interests in international modernism might themselves come from the nationalist history of the discipline, unexpectedly inverted by the worldwide spread of North American– or western European–style art-historical scholarship, which now appears as “global” and therefore neutral in relation to the question of nations. 5. See, for the general theme, Udo Kultermann, “Histoire de l’art et identité nationale,” in Histoire de l’histoire de l’art, vol. 2, XVIIIe et XIXe siècles, edited by Edouard Pommier (Paris: Klincksieck, 1997), 223–47. For the institutionalization of the history of art during the time of European nation-building, see Heinrich Dilly, Kunstgeschichte als Institution: Studien zur Geschichte einer Disziplin (Stuttgart: Suhrkamp,

1979). The approach of universal history carries over into the “world art history” represented by the handbooks of Franz Kugler, Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte, 2nd ed., with additions by Jacob Burckhardt (Stuttgart: Ebner and Seubert, 1848) (1st ed. 1842), and of Carl Schnaase, Geschichte der bildenden Künste, 2nd ed. (Düsseldorf: Buddeus, 1866–79) (1st ed. 1843).

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There is an unacknowledged, inbuilt limitation in the discipline, and to art writing in general, on both these counts. The exemplary text for me is Hans Belting’s little book, The Germans and Their Art: A Troublesome Relationship, which demonstrates with unimpeachable clarity that generation after generation of German art-historical scholarship was driven by ideas of Germany and Germanness; but just at the end, when the lineage of German art historians comes up to the present, Belting himself is mysteriously absent from the roster.6 It’s not that he doesn’t grasp the history he means to tell; it’s that he does not feel he needs to account for the epistemological break that has enabled him to tell the history, and he feels no need to explore the conditions of his ability to remain apart from that history, to expose the nationalism in the discipline without, somehow, leaving the discipline. It is a wonderful lacuna. michael holly: I do take it as axiomatic that narratives speak us and we don’t speak the narratives. And I would like to hear what ideological function this fascination with globalism—current or historical—is serving for art history. Is it just chance that at the moment when, to invoke Hegel, art history became philosophy, when theory raised its hoary head, that there is a return to something of a different register—the global register? There is a return to the archive, to local knowledges, to writing catalogues, to the empirical stuff. In other words, is there some kind of explanation why these ideas occur now in the span of art history? bhaskar mukhopadhyay: It is quite clear now that the rise of art history as a discipline in the nineteenth century is part of the formation of the larger discourse called the human sciences, whose origin Foucault traces to Kant’s epochal question: Was ist der Mensch?7 The discovery of Man and his finitude led Kant to posit a philosophical anthropology8—understood as the analytic of Man—whose various branches are political economy, biology, linguistics, history, ethnology, aesthetics, and so on. In other words, Man qua Subject becomes both the subject and object of knowledge. Neo-Kantians like Panofsky and Cassirer merely renewed the Kantian question to study this transcendental Man, understood as an autonomous consciousness, and widened and broadened its reach. Art historians like Riegl (with the concept of Kunstwollen) gave it a historicist twist. The problem with this concern with Man is that, to cite Foucault again, it produces the confusion of the empirical and the transcendental.9 What we are witnessing today is an exhaustion of this problematic of Man. The rise of reflexivity, whose symptoms manifest itself increasingly with a certain concern with the history of various disciplines, including art, is a sure sign that it is no longer possible to think in our time other than in the void left by Man’s disappearance. And to those who are still under the thrall of Man and his putatively most splendid achievement, art, we can only answer with a philosophical laughter. 6. Hans Belting, The Germans and Their Art: A Troublesome Relationship, translated by Scott Kleager (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 7. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 2006), 371.

8. Etienne Balibar, “Subjection and Subjectivation,” in Supposing the Subject, edited by Joan Copjec (London: Verso, 1994), 1–15. 9. Foucault, Order of Things, 371–72.

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However, the void created by the disappearance of Man (leading to a certain deontologization of the very category of “art”) has not created a deficiency, as is clear from Michael’s comment. It has led to a proliferation of empirical works, often microstudies, to a resurgence of local knowledges, and finally, to the writing of philosophical genealogies which show that far from being an attribute of some mythical Man, “art” is, at its best, a convention.10 Overcoming the anthropological sleep has resulted in a radical empiricism, to use Isabelle Stenger’s phrase, and in opening up a space in which it is once more possible, after two centuries of “art,” to think again what artifacts mean.11 Today, no art theorist or art historian worth his tenure would tell his student that art has to do with the beautiful or the aesthetic. thomas dacosta kaufmann: There are obviously a couple of larger questions to be asked. The first one is if there has been some reflection about the origin of the discipline, and the answer is: yes, increasingly, in the last twenty-five years. “I am a historian of the discipline” would have been a very unusual claim to have made in the past. The number of books published on figures like Warburg, for example, in the last decade, is astonishing. There exists a real interest in earlier practitioners of art history. As far as the idea of art is concerned: I do think there are a couple of arguments that have been raised that need to be discussed further, one of which I would have contested. Jameson commented yesterday that the historical idea of art excludes aesthetics. I think that this is actually wrong, and it is certainly factually wrong in terms of the historiography of the discipline, and in terms of the discourse on art—as revealed in the origins of aesthetics as a philosophical discipline in the writings of Baumgarten himself and his immediate successors, and also of art history as a historical discipline. I think, first, that Baumgarten says somewhere explicitly that aesthetics can be demonstrated by the history of the various arts;12 and, second, that Winckelmann’s history of art obviously has aesthetics built into it.13 That is to say, in Winckelmann the history of art reveals the creation of the beautiful and the decline from it. Furthermore, the thesis that aesthetics should necessarily be involved with the conception of the autonomy of art is certainly another idea that comes out of the eighteenth century.14 In addition, if we think of objects made not for any particular use and not necessarily treated as commodities, but for ex10. Howard Caygill, The Art of Judgment (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989); Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). 11. Thierry de Duve, Kant After Duchamp (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998). 12. This comment was made in Baumgarten’s Halle lectures, known from a publication of 1750, printed in Bernhard Poppe, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten: Seine Bedeutung und stellung in der Leibniz-Wolffischen Philosophie und seine Beziehungen zu Kant: Nebst einer bisher unbekannten Handschrift der Ästhetik Baumgartens, PhD diss., Universität Münster (Borna-Leipzig: R. Noske, 1907), 67: “Es wird

nicht undienlich sein, eine kleine Einleitung in die Geschichte der Ästhetik zu geben. Die ganze Geschichte der Maler, Bildhauer, Musikverständigen, Dichter wird hierher gehören, denn alle diese verschiedenen Teile haben ihre allgemeinen Regeln in der Ästhetik.” 13. Most conveniently available now in Johann Joachim Winckelmann, History of the Art of Antiquity, translated by Harry Francis Mallgrave (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2006). In earlier writings (Vasari, Bellori et al.) the aesthetic bias is also obvious. 14. See further for these issues Regine Prange, Die Geburt der Kunstgeschichte: Philosophische Ästhetik und empirische Wissenschaft

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ample as objects made to be collected, which many objects were at that time—for instance, much porcelain was made to be collected during the eighteenth century rather than to be used—yes, there is already a conception of aesthetics, and of art, and of objects produced clearly for their aesthetic value. harry harootunian: I have an example in mind from a recent exhibition devoted to the Other I saw at the ethnographic museum at Branly in Paris. What interested me most was the instance of earlier collections in the seventeenth century, house collections or protomuseums, called cabinets, I think, filled with things from voyages, some good, in time, others curiosities and junk. So I was wondering if we could look at the problem of art as a processual one—some of it collected with a randomly distinguished value. It seems to me there was a certain kind of materiality rather than aesthetic randomly articulated in some vision of the exotic or the different. keith moxey: In the context of globalization, we have become increasingly aware of the massive scale of collecting during the age of nationalism that was ushered in by postcolonialism. Every emergent nation had to have its own museum of art, in order to compete with those of the colonizing powers. The current situation points to the productivity of the very fluidity of the concept of “art”—from the collection of naturalia and artificialia, to collections that consist of only paintings and sculpture, to contemporary collections that include installations, situations, contexts, ideas, and so on. The concept seems to be forever in flux, and one of the useful things about the emergent field of visual studies is that, instead of dissolving the aesthetic, it actually puts a spotlight on it, by enabling us to understand what allows people to isolate certain things from the mass of visual culture in order to grant them status and prestige. thomas dacosta kaufmann: Thinking in terms of material culture might actually be a bit better than thinking in terms of visual culture. I am not sure what the visual aspect is in this particular case of collecting and exchange. The notion of visual culture takes in so much more—and that might be the difference between the twenty-first century and the collecting and exchange practices of the sixteenth century. Paintings and sculpture are after all objects, and we need to consider their material presence. Even reproductions are themselves objects that present their own material reality. joyce brodsky: If I may go back to Tom’s first question about continuities and breaks: I am interested in that contrast between the trade of these objects you were talking about and the present realities of globalization. How does that affect the daily lives of people? It seems to me this might be a crucial question: whereas trade went on historically for a long time, how were people affected when someone acquired an object such as a piece of porcelain or a painting, in relation to the way it happens now, when every act of trade is touching every part (Cologne: Deubner, 2004), and for the autonomy thesis in the eighteenth century, Thomas Crow,

“The Critique of Enlightenment in EighteenthCentury Art,” Art Criticism 3 (1987): 17–31.

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of the world? Nowadays there seems to be no place that doesn’t receive the impact of globalization. shelly errington: Joyce, what I like about what you said is that you are pointing us away from grand narratives and to lived life to understand what “globalization” means. That is, instead of talking about globalization as an event or a stream of events that either did or did not happen, or when “it” began, or whether “it” is continuous or ruptured, as if it were a thing that could be pointed to in the world like a table or a chair, Joyce is asking what it means to a person or a collection of associated people in a particular place and time that people are connected in certain material ways instead of others, or that images are flowing around us constantly, or whatever? That’s a very different way to ask the question than asking what the phases of capitalism are and when they started. If I could say just one more thing about narrative here: I feel as if we are talking about history and globalization and narrative as if the only way to deal with telling a story of continuity were with the same-old same-old master narrative, and that if we abandon it then we are left with a mess of shards and shreds and patches. But Foucault talked about “genealogies,” which to my mind is a kind of way of talking about continuities without giving them either an essentialized content or a forward thrust. michele greet: We have been talking about these theories of globalization, but then we return to the institutions in which we teach art history, and the structures in which we teach, say, Latin American art, or European art, or African art. I wonder if anyone has encountered an institutional model that has been able to break down these geographic categories. How do we counteract resistance on the bureaucratic level, an insistence on labeling and categorizing courses in a certain way, to bring a more theoretical or cross-cultural approach to our teaching? I am interested in larger structural models and not just a single “global” course that has been developed within a department— charlotte bydler: Like visual cultural studies in Rochester, for example. In the Art History Department at Södertörn University College, we have modified or continued the visual culture studies model: a thematic layout of courses over three five-month semesters, no chronological overview. Each theme is anchored in the current situation—either a certain problem in art historiography or with an exhibition that also has a bearing on material that is geographically or temporally distant. For Sweden this could mean that we connect to German nineteenthcentury material when it comes to art history’s history. However, breaking out of a traditional teaching canon, there is a thematic canon forming within visual culture studies as well. This set of themes comprises a section on methods and views of representation means and technologies; a toolbox of methods (for instance, iconography, semiotics, psychoanalysis, Foucauldian structural discourse analysis); one on images with supernatural powers that would not normally fit a

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history of the “autonomous art” concept; and another thematizing various arts and media. But killing chronology and aiming for a global art history through genealogy, I think the serious problem in Sweden as elsewhere is the lack of translated literature in larger languages. This severely narrows the range of known practices, traditions, and interpretations—there is never enough material to develop a genealogical method. It is selective, tendentious, and can never be global. james elkins: Those are themes developed in some detail in Is Art History Global? 15 They span the range from monolingualism through to difficult issues of translation among polylingual scholars, as we saw in Shigemi’s seminar.16 thomas dacosta kaufmann: Charlotte, what you are reflecting on is something generally present in all places, that is, the accessibility of literatures where people learn other languages less frequently or less fully. There is also a kind of disjunction between scholarly interest in method and theory on the one hand, and the areas and objects we study on the other. With all the questioning of the discipline, the object remains intact much the same, and methodological and theoretical discussions do not seem to have taken into consideration the expansion of the canon within traditional fields of study, despite the addition of many different areas for research and teaching (African art, Latin American, and so on). So a crucial question is whether and how we should bring in other objects for analysis, and whether this is within the power and the structure of the discipline. It is much easier to do things as individuals than collectively in art history. michael holly: Visual studies came about in the 1980s, when traditional art history was confronted with various theories imported from other disciplines—such as deconstruction—particularly from literary studies and from the philosophy of history. And you could no longer call the mixture “art history.” In other words, there was a lot of significance in changing the name—that act of change had to signal the difference. Art history in the early 1990s was on death row. thomas dacosta kaufmann: What difference does it make if art history exists or not? What is the ideological importance of the discipline, what purpose and what ends does it serve? I can answer this personally but I don’t know if I can answer it more generally. karl hakken: There are places in the academy still where totalizing progressivist narratives are thought of as the right thing to do. And there might be a driving force here, that of economics— shelly errington: Precisely, and I think Karl and I are on the same page here because we talked about it outside of the seminar. I think that economics is a driving force in progressivist narratives in multiple ways, sometimes subtle or maybe 15. See Bydler’s own contribution, “A Local Global Art History,” in Is Art History Global? edited by James Elkins, The Art Seminar 3 (New York: Routledge, 2006), 316–21.

16. See Section 2 of the Seminars.

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repressed—but in art history it is really obvious. It is in the interest of collectors and curators and dealers, whose activities support and enable art history scholarship and scholars in many different ways—it is in their interest to believe in the universality of art and to naturalize and mythologize hierarchies of value—and to tell the right stories about it. If art, and therefore its criteria and standards, were not universal, how would you know your investment or acquisition would hold its value or increase? I’m not saying it is as simple as that—I don’t think quite as crudely as I may sound here—but the huge psychological, conceptual, and monetary investment of people involved even peripherally in the art market is obvious to those who stand outside it. The point is, meanings are not intrinsic, and narratives are not reflections of what really is the case. It takes work and motivation and sometimes capital on the part of someone—social, political, and economic work—to produce narratives and distribute them in a way that makes them believed and believable. karl hakken: With regard to the question why visual culture is continuously cast in the background, and why this continued focus on the same objects—one might argue that the economics of these objects hasn’t changed at all. The field of visual culture has not established itself as legitimate knowledge, and we may be talking about the same things because we are perhaps buying the same things. pamela lee: I see where you’re going, but I would want to nuance your take on visual culture and the market. In the academy at the very least, “visual culture” is the term that threatens to trump art history as an extradisciplinary rubric. Whatever its genealogy in deconstruction or its force as an explanatory model, “visual culture studies” has become a way for institutions to consolidate, organizationally, anything vaguely interdisciplinary and messy; it has enabled a kind of disciplinary and departmental streamlining that actually suggests it is “art history” that is the outmoded field. And while it’s certainly true that the typical artifacts of visual culture might not fetch the same kind of prices at auction as your typical oil painting, the market itself functions as its own kind of visual regime. It is visual culture par excellence. This is why, I think, we need to worry more about the absolute continuity between the aesthetic and the economic in our analyses of globalization and art. simon baier: This would lead us to the question of how our own discourse, be it art history or visual studies, is related to and shaped by specific historical economical formations. An argument and the object it constitutes are dependent on the sheer possibility that they can be sold. Our present condition prescribes that the argument appears when its object is able to appear on the market, that is, when language can be exchanged for money. Besides this extreme situation, I would like to point to a specific historical lineage that connects and disconnects our present moment of globalization with the history of modern art, which I feel has not been discussed here yet. In contrast

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to today’s equation between globalization and capitalism, it has been of course one of the key goals of the historical avant-gardes to transgress local or national forms of artistic practices of the past and to point to an international artistic practice of the future: the nonobjective, which is not money, the abstract, which is not equivalence. A history of modern art is therefore a privileged field in order to survey the history of conflicting concepts of globalization, and it is modern art, as a symptom, which plays an absolutely crucial role in this history. One could say that modern art manifests a specific desire for the global. It would be crucial, then, to analyze how present artistic production can still relate to this desire, whether the globalized world can still be appropriated as an artistic project. harry harootunian: I wonder what desire the concept of globalization is emitting here. I was saying to Fred yesterday that globalization seems to be more represented than lived right now. For example, today with the discussion of the crisis of art history. I would say it’s not just art history: everything in the humanities and the social disciplines—history, anthropology—has been under siege and under crisis for decades. When we talk about globalization, I don’t even know what globalization is, other than some kind of neoliberal economic necessity. To talk about it in the perspective of art or art history means to wrest something from that domain of ineffable necessity. What is it that we are trying to rescue from the current hegemony of a particular kind of economic activity? What is it that globalization offers or promises, that previous models or units of organization such as the nation have failed to? Many of you are historians—maybe there are some views about some strong desire that drives it underneath? charlotte bydler: Obviously there is a desire of economic forces; but do not forget there is cosmopolitan ethics that drives thought and action in a globalizing direction. The ethical dimension is useful to think about—I don’t see solidarity within the art world or in other communities as a purely economic phenomenon. The cosmopolitan heritage should be drawn into account at this point to counterbalance capital and nation-state as globalizing-extension machines. The Cynics refused to confine their view of humanity to the city-state borders, just as medieval Christianity and Islam identified as a community across and beyond nations. Kant held on to this tradition in his view of rights in the treaty on perpetual peace, as did Marx in the Workers’ International. That is what has sometimes been called “cosmopolitanism from below” could claim as its heritage: an interest-based community that is volatile and possibly violent. Similarly, there are art worlds that identify against a nation-state ethos, that are interested in extending their cause-centered community in spite of drawbacks in terms of status or economic benefit. The artists of the heroic “net.art” era could be one such community. harry harootunian: Cosmopolitanism has its own history, and it’s a baleful history, an ideological history. It is still grounded in some conception of class on the one

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hand, and nation on the other. It has really tried to find some mode of articulation between what the nation has to offer and some large notion of worldly civilization or culture, in which the nation constitutes a voice in this universal chorus. But basically, when you begin to examine it, at least in the case of Japan or China—there was a really heavy moment of cosmopolitanism in the 1920s—it turns into an attempt to cover up enormous class disparities and entire domains of unevenness. When we talk about cosmopolitan cities like London or New York, what we immediately ignore is large domains of people beneath who don’t participate. charlotte bydler: Surely cosmopolitanism is selective. In a sense it reaches out for equals and therefore it has contradictory effects. It is not purely “good.” But my point is that cosmopolitanism follows neither economical nor nation-state logics; it has its motivation in recognition of and by other humans. As such, loyalty and solidarity between friends and family are expressions of cosmopolitanism; it also appoints equals. So when we are dealing with restrictions caused by citizenship and nation-state borders, a concept like cosmopolitanism might enable us to mobilize and to imagine alternative loyalties. thomas dacosta kaufmann: I still think we need to consider whether the contemporary conditions of globalization are special, or unique to our particular period of time. We have had a variety of answers to that question. In my essay on the Spanish realms, I posed a variety of terms that could be applied to the global situation of art in an earlier period. I was concerned with the originary global imperialist situation, the Spanish one, but I was also proposing that other models might apply to the Portuguese or Dutch situations, which are not that similar to the Spanish. The question that would arise, which you were posing, Jim, and which is relevant, is: to what extent can we use such models for our present circumstances? james elkins: Since we haven’t talked in detail about your essay on the Spanish realms, let me bring in an example. As part of your criticism—I think in particular of Serge Gruzinsky’s book—you mention the fact that some colonial emulation did not involve transformation. “Many forms of art and architecture,” you write, “were derived from, copied after, or based upon European sources which were not transformed, and which thus do not reveal any evidence of indigenous or mixed hands.”17 That is a mode of exchange, a kind of interest that a margin might take in a center, that is seldom remarked on or valued in the contemporary art world, because it apparently fails to demonstrate the transformations and reinterpretations that we value. And yet it has direct relevance to understanding the situation of much of the art I was just describing—the art that is excluded from the global art market. One conceptual hurdle here is reimaging and redescribing sincere emulation. 17. See the essay partly reprinted in this book; Serge Gruzinski, The Mestizo Mind: The Intellectual Dynamics of Colonization and Glo-

balization, translated by Deke Dusinberre (New York: Routledge, 2002).

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thomas dacosta kaufmann: Yes, but I would rather broaden the question. This question of the pertinence of past globalisms is of wider importance as well, because it depends on philosophies of history. Both the generalization from historical examples—a kind of heuristic approach to history—and the philosophical notions of forms of globalisms are issues with which we need to deal. With Jameson, for example, it is clear we are dealing with what one would call a Marxist or Hegelian view of history. I would like to present as a challenge the idea that although many of our discussions in the seminars this week came out of Marxist or postMarxist or Hegelian analyses, these proved to a degree inadequate to our task of dealing with globalism and art. What other models of historical interpretation might we find that could be applied to present problems? zhivka valiavicharska: Of course, previous universalizing discourses and global practices do exist, and they inevitably participate in current global ones. In the social disciplines, however—those disciplines that deal with globalization handson—these questions are rarely an issue, due to a number of materialist analyses that have pointed to the transnationalization of finance capital, of the material realms of production, and of labor itself. So we are dealing not only with transnational models of exchange, but also of production and labor. I think it is very important, when we talk about globalization, to have in mind how capital, by exploiting global material inequalities, leads to particular outsourcing practices that transnationalize the labor forces. That leads to certain “global” human relations that are completely different from, say, the ones realized in the global trade routes in the sixteenth century. Of course, this is not about economic determinism, but that these are actual, historical reconfigurations of material relations, and they carry with them new forms of human experiences and new meanings, new forms of relations of humans to other humans, to themselves, to things. We could look at them as the conditions of possibility and impossibility for how subjects are constituted. There is another crucial point as well: that the forms of power that produce current global hegemonies are not the same as those in the past—neoliberal capitalism comes with its own mechanisms of power and control, its own technologies of expansion, very different from the colonial ones. This is why a lot of the empirical disciplines have taken up Foucault’s later work on governmentality, neoliberalism, and biopower to understand these new power configurations and practices in various historical instances. james elkins: Three levels are in play here. One is the practical one, what Tom called heuristic: forms of dissemination, parochialism, provincialism, emulation, and so forth. Second is the question of interpretive frameworks and philosophies of history: there the mention of Marx and Marxianism is especially pressing because most theorizing on globalization occurs within broadly Marxist frameworks. I would add a third level, recognition: the contemporary global art world does not

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notice either the possibility that past forms are pertinent or the pervasiveness of Marxist and Hegelian ideas. They seem natural—they are ideologies, as Marx would say! So we also need to ask about the conditions under which people might recognize the issues, because—as Hegel would say!—it is not a simple matter of pointing them out; they have to be systematically critiqued. thomas dacosta kaufmann: Just to continue on the first level for a moment: I was proposing several models: the colonial model, which would be emulative; discussions of influence, which are related to acculturation or transculturation; and viceregal models, which involve several cultural centers. These are not necessarily derived from art history itself, but they are all terms used in contemporary analysis.18 james elkins: Even the existence of that as a classification is important. Your essay is useful in that regard, and I have other categories in mind that could be added to your account. In the case of modernism the problem becomes, as it were, threedimensional, because in addition to different practices separated by geography and time (I am imagining those as the two dimensions of your account) there are problems introduced by competing narratives of the art. So, for example, local descriptions of an emulative, “colonial” practice occurring in, say, Paraguay (where a Paraguayan modernist might be emulating school of Paris painting), will differ from descriptions of the practice’s model (original school of Paris painting). The two narratives may not be compatible, making it necessary to work on a comparison of historical descriptions—of the ways that narratives of modernism have disseminated, acculturated, and changed. It is not enough just to rethink concepts like “originality” or the “avant-garde”—because they can’t be rethought without making nonsense of modernism. What is needed is a series of multiple meanings for concepts like “cubism,” “expressionism,” “constructivism,” and all the others in each local context, because they often only appear to have comparable or compatible meanings in different parts of the world. As far as I can see, that is the only way to write a history of modernisms around the world.19 18. It might also be added that Jim Elkins’s discussions of cartography of the global art market and of geography are also related to the methods used to discuss earlier historical moments: see Kaufmann, Toward a Geography of Art. 19. This is a pocket description of my work in progress on modernist painting around the

world, 1900–2000. See the essay “Writing About Modernist Painting Outside Western Europe and North America,” in Compression vs. Expansion: Containing the World’s Art, edited by John Onians (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 188–214.

4. h y b r i d i t y

It was a surprise to some of us that our talk turned to the question of hybridity. It emerged because our conversations were continually in need of a term to denote the complement of the fiction of pure identity. We often made reference to marginal examples, liminal cases, mestizaje cultural practices, and the fluid identities of international artists. Our interest was firmly fixed on mixed practices and changing senses of boundaries; we seldom mentioned artists who present themselves simply as representatives of a given place or culture. It became apparent that an analysis of globalization in the art world requires a close look at the terms that serve to articulate the places where the national situation gives way to mixture and uncertainty. The most common word for that situation is “hybridity,” so we revisited the word to see the kinds of work it is doing in the discourse on contemporary art. (Jameson was not present for this or the remainder of the seminars.) james elkins: This is a very interesting moment in our conversations, I think: I want to point out that two of our principal themes have just come together unnoticed, or fortuitously—so it seems. The first is the question of hybridity, which I would like to understand here as a placeholder for the question of what mediates the break between the individual and the particular, what stands for the ground that vexes and attracts so many international artists, critics, and historians. And the second is the question of the rift of the aesthetic and the antiaesthetic, which I introduced by citing that Buchloh critique. I do not think this meeting, or nearmeeting, of two themes means that the aesthetic is to be identified with the local or national, or anything of that sort. But we may be close to a way forward if it becomes clear that terms for the middle ground, like hybridity, may be every bit as problematic as the absent term for the kind of understanding that goes “between” art history and aesthetics.1 zhivka valiavicharska: Jim, I have a question for you: hybridity was a theoretically powerful idea in American postcolonial theory and cultural studies about a decade ago, and it was a politically enabling discourse and a politically powerful concept in a particular moment in the history of cultural studies: it brought poststructuralism into postcolonial theory and cultural studies, and it was also deployed as a critique of naturalist notions of culture embedded in the 1. The most interesting positions taken in Art History Versus Aesthetics, I think, were those that claimed no dichotomy even exists (Matthew Rampley, for example, argues that aesthetics has always only been a kind of historically specific knowledge), and those who tried to

leave the discourse altogether in favor of a deconstructive or political critique (the former as in Marc Redfield’s Afterword). James Elkins, ed., Art History Versus Aesthetics, The Art Seminar 1 (New York: Routledge, 2006).

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ethnographic methods of anthropologists. Now I look at it more as a part of the intellectual history of American postcolonial and cultural studies debates. I have training as an art historian: I finished the art history programs in Sofia and here, at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and then I moved on to social theory and political philosophy, so I left the art-historical debates some time ago. You seem to be suggesting that first, hybridity has a strong conceptual power in art-historical and art-critical discourses, and second, that its meaning and its use have evolved in quite unpredictable ways. james elkins: Hybridity may have disappeared from social and political critical discourse indeed, and Homi Bhabha’s original definition isn’t much used. But it is ubiquitous in the art world and the art market. (It’s sometimes described as an old concept, but hybridity and other terms still play an enormous role.2) The differences are intriguing. michele greet: I think Fred Jameson is right to recognize hybridity as an ideology, but then dismissing it is missing a whole way of thinking that is coming out of a non-European place. One can read that gesture of dismissal as quite Eurocentric. Néstor García Canclini, who wrote extensively on hybridity, wrote from a Latin American perspective, where hybridity was very much a lived experience.3 In Latin America the strategic use of this lived experience can be traced back to the idea of mestizaje and the writings of José Vasconcelos.4 García Canclini extrapolated on this idea to posit hybridity as a strategy to compete with Eurocentrism— angela miller: It came out of postcolonial studies— michele greet: Right, the emerging postcolonial situation. 2. Here is an example of the art-world rhetoric that presents hybridity as an old term, but ends up revisiting it under other guises. InSite is an art event that takes place on the border between the United States and Mexico, at San Diego–Tijuana. A review of inSite_05 by the critic Nico Israel names hybridity as a concern of the early 1990s, when the event began. Israel writes: “Walls everywhere seemed to be tumbling down. Accordingly, on the academic front, there was a theoretical fascination with borders, migration, and hybridities.” Then he presents 2005 as a time when such interests had to be reconsidered: “In this changed political climate, academic inquiry has departed from the border area and moved to other, more fashionable quarters (the biopolitical, for example) . . . InSite_05, the exhibition’s fifth incarnation . . . confronts these political and theoretical challenges as an opportunity to rethink the grounds on which its initial presumptions rested.” The rhetoric of reviews of inSite_05 circles around. Israel, “North American News, Over the Border,” Artforum International 43 (May 2005): 109. (Thanks to Abigail Satinsky; this is excerpted from the dossier on inSite_05 she compiled for

the School of the Art Institute graduate class associated with the Stone Summer Theory Institute.) 3. Néstor García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity, translated by Christopher L. Chiappari and Silvia L. López (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). 4. The Mexican secretary of public education in the administration of Alvaro Obregón, José Vasconcelos, proposed the concept of mestizaje to counter the sense of entitlement that allowed the United States to impose its will on the nations to its south. First articulated in an article published in 1916 and later expanded on in his books La raza cósmica and Indología, Vasconcelos’s theory posited that the roots of contemporary political problems stemmed from the cohabitation of what he called inferior races with superior races, provoking social imbalances and ultimately imperialism. See José Vasconcelos, The Cosmic Race, translated by Didier Tisdel Jaén (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1997) and Vasconcelos, Indología: Una interpretación de la cultura ibero-americana (París: Agencia Mundial de Librería, 1926).

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james elkins: So the mestizo and the hybrid would be two of the several terms we could consider that work to name the gap, which is either between two or more specific, local contexts, or else between a local context and a wider regional or global context. There are many others: marginality, “border aesthetic,” bricolage, and even the performativity of identity.5 Or, in the abstract language Keith Moxey first proposed, hybridity and related terms occupy a middle ground between particular and particular, or else between particular and universal. And of course there are more complex forms: Guillermo Kuitca, for example, balances between a local context (Buenos Aires in particular, and the Argentine modernist tradition) and several international or global contexts such as postwar expressionism. karl hakken: That’s where Jameson began, by dismissing anything that is not either a pure, Disneyfied future or a fetishized, ethnographic Other. joyce brodsky: Hybridity as a notion has informed large areas of the globe, and I’ve been interested in a whole group of artists and writers who speak very intensely against hybridity. They see it as a new form of racism. They work to find a kind of integrated solution where the whole is more important than the parts. james elkins: And what would that be? joyce brodsky: Take Xu Bing as an example: there is a return to a kind of formalism and to refined technique over emphasizing his being Chinese. The idea is that one can speak to a large portion of the globe . . . Wenda Gu is doing a similar kind of thing, as is Cai Guo-qiang. These are the most well-known contemporary Chinese artists who are also transnational. For me, it’s a frustrating kind of 5. Some examples: “performativity” is used in the reviews of inSite_05 (mentioned above) as a placeholder for issues that would have been assigned to hybridity. The curator Donna Conwell, for example, observes that “the nation-state is collectively understood as a natural, territorial, political community, rather than a contingent historical organization that has been naturalized. The ritual of affirming the nation-state is a performance that border crossers engage in on a daily basis.” Donna Conwell, “Border (Dis) Order/On the Imaginative Possibilities of the In-Between,” in [Situational] Public > Público [situacional]: InSite_05/Interventions—Scenarios, edited by Osvaldo Sánchez, exh. cat. (San Diego, Installation Gallery, 2006), 13. I understand that performativity is a theoretical concept in Judith Butler and others. But it is also used as a placeholder for the set of concerns I am identifying, for heuristic purposes, with hybridity. “Border aesthetic” was one of the themes of inSite_05; it was often articulated in the press as an emergent property of the exclusion of the aesthetic. (Thanks to Abigail Satinsky; this is excerpted from the dossier on inSite_05 she compiled for the School of the

Art Institute graduate class associated with the Stone Summer Theory Institute.) “Marginality” comes into play in characteristic fashion in this passage from a review of the Fifth Asia-Pacific Triennial: “Marginality is a sensitive issue in the once heavily colonized part of the world: Even the host nation has existed historically at the edge of the British Empire (in the case of white Australia), and under the thumb of its colonial oppressors (in the case of the indigenous population). Crucial as these issues are, at this point their foregrounding would only limit the scope of the show. There is by now a core triennial constituency very au fait with postcolonial identity discourse and a wide range of cultural specifics, for whom the cluster of cultures in the region is no longer a mélange of irreconcilable otherness but a semi-negotiable matrix of similarity and difference from which authentic crosscultural appreciation might begin to develop.” Jeff Gibson, “South of the West,” Artforum (March 2007): 111. (Thanks to Allison White; this is excerpted from the dossier on the Fifth AsiaPacific Triennial she compiled for the School of the Art Institute graduate class associated with the Stone Summer Theory Institute.)

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effort, because it involves bringing all the negative aspects of modernity back in again, like essentialism and universality. james elkins: Hans Belting has recently written about the resistance to both the global and the local on the part of some non-Western artists: they see the former as capitalist and Western, and the latter as inappropriately demanding.6 Hybridity, when it is understood as a mixture of the global and the local, would be the object of that resistance.7 joyce brodsky: Yet hybridity for many artists has become a term that is actively, passionately avoided. james elkins: Formalism is the right word, I think, in relation to Xu Bing: but it’s a formalism of the contemporary international art world: a kind of lexicon of contemporary practice—sheet rock, off-white latex paint for walls, documents pinned to walls, slide projections on buildings, neon, dry ice, things that burn, things that glow, paths set with candles . . . I’m just thinking of some elements of an installation he did in North Carolina.8 All those things can be taken, inaccurately, as formalist elements of a lingua franca of art that ultimately—in this inaccurate genealogy—come from modernism. joyce brodsky: Yes; I have not been very successful in finding out how he thinks of those elements, except as formal, really aesthetic, possibilities. Perhaps they take place as the “spectacle” that so many artists are producing. darby english: I’d like some clarification: what is it about hybridity that these artists object to? joyce brodsky: That if you take the pieces apart, you’re reidentifying a particular element that defines a race or an ethnicity. james elkins: The parts have to remain in close juxtaposition, but they also have to remain at least partly unnamed. joyce brodsky: So by stressing hybridity, you are in effect refusing to see the person, and the work as a whole, as a totality. darby english: I see. The only vocabulary for hybridity I know derives from postcolonial theory in the mid-1990s. I was baptized, I suppose, in Homi Bhabha’s account. That is a doctrine of no-placeness—so what you’re describing is not that. joyce brodsky: Right. There doesn’t seem to be the kind of anxiety that people like Bhabha and Said associated with the term “hybridity.” Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay 6. Hans Belting, “Contemporary Art and the Museum in the Global Age,” in Contemporary Art and the Museum: A Global Perspective, edited by Peter Weibel and Andrea Buddensieg (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2007), 16–38. 7. Here I mean to understand usages of the word, not to defend its coherence: the global,

understood as transnational and internationally accessible, could not be said to mix with the local in the sense that is implied by art-world usages. 8. Xu Bing, Tobacco Project: Shanghai (2000).

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said that if you’re talking about a specific kind of transnational event that is not diasporic, then Bhabha’s concept might not apply. bhaskar mukhopadhyay: If hybridity is a sign of the productivity of the colonial, there is little to disagree with about the concept’s theoretical purchase. But Bhabha often gives the impression that the notion of hybridity is somehow tethered to the emergence of the diaspora.9 This is rather restrictive. First, it leads one to think that national cultures are somehow pure. I come from India (one of those few countries where the state and the national bourgeoisie invested heavily in constructing a synthetic “Indian” culture), and I know how debilitating the official “Indian” culture is. Second, coupling hybridity with recent geopolitical history (the large-scale movement of people across the globe) conjures up a myth of the origin by positing a certain anteriority of the uncontaminated and the pure. The vernacular or subaltern subjectivities I have studied show that there are discrepant, disorienting, dissonant spaces— “zone(s) of occult instability where the people dwell” (that’s Fanon)—which disrupt the transnational’s privileged access to translationality and the claim of the national to exhaust the affective space of solidarity, agency, and politics.10 In sum, if we can relieve Bhabha of a certain burden of representation and turn instead to his trope of “unhomeliness” understood as a generative condition and his innovative argument about the location of culture (roughly: culture’s inside lies on its outside)—then we do indeed get a more nuanced account of hybridity which is enabling. james elkins: Here hybridity is a resistance against ethnography or the interests of Western art history, which seeks to parse practices into local and national lineages; Bhabha’s was specifically “the sign of productivity of colonial power”—that is, bound up with questions of identity that could not be parsed without violence.11 zhivka valiavicharska: In both senses, there is a question of power relations, and it is still a question of how these unequal relations are perpetuated. The limits of hybridity as a critical tool lie precisely in that it remains blind to unequal relations played out on its terrain.12 9. Homi Bhabha, “The Postmodern and the Postcolonial: The Question of Agency,” in The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 171–97. My allusion is to Bhabha’s elliptical phrase “the transnational as the translational” (173). 10. For example, Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay, “Writing Home, Writing Travel: The Poetics and Politics of Dwelling in Bengali Modernity,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 44, no. 2 (2002): 293–318. 11. Bhabha, Location of Culture, 112. 12. See Pheng Cheah’s cogent critique of James Clifford’s and Homi Bhabha’s visions of hybridity as the new cosmopolitan emancipatory project. He calls the hybridity theory a “residual” positivist culturalism and a “closet

idealism” that, retaining an ontological understanding of culture as an autonomous terrain of human freedom, effaces the material inequalities structuring the postcolonial realities they claim to emancipate. For Cheah, it also presents an elitist celebration of the postnational traveling subject, unable to take into account either the progressive character of national movements vis-à-vis neoliberal reforms or the vast number of laboring populations immobilized by free economic zone policies. Pheng Cheah, “Given Culture: Rethinking Cosmopolitical Freedom in Transnationalism,” in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, edited by Phen Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 290–328.

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keith moxey: I think that is one of the things Fred Jameson held against García Canclini: Canclini saw interactions between widely disparate cultures as a promising development, something that led to all sorts of new interests and forms of expression, but according to Jameson he ignored the power relations that were involved in those new configurations. james elkins: There is a lot more that could be said about that passage in Fred’s text, and about the next page that characterizes Europe and Asia so swiftly. He was taking hybridity as a concept that could be applied across the board, whereas García Canclini was thinking of specifically Latin American questions. If we are parsing this concept, we have at least three forms on the table: Bhabha’s “original” formulation; Carcía Canclini’s celebration of hybridity as a generative state; and Joyce’s observation about an aversion to hybridity in contemporary art practice. In each of these cases, I think we have the possibility with which we began, that hybridity might stand in as a placeholder for the general problem of mediation between particular and particular, or general and particular. Fred’s text would be a form of this possibility, which is a potentially distorting abstraction. isla leaver-yap: For me “hybridity” is a term that seems prematurely celebratory or maybe ambiguously emancipatory, but it might be interesting to see who is using the concept now, and who is trying to translate hybrid subjectivities or localities in an artist’s work. pamela lee: Xu Bing would probably argue that a large part of his work is organized around a thematic of translatability and nontranslatability: so hybridity becomes another arch-critical label, a device used to put him in one category or another. What you reported, Joyce, reminds me of arguments around feminism in the 1980s and 1990s, and how people were afraid to be pigeonholed. thomas dacosta kaufmann: The origins of valuations of hybridity began from an attempt, made within various, individual cultures, to reevaluate what had previously been despised. But to carry this effort on in the late twentieth and into the early twenty-first century is objectionable: hybridity carries, to be blunt, a racist charge—and I wonder, to characterize this way of thinking further, whether hybridity might be more facilely treated by someone from Argentina than it is, say, for someone from Mexico. keith moxey: García Canclini was using hybridity to think about globalization in terms of reception, whereas Jameson was thinking of the situation in terms of production, and it is easier to condemn it from that point of view than from the perspective of reception. For example, Latin America is invaded by all sorts of Americanisms, from Coca-Cola to music to styles of dress; García Canclini asks what people are doing with that. They aren’t doing the expected: they use the commodities produced by international corporations differently: the recep-

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tion, in other words, is different from the production. But Jameson thinks of it in terms of the hideous machinations of capital that sends its homogenizing products to wonderful, uncorrupted civilizations that were hitherto blissfully unaware of these things. harry harootunian: I think there is more to it. He is responding to hybridity largely in the older, Bhabhaian inflection, and what is absent in that is class. However eclectic Fred is as a Marxist, class permeates many of his discussions, and hybridity excludes class. thomas dacosta kaufmann: Keith, I agree that there is a positive aspect to these usages of hybridity, but if you want to exclude aesthetic and value judgments from your analysis, as is being done in these theoretical discussions, then it is true that hybridity doesn’t fit well with class analysis, or with ethical choices. I disagree with Peter Burke on another aspect of this problem; he goes through all the possible terms that may be used, in effect arguing that the phenomenon of hybridity is there, no matter how it is described.13 That basic argument I can understand, although the other terms he adduces aren’t really wonderful either. The problem of hybridity is like that of mestizaje: hybridity uses a botanical metaphor. But, to go back to Jameson’s metaphor, it’s purity that is the aberration, not mixture. The problem is: Does any other concept help? Bilingualism, or syncretism? Or creolization? shelly errington: Or, the other night at dinner we were suggesting to each other the term from the cuisine we were eating, “fusion.” Seriously, though, a solution that I quite like is derived from Mary Louise Pratt’s “contact zones,” so you’d call them something like “arts of the contact zones”—things clearly produced as attempts of, say, the Inca to come to grips with the Spanish presence and incorporate it visually into what they already were making or writing (in paintings or clothing or in documents). A more recent analogue, not quite the same, is socalled tourist art, which Fred raised as a minor issue in his seminar and seemed extremely skeptical about.14 Both of these are examples of contact zone arts, and both used to be below the radar of the art historians’ gaze, or anthropologists’ for that matter. If they were noticed at all they were considered incomprehensible or impure or kitsch, but now they are getting respect and attention. Anyway, terms like “hybrid arts” seem to me to evoke and express a certain moment in our disciplines’ histories, but you really don’t hear it much these days. I guess it’s because the idea of purity and untouched authenticity has been so deconstructed and delegitimized that the term “hybrid,” at this point, would sound odd. As Tom just said, purity is the aberration, if it ever existed at all, and anthropologists tend to think not. Actually, to reject entirely.15 13. Peter Burke, Hibridismo cultural (São Leopoldo: Unisinos, 2003). My problems with notions of hybridity are expressed in Toward a Geography of Art and further in “Pintura de los Reinos.”

14. See Section 1 of the Seminars. 15. Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” in Ways of Reading, 5th ed., edited by David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrovsky (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999). On the Inca

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james elkins: All the choices of words are likely to come up short, because they are symptoms of a conceptual structure. That is why I thought it might be best to begin with abstract terms. Michele, you wrote me an e-mail before the conference, responding to the reading—mind if I read a passage? “Students come away thinking Latin America is a natural term, so that a common ground links Cuba and Chile.” I mention this because one of the ways forward might be to think of what goes into these judgments: your comment reminded me of the largest of our naturalized terms: “international art” or “global art,” which is understood to express at once nothing and everything, in accord with the logic of what Fred called the nation that is no longer a nation-state. And you reminded me of Richard Dyer, Mike Hill, and whiteness studies, according to which North American and some European whiteness is itself both naturalized and invisible.16 When hybridity involves concatenations of the local or particular, on the one hand, or the universal or global, on the other, then the latter terms can be asymptotically close to categories that appear at once universal, natural, and empty. bhaskar mukhopadhyay: Hybridity is different from syncretism or mixture. All of you know Bhabha’s (in)famous phrase “almost the same, but not quite,” “almost white, but not quite.”17 The internal critique of what Heidegger called the Western “onto-theology” has been productive of figures like Derrida, Lacan, and Deleuze who interrogated the founding notions of presence and identity/ difference. All presence (the very notion that something is and is identical to itself ) is internally fractured by absence, slippage, and uncanny doublings. Yet a simple disavowal of metaphysics will amount to a repudiation of discourse as such, which is unthinkable. One cannot go beyond discourse. Thus, the poststructuralist critique splits along the very axis on which it turns, rendering all transcendence or Aufheben impossible. Bhabha gives poststructuralism a specifically postcolonial provenance by showing that (post)colonial identities are not simply oppositional or self-annulling—speaking in a tongue that is forked but not false. That the agency of the or Inka, I was thinking of the work of Carolyn Dean, an art historian: Inka Bodies and the Body of Christ: Corpus Christi in Colonial Cuzco, Peru (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999). What used to be called “tourist art” and was dismissed or not even noticed is also getting much more attention now, I’m sure for many reasons. The art historian Ruth Phillips wrote the work that really articulated the position that “tourist art,” arts made to sell by native peoples on the periphery of the global economic system, expresses not something impure and unworthy of attention but rather creativity worthy of respect and interest. Ruth B. Phillips, Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast, 1700–1900 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998). Interest in tourist art in anthropology was probably begun with Nelson Graburn’s edited volume Ethnic and Tourist Arts: Cultural Expressions from the

Fourth World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). 16. For example, Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997); Mike Hill, After Whiteness: Unmaking an American Majority (New York: New York University Press, 2004); Karyn McKinney, Being White: Stories of Race and Racism (London: Routledge, 2005). 17. Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” in Location of Culture, 85: “If I may adapt Samuel Weber’s formulation of the marginalizing vision of castration, then colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite. Which is to say, that the discourse of mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence; in order to be effective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference.”

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colonized does not consist of producing a sort of anticolonial counterconsciousness as the advocates of négritude or radical subaltern-nationalists like Partha Chatterjee would have us believe.18 Rather, identity itself is simulated in the play of difference and repetition (“metonymies of presence”) and is not a matter of self-knowledge, autonomy, and negotiating a transparent relationship with the self and the other. james elkins: Yes, in terms of Bhabha’s sense of hybridity. bhaskar mukhopadhyay: Yet one of the things that has happened in recent times, in the wake of Said and subaltern studies, is a certain proliferation of “oppositional” or “postcolonial” histories whose epistemology derives from a kind of “the return of the repressed” argument: the empire writes back. After Bhabha, we need to go beyond “postcolonial” histories. james elkins: Absolutely, and one of the ways is to reconsider the temporalities that condition judgments of hybridity—as I hope we’ll do in Harry’s seminar.19 angela miller: Whatever else it may be, hybridity has long been a fundamental strategy of cultural survival for indigenous peoples under colonization. However, we have long framed the study of art history around notions of purity—of national traditions, of aesthetic canons, of formal genealogies. This whole issue of hybridity therefore becomes a central challenge to the way the entire discipline of art history has framed its subject. The discipline implicitly excludes or derogates forms of production involving boundary crossing between formal traditions, appropriations of high art forms into vernacular expression, or of European into indigenous forms. The reorientation of art history through the introduction of visual culture has also involved a loss of disciplinary focus, insofar as visual culture emphasizes circulation and reception, over and above definitions of essence and issues of quality based on formal purity. james elkins: Within the traditional study of European art, the kind of internal difference that is allowed is not only narrower (as in Michelangelo’s supposed opinion about Flemish art), but also structurally different (as when Bellori talks about schools within Italy). That is more a matter of influence, to use the old astrological term. thomas dacosta kaufmann: Hybridity has been valued negatively in writing on European art. This is exemplified by the concluding passage in Baxandall’s muchadmired book on German limewood sculptors.20 The claim there is that there 18. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). 19. See Section 5 of the Seminars. 20. Michael Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 216: “Their new palazzi [i.e., those of the “modernized dukes and prince” after ca. 1530] were decorated by second-rank Italians and half-Italian traveling

Netherlanders, while in the [i.e., German] towns a rump of guildsmen subsided into a sort of pidgin Italianism: it was all provincial at best.” I have spent a good deal of time dealing offering critiques of this loaded, and traditional, interpretation, e.g., in Court, Cloister, and City: The Art and Culture of Central Europe, 1450–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press; London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995).

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are pure styles and mixed styles such as Italo-Flemish, or Italo-German, but the latter are deprecated. shelly errington: That is so fascinating, that “mixed” styles were and perhaps still are devalued in art history—I suppose in part because art history and the state art museums that enable it developed in relation to the emergence of nationstates, so national styles became essentialized and valorized. It is really ironical, too, since most of what traditional art history deals with is objects made before nation-states were invented. But it is fascinating also because I see here a direct analogy with so-called primitive art or tribal art. For most of the life of the concept of “primitive art” in the twentieth century, the kind that was valued most—indeed the only kind that counted—was “authentic” artifacts made by peoples who were imaged as pure and untouched by the West, who made ritual objects not for sale. Objects that were clearly straddling two worlds—such as the colon figures from Africa—were devalued. They were impure and worst of all humorous. But as Angela said, “hybridity” in this sense has been a fundamental strategy for survival for indigenous peoples. What these “mixed” styles are, really, is being awake to what is happening in your world and incorporating that awareness visually into the artifacts you are making. darby english: I have an observation about the semantic nature of the conversation we’re having. It seems to me that one of the problems that the term “hybridity” causes is that it puts emphasis on a part of the process that interests us, rather than one that interests us less: which is to say, it names an effect. We seem to be evolving an interest in mixture as process—as the middle, the in-between. Hybridity seems to be a condition, but we are beginning to speaking of it as a process. james elkins: That is interesting. Darby, if I understand you, you’re suggesting that there might be a way to think of hybridity in experiential terms. To put it roughly: there might be a moment in which an artist’s work, for example, strikes you as clearly composed of two particular references: but you realize, quickly and without reflection, that you cannot describe those two without being prey to essentialisms, or worse—and so the concept, hybridity, comes into play as a cipher for that anxiety and as a marker of the hope that you have that some other kind of description might be created out of those dangerous or unnamable parts. But of course there can never be such a formulation—there can’t be a way to name the artist’s practice with some new covering concept—because that would be a sign that the heterogeneity you perceive and value has been erased in favor of a new essence, a new irreducible truth. So our circling around the concept, from the Bhabhaian to what I’ll call the Brodskian—sorry, Joyce—would be a symptom of our anxieties.

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zhivka valiavicharska: Well, I wouldn’t call what you are describing an anxiety; instead we might try to understand it in terms of the constitution of a new subject—that “irreducible truth” would appear when confronted with the limits of available discursive modes of self-understanding. It is about giving language to a lived experience, which experience in turn comes into being through language. If we think of this category as one that attempts to capture a process and takes into account the subject’s incompleteness and its radical openness, rather than presuming a subject or a condition existing prior to it—then it gives us a powerful method of historical analysis. It becomes a conceptual category that places emphasis on the process, it turns the process into an object of analysis as opposed to things with a preexisting value and meaning. It allows us to think of things as derivative of historically constituted relations, rather than vice versa. I find this relational understanding of history very productive—to Bhabha’s credit. suzana milevska: We have been talking about hybridity in terms of artistic products, and other have been talking about artistic subjects. This leads to the issue of whether we can apply postcolonial theories to postcommunist societies: in Macedonia, for example, we need to think about the contextual implications of postcolonial theories, and whether hybridity might be applicable to different specificities and singularities. Let us not forget that the political subject of hybridization for Homi Bhabha is before all a discursive phenomenon, and it does not take place in visual arts or in everyday life, but it emerges through enunciation of language, character formation, and narration.21 I would rather think of participation or involvement, as Marie Gee prefers to call the communitarian participation, something that is taking place here and now, and less of structural concepts imposed by postcolonial theory.22 james elkins: As you do in your essay on Balkan subjectivity “as neither”: but I wonder if it might not be legible as another symptom of this underlying concern.23 At least for me, it is promising to shift away from ideological disputes, and even from terminological or historiographic disputes, and begin thinking of hybridity as an experiential process. darby english: I might accept that reading, but all I was trying to do there was signal an interest in our dissatisfaction, which seems expressive of a shift of emphasis toward that which remains perpetually outside the grasp of linguistic description. james elkins: I wonder. Why assume that? It seems to me two things are entwined here: first, hybridity is a dusty concept, apparently inappropriately revived; second, it is a placeholder for various kinds of mixture, coherence, and incoherence, 21. Peter Hallward, Absolutely Postcolonial Writing Between the Singular and the Specific (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 24–26. 22. Marie Gee Yes, “My Front Yard: Participation and the Public Art Process,” High Performance 69/70 (Spring/Summer 1995). Available

at www.communityarts.net/readingroom/archivefiles/1999/12/yes_in_my_front.php (accessed October 1, 2007). 23. Suzana Milevska, “Balkan Subjectivity as Neither,” Third Text 21, no. 2 (2007): 181–88.

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many of them essential for the articulation of contemporary global art. That confluence of difficulties is why I am interested in what I’m interpreting as your emphasis on experience.

5. t e m p o r a l i t y

As the week went on, time and theories of temporality loomed larger. At some points it seemed that a rethinking of temporalities was the most promising way to break the grip of some influential theories of modernism and postmodernism, because they depend on uncritical senses of time. An initial question was how the senses of time that informed early twentieth-century modernism might have resonance with the senses of time that drive narratives of modern and postmodern art. In particular, we wondered whether the art world’s static, eternal present—the present of international contemporary art—might be effectively questioned by a closer reading of the kind of temporality it seeks to exclude. We had read texts by Fred Jameson and Peter Osborne, and chapters from Harootunian’s History’s Disquiet.1 In a public lecture the evening before, Harootunian had spoken of senses of temporality in Max Weber, Tetsuro Watsuji, Nishida Kitaro, Hermann Bloch, and Georg Simmel, and on the experience of time in cities during the first half of the twentieth century. The excerpt here is from early in the seminar, when Harootunian was discussing Simmel, de Certeau, and others as examples of temporalities that have been omitted from contemporary discussions of global art. (Susan Buck-Morss had arrived; she was present for the remainder of the week; Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann was absent.) michael holly: There are many different models of time around the beginning of the twentieth century. The one that occurred to me first is in Peter Galison’s book on Einstein’s clocks, where he attributes the theory of relativity to Einstein’s being unable, in the patent office in Bern, to imagine synchronizing rail clocks.2 That’s a wonderful example of how time can differ, even between people only a quarter of a mile from one another. Then there is Freud, in Civilization and Its Discontents, with the model of ancient Rome, which he took as a model of the unconscious. It exists, with its historical stratigraphy (old Rome interpenetrating new Rome), even in the present, so there is not one single time, even though it is the present.3 And then to bring it a bit around to ideas about time in art history: at the same moment when Viennese art historians were searching for a universal 1. Jameson, “The End of Temporality,” Critical Inquiry 29, no. 4 (2003): 695–718; Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso, 2002); Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (London: Verso, 1995); Harootunian, “Some Thoughts on Comparability and the Space-Time Problem,” Boundary 32, no. 2 (2005): 23–52; Harootunian, “Shadowing History: National Narratives and the Persistence of the Everyday,”

Cultural Studies 18 (2004): 181–200; Harootunian, “Remembering the Historical Present,” Critical Inquiry 33 (2007): 471–94; and Harootunian, History’s Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). 2. Galison, Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003). 3. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), in The Standard Edition of the Complete

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history, there is Alois Riegl’s essay on the cult of monuments, and the important distinction between historic value and age value.4 I wonder how those models, which surround the points you have been mentioning, nuance what you say as it has been experienced in cities and countryside. harry harootunian: Your description mirrors many of the concerns Georg Simmel had. He was very much concerned with what had happened to time, and especially the enormous privilege that was accorded, in the city, to the present. He tells us, in the work on the philosophy of money, that there is no periodicity, but only a present. (He is really talking about capitalism, although he rarely mentions it.) On the other hand, he was very interested in art, and when he talks about it, he is concerned with the durability of form. He was fearful, in other words, that the form which had constituted the center of cultural life before modernity was in danger of disappearing. Art came to represent for him something that could win some exemption from the processes of change. All of this is accompanied by an intense discussion of ways that time is interiorized. Michael, you mentioned that with reference to Freud, but all the philosophic discussions of the time were bent on springing time free, making a separate realm for individual experience. For me, all these issues have to do with the ways that history is understood. Art historians themselves have not been too quick in recognizing that one of the problems they ought to be dealing with is the problematic state of time and temporalities. But instead those concerns get subsumed under their interests in a particular kind of national space. What all of these considerations do for me is that they return me to a consideration of the present, which for me is the only site for a historical practice. I think history does not exist in the past: the past is a category that only has a function in the present, that only has meaning in the present. That may seem banal, but when you think about the ways that people talk about the past—it leads to the present, or illuminates the present—you see that people still think that the past can be studied in and of itself. I have never known what that meant. I mean I know what it means, but these are ways of avoiding that problem of the role played by the present, and the politics that is implied by that position. pamela lee: Can you expand on the relation between capital time and what Appadurai calls an alternative temporality of people in the countryside (or whatever rubric you’d choose for that), people who live outside of Taylorization? In some of the readings you refer to Michel de Certeau— harry harootunian: No, not really. I have an allergy to de Certeau. pamela lee: Well, however allergic you are, it did seem to me that this alternative temporality would be in line with a tactical relation to time, as opposed to the stratePsychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated and edited by James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1966–74), vol. 21.

4. “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its Origin” (1903), translated by Kurt Forster and Diane Ghirardo, Oppositions 25 (Fall 1982): 21–51.

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gies of Taylorization.5 I was curious about how you talk about these two kinds of time as dialogic, rather than seeing them as coeval. What, in particular, is the dynamic of power embedded in that relationship? harry harootunian: The relationship being between capital time and noncapital time? pamela lee: Yes. Is a tactical relationship the principal one? And could you talk about noncapital modes of temporality, beyond the tactical or the resistant? harry harootunian: The basic problem I have with de Certeau is his reliance on binary categories like “tactics” and “strategies,” taken together to form a symmetry, which invariably are made to play the role of functions in the operation of larger system and ultimately cancel each other out in the interest of maintaining the social equilibrium. But let me start with the tactical. Today, more than ever, the relation is tactical. People resort to different conceptions of time—and there may be good reasons for that, as when migrants organize themselves into large social spaces in New York City or London. What interests me is how certain things are retained, and put into different registers. But I want to thank you for that question, because it is precisely because of my allergy to de Certeau that I’ve ignored that distinction between strategy (used by institutions) and tactics (which can be deployed by individuals). The distinction allows you to think about how different times, or noncapitalist temporalities, may be reproduced in different contexts. The possibility of extracapitalist temporalities has everything to do with what kind of furniture, what baggage, each society brings into the world of capital. That distinction remains to be examined, because it is there that you can begin to see how forms are used, or not used. In the 1960s and 1970s, there was a movement that made use of a binary juxtaposition between tradition and modernity. It led to thinking about how certain traditions forms survive by making adaptations, and how they were used to mediate changes. The whole purpose was to show how societies evolve naturally and peacefully, rather than through rupture—it was really a Cold War idea. That was a gloss, I think, on earlier Marxian views on what constituted the difference between formal subsumption and real subsumption. I have been very much concerned with that, because I have seen how the broader forms of subsumption operate. Take the institution of the emperor in Japan. The Japanese reappropriate that institution at a certain moment in their modern history: it’s like a tool, which you apply to a new situation: you make the emperor into something you need, even though he still retains all the marks of an archaic agrarian society. In the language of conceptual art, the emperor in Japan comes to us as a ready-made. That strikes me as the product of a certain kind of historical experience: what you get is a doubling of the historical experience of retaining and reappropriating forms, and also a kind of tactical extension of the past. 5. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, translated by Steven Rendell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984);

for Taylorization see, for example, Robin Cohen and Paul Kennedy, Global Sociology (London: Macmillan, 2000).

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darby english: The more I hear you talk, the more it seems the project you have set out on is more a revival than a revision of the texts you’re engaging. harry harootunian: I am not sure what you think is being revived. darby english: You mentioned Bloch and Watsuji, and then you maligned both for a kind of essentialism. harry harootunian: My position is to see involvement in temporality as a kind of permanent condition: there is not something essentialist involved. For a philosopher such as Watsuji, there was something unchanging and irreducible about what it meant to be Japanese in a society that was geared to rapid change. With Bloch, it was a case of trying to figure out the relation between cultural residues and fascism. That is a very familiar problem, even aside from Marxists like Bloch. There is a widespread presumption that if a society evolves in a certain way, like the United States, it avoids some of the uneven asymmetries of development, can escape the specter of fascisms and authoritarianisms. This happens in Barrington Moore’s book on democracy and dictatorship, for example.6 It’s about the lag, about assigning a different development: some societies, it is said, may have developed a powerful industrial engine, but they lag in developing social structures that are adequate to a modern society. I am not reviving those authors, but basically extending them. darby english: What’s the difference? harry harootunian: The difference may be no more momentous than that between “revival” and “revision.” I am saying these forms are characteristic of every society, not just certain ones. In other words, there is no such thing as time lag, except from the perspective of a certain conception of historical development that was articulated essentially during the Cold War by American social scientists and historians. There is just as much evidence of asymmetrical developments in the United States today, for instance, as there was in Germany or Japan in the 1930s. This may seem small to you, but at least in terms of a common understanding of historiography, it’s a pretty big step. Societies like Germany, the United States, and England came pretty close to replicating a lot of those forms of fascism in the 1930s which we attribute to underdevelopment. Just look at the present. susan buck-morss: Let me get at this from another perspective. You talk about modernity and capitalism, and you want them to have the same valence, and yet terrorism was embraced by the Soviets in the 1940s—so I wonder if that’s a fair analysis. Seen from my quick trip to Tashkent and Samarqand, parts of these places looked very much like a 1970s Soviet city, and I felt right at home. But other parts were in a temporal lag—I’m not talking about venerable age, the kind that infuses tourist destinations, but simply old-fashioned, out-of-date. 6. Barrington Moore, The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant

in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966).

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They had not been touched by modernization. Even in Moscow, behind the street-facing building fronts, the courtyards are all grass and weeds. As Walter Benjamin said, Moscow is a village hiding out in the city. So can one really make the distinction between capitalism and socialism? And if not, then is it about something else, something more universal in the 1920s, perhaps a utopian investment in urbanization? harry harootunian: It’s a complex problem, because socialism, during the Cold War, participated in many of the same kinds of modernization that are associated with the “free world.” It’s maybe just the other side of capitalism. susan buck-morss: Yes, I’ve argued that. But then you can’t keep on using the term “capitalism,” because the politics you call upon may be part of the problem. harry harootunian: Well, it is and it isn’t. You can’t think about the emergence or development of socialism without first accounting for its relationship with the formation of capitalism in the nineteenth century. You’re right in making that distinction: there is a socialist modernity, that’s what you’re essentially arguing. I accept that, but I also think that capitalism is at the heart of the impulse for modernized development. keith moxey: I want to bring the conversation back to the possibility of a global art history. I think your fascinating analysis of these different forms of time, and the emphasis on heterogeneity rather than homogeneity, really presents an aspect of the problem that we haven’t considered. In a way, your conclusion, that history is always written in the present—something that our age has become very much aware of—would place a burden on the ideological agendas that might inform a global art history. Why would one want to write a global art history? The danger, of course, is that it would cover over the complexity of the temporal situation that you have been sketching. Or, if it were to recognize the plethora of different forms of time that are taking place around the world, wouldn’t those forms of time always come off at a disadvantage when considered from the perspective of the person writing the history? That person would always be outside of the system being described, and he or she would probably be synonymous with the most “advanced” sense of time, the one synonymous with capitalism, or the West. This seems to me to dramatize the question of what a global art history might be. The project of a global art history might seem progressive, in that it would be an attempt to draw attention to different parts of the globe, different forms of artistic production. But what would they be recuperated for? And where would those recuperations be situated? Into what sorts of narratives are the recuperated to be folded? pamela lee: I really appreciate what Keith is saying. I’d like to add that I’m a little uncomfortable with the notion that, given our current situation, heterogeneous

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time is necessarily a resistant temporality, much as one might assume by analogy that a global art history is necessarily progressive. I really appreciate Harry’s reading, and I couldn’t agree more that the “everyday” is a category of enormous resonance and explanatory power. But our present moment is radically different from the postwar or Cold War moment where temporality is concerned. In fact, isn’t heterogeneous time precisely that which is recuperated under the conditions of the global market, one that enables multiple markets to function by temporalities—“24/7,” as the ads would say? If a global art history is to remain a possibility, even as speculation, I imagine it would have to account for these shifts at the level of its narratives. And how one does that is anyone’s guess. james elkins: I think the question Why write a global art history? is misleading, because it implies people set out to do such a thing—Is Art History Global? showed, I think, that almost no one does.7 What everyone tries to do is write in a way that is sensitive to local meanings, but what results is a massive, worldwide literaturein-the-making, in which practices are described in such a way that each is legible to the others: they comprise a slowly accumulating, global art history. That is what concerns me, not the ambition of a few people to write about the whole world all at once. pedro erber: I would like to go further in this notion of legibility. One could say that the global character of art history defined in this way would depend upon the mode of its legibility to others, that is, on the process of translation between the different local contexts. How we conceive of this mutual legibility, of the mode of translation and communication between the different particulars, would then be decisive in determining the character of such globalism of art history—and of artistic production itself. In other words, how are these different practices and histories legible to each other? Do they have to partake of some kind of universal language of art and aesthetics? Or what other modes of cultural translation and transcultural legibility can we conceive of? harry harootunian: Keith, I was always taught never to answer a question by asking another. But it occurred to me: Why would you want to write a global history of art? There are comparable attempts; there are global histories (not art histories), and there is also the old model of world literature. The models I’ve participated in, especially at the University of Chicago, were attempts to do something analogous to what was being done in the core courses on civilization. It was outrageous! We were never able to escape from that model of cultural domination and hegemony. james elkins: I’d like to add a distinction here, between recuperating for and recuperating as. Consider John Clark’s book Modern Asian Art.8 He presents examples of modern Asian art as questions of economics and politics—in other words, 7. This is a starting point of my review of David Summers’s Real Spaces, in Art Bulletin 86 no. 2 (2004): 373–80, reprinted in Is Art History Global?

8. Clark, Modern Asian Art (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1998), discussed in my “Writing About Modernist Painting Outside Western Europe and North America,” in Com-

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he studies the social conditions of production in different places. He looks, for example, at the socioeconomic situation of art in the Tokyo National Academy in 1905, and pays close attention to the particular social configuration that made an avant-garde art possible at that time and place, presenting it as art history. But a reader who comes to that material knowing Van Gogh and Gauguin— I put it that way to avoid saying a Western reader, because I mean nearly every potential reader—will have a hard time suspending disbelief at the attention accorded to what have to appear as second- and third-rate pastiches of Van Gogh and Gauguin by artists such as Yorozu Tetsugoro and Kuroda Seiki.9 In other words, Clark presents a very careful account of what informed art production in Tokyo in 1905, and he presents it for art history, but he pays a very high price: he brackets out the kinds of judgment that would allow readers to think about those paintings as moments in any conceivable modernist art history. He mentions the avant-garde only in selected brief contexts in his book, shrinking it, sequestering it, keeping control of it, in order to be able to take such work seriously. harry harootunian: One of the stakes here, thinking about these larger narratives, is inclusion. I’d be the first to defend Clark’s choice in talking about economics over, for example, some generalized avant-garde, but on the other hand, even though the work is avant-garde, the category was made someplace else, and has a whole set of associations that derive from other practices, it would be interesting to see to what degree these appropriations were mediated by received experience. That happened in modern Japanese literature. When you talk about what “we” call the novel in Japanese, it’s really different from what we know as the novel. It was appropriated as a marketing strategy— james elkins: A very difficult problem is lurking behind this. If Clark were here, he might want to say that the category of appropriation also needs to be interrogated. He works on such concepts in different chapters, at the risk of losing what might be called direction—I’m trying to choose a fairly neutral term here for what is really nothing less than the purpose and underlying conceptual structure of art-historical narratives of modernism. It becomes unclear, in his book, why he is writing about art. Why not any other cultural product that resulted in interesting socioeconomic contexts? Here are the choices, as I see them. First: you can write a sensitive, informed, contextualized account of some non-Western modernist practice, and end up contributing to the slow accumulation of mutually intelligible texts that compression vs. Expansion: Containing the World’s Art, edited by John Onians (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 188–214 9. I don’t mean those painters didn’t do interesting work: I mean that some of their work, and especially what is illustrated in Clark’s book, will necessarily appear initially as poor and derivative. How we adjust that sense is an

entirely different question, but I doubt accounts that claim such pictures can be seen initially without such value judgments: if they are actually apprehended that way, then my claim would be that so much of the conceptual apparatus of art criticism and history have been omitted that the account may not make sense for history or criticism.

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prise the world practice of art history or criticism.10 Second: you can break free of all that by deconstructing or deleting the apparently transhistorical categories such as value and the avant-garde, jettisoning the judgment of lag or belatedness, and perhaps ending up writing only about socioeconomic contexts in the way Clark does (so that your practice becomes, in effect, a study of economic or social conditions that just happens to use art objects as examples). And third: you can write idiosyncratically, in some new way, in order to articulate the particularity of the art. In that third case, you are taking the risk that your writing does not make contact with other people’s narratives at all, that it appears outside history or criticism—that it appears as poetry. It is possible to be more exact about individual cases, but I see no way around those three general choices. The first is whatever is read as art history (for anyone, by anyone); the second is largely postcolonial theory, sometimes presented for the interests of art historians and critics; and the third is much of what gets written in the international contemporary art scene, indifferent or resistant to attachments to existing discourses. None of them is satisfactory. joyce brodsky: I am trying to understand what your objections are to Clark’s approach. To me he seems to contextualize the problematic of modernism within the various Asian countries by exploring cultural as well as social and economic institutions, and by deconstructing the binary traditional/modern that makes so much of Asian modern art seem to be what you think of as second rate. Are you not just imposing a value-oriented Western modernist aesthetic on his narrative? Why can his story not exist in parallel to the one you seem to be imposing and make sense in relation to other discourses? james elkins: It can exist in parallel. harry harootunian: This all has to do with conceptions of time. Capitalist time is a complex thing: it is filled with operations, and self-differences. Marx gave us our first look at it, and we have gone a long way beyond him. But we still cleave to things like the working day, for example. The time of distribution, of exchange—these are incredibly complex. james elkins: That’s really intriguing. It’s like an open door, a way forward for the kinds of conundra I was sketching. harry harootunian: Capitalism also tries to do what national time does: it tries to make these things seem smooth on the surface. Capitalist time is a powerful attempt to force a uniformity, even on the level of the everyday, especially at the level of the everyday. That is what we call “routine.” I think that nonstandard experiences of time do not disappear: they may just go on in their own way; they 10. This is the direction I am taking in the work in progress on modernist painting; see the remarks at the end of Section 3. The second approach arises in part, I think, from attempts to critique concepts such as belatedness, the avant-garde, value (for instance, Greenberg’s

concept of “quality”), or originality. Those attempts have tended to dismantle the narratives that make historical and critical sense of modernisms, and what remains tends to be political, social, and economic matters.

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may become mediated; they may represent those nodes of heterogeneity, which could be mobilized for political agendas. I think it is important to recognize that the categorical force of “postmodernity” is made to announce the “end of temporality” and the installation of the regime of the spatial dominant, coming on the heels of a now-passed modernism which presumably concealed modernity’s uneven temporalities. Yet this kind of declaration is really no different from those who have circulated the rumor that with globalization the nation is on its way out. pamela lee: Maybe this is redundant, but I still feel we need to qualify the ways in which “heterogeneous” time might remain outside the reach of capital time. The time of post-Fordist production, after all, is such that it actually accommodates and facilitates heterogeneous temporalities through its decentralizing of markets, material resources, and labor. It’s not incidental that this mode of production or management is referred to as the “just-in-time” system: it’s the reigning operational paradigm of Toyota, Microsoft, Monsanto, Exxon Mobil, you name it. What we mean by the workday has expanded beyond the conventional eighthour factory model; and if the workday is what conventionally organized our relationship to time under the sign of Fordism, we’re now at the point where we have to reconceptualize our relation to the “everyday.” For those of us working on contemporary art, it’s vital to retain something of this shift in temporalities if we’re going to take seriously problems of the global art world, whether its market, its audiences and—perhaps most important of all—its intrinsic unevenness. isla leaver-yap: Certainly this “time of distribution” you talk of becomes increasingly complex if we look at the current reception of contemporary art. We have seen how the erosion of temporal and spatial barriers in the global market has accelerated the circulation and reach of contemporary art and given a kind of temporal density to large-scale international exhibitions like biennales. michele greet: As art historians, I wonder if we might look at different ways of interacting with differing temporalities, as they exist in different places—studying heterogeneities in the experience of time. That might reveal a continuum: that the unevenness is more pronounced in some places, and less in others. harry harootunian: I think that is exactly right. You have to specify: to make it interesting, you need to make discrete comparisons: that is why the everyday is such an important unit for me, despite the fact that it is part of some national space, and also some global space.

6. p o s t c o l o n i a l n a r r a t i v e s

The following excerpt is from a seminar led by Susan Buck-Morss, in which we discussed practices of reading events and reconfiguring historical narratives from postcolonial perspectives. We discussed Susan Buck-Morss’s essay “Hegel and Haiti” (now part of her Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History) and her interview for the Journal of Visual Culture, titled “Globalization, Cosmopolitanism, Politics, and the Citizen.” 1 Her “Hegel and Haiti” redraws the intellectual history of Hegel’s much interpreted dialectical formulation of freedom. Rather than reading Hegel’s master-slave dialectic within the lineage of European liberal political discourse and in the context of the revolutionary developments of late eighteenth-century Europe, she locates the conception of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in the empirical context of the 1791–1804 Haitian Revolution, at the historical beginnings of the anticolonial revolutionary movements. While her essay develops a postcolonial critique of the notion of freedom as it is articulated by the English and French liberal thinkers during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it radically separates the German philosopher from the French Enlightenment tradition and places his philosophy at the foundations of twentieth-century postcolonial thought. Buck-Morss’s lecture, which preceded this seminar, presented her historical research on the Haitian anticolonial movement in relation to a collective-empathetic notion of universal humanity. michele greet: In your lecture last night you talked about emotional involvement and the commonality of human experience of the lived moment. How does that relate to the task of historical research? susan buck-morss: The emphasis is not on emotional involvement, although, I admit, I may have become emotional in defending a project that is today quite unpopular, because it opposes ideas of alternative modernities, hybridity, and multiculturalism. I am making a case for universality by focusing on the dangers that human beings face when they experience the limits of collective belonging. The project attempts to rescue from long-time disrepute the idea of universal history, not as world history, not even as the history of global capital, but as empathic identification with historical actors when they find themselves abandoned by their cultures, exposed and vulnerable because they have slipped out, or been pushed out, of the ambiguous shelter of collective identities, all of which 1. Susan Buck-Morss, “Hegel and Haiti,” Critical Inquiry 26, no. 4 (2000): 821–65; “Globalization, Cosmopolitanism, Politics, and the Citizen: Interview with Susan Buck-Morss,”

Journal of Visual Culture 1, no. 3 (2006): 325–40; Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009).

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are suspect. I never met a culture I liked. All of them are based on sentimental justifications of inequality, exploitation, and oppression. But you cannot get through to a humanly universal level where empathic identity is possible without empirical work, scrutinizing the details of history, its “lived moments” as you say. This demands research at the edges, the limits of collective narratives. I am not so interested in producing interdisciplinary work as I am in probing the spaces where even interdisciplinary discourses and communities shut down, in order to dismantle the conceptual blinders that constrain the scope of empathic imagination. The political responsibility is to produce knowledge that does not stay contained within the boundaries of cultures and their cognitive frames. It means looking over the edge of ways that we have been conditioned to know and see, allowing conscious recognition of facts that have been recorded, but not attended to—like the role of Muslims in leading the slave rebellions that initiated the Haitian Revolution. While it may not be that history is citable in all of its moments (that was Walter Benjamin’s idea of utopia), still, the rescue of elements of the past that have been overlooked creates opportunities for new historical configurations that do not keep replicating the relationship of “us” versus “them.” pedro erber: Since Hegel, Western philosophy is always referring back to its own history—and making this historical self-reference a fundamental part of the philosophical endeavor itself. What Heidegger calls the “history of Western metaphysics,” for instance, is the narrative of a self-enclosed, internal development of thought. Despite his attempt to conceptualize such mode of thinking beyond geographical determinations, namely by identifying the “West”—or the Abendland—with this very philosophical development, of course he is talking about European thought. One can see clear traces of this weight of a notion of Western metaphysics also in Derrida, especially in earlier texts, such as Grammatology and the conference on “The Ends of Man.” On the other hand, your reading of Hegel through the Haitian revolution, as an extra-European historical event that dramatically intervenes in this supposedly European history—rather than through the French Revolution, for instance—questions the fundamental presupposition of self-enclosure that sustains this dominant narrative. Bringing it back to the question of globalism in art—maybe, instead of trying to globalize something, it is a matter of realizing and recognizing that art and its history are, in fact, already much more global than one might have been told by traditional narratives. bhaskar mukhopadhyay: I love Susan’s essay. I teach it to my students. But I also teach them Fanon and try to come in terms with his legacy. Touissant L’Ouverture is our martyr, but it needs to be emphasized that he was merely pushing the Enlightenment agenda to its logical limit—he was a “Black Jacobin” in every sense of the term. It appears quite extraordinary and exhilarating today that a Negro

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slave from distant Haiti would demand and fight for what the philosophes articulated from their posh salons. Yet I find this politics of recognition leading to an ultimate radiance and final reconciliation profoundly problematic. After Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, it is no longer possible to think of the problem of race under colonialism as a sociological matter of exclusion/inclusion: the politics of race cannot be contained within the humanist myth of Man or the (meta)narrative of historical progress. The colonial condition renders it impossible to speak in terms of a commonality of human experience: there, everyday life exhibits a “constellation of delirium.”2 The colonial state of emergency, as elaborated by Fanon, interrupts the dialectic of deliverance by interrogating presence as such (Man, Truth, Self, Progress). Practices that are endemic under colonialism—violence, paranoia, selfhate, treason, madness—are not mere alien presences which the dialectic seeks to explain away as the ultimate misrecognition of Man. These are what reveal the presence of the other in the time of our own consciousness. susan buck-morss: Fanon’s conception of history is far more Hegelian than my own. I am skeptical of the implication that the solution to Hegel’s Eurocentrism is a different variant of the same dialectical overcoming. But philosophical relativism gets us nowhere, and it is counterproductive to give up on the philosophical concept of truth. If you imagine yourself in the same place as those who have been betrayed by their culture, you are likely to discover a different truth, one that is more material, more corporeal, out of play of culture and its meanings. No collective can claim possession or control of such truth. Of course, you remain saturated by particular cultural traces, but that is a different issue. keith moxey: Maybe the distinction would be between truth with a capital T and truth with a small t. I think that the small truth is namely that there is always going to be a truth that is for you, that you believe in something. This is different from relativism—relativism is always brought out as a red herring. There are perspectives that are irreconcilable. susan buck-morss: I agree about the noncommensurabilities, but I would want to argue for the universality of affective reaction to events, a sense of collectivity that emerges with the experience of human vulnerability. 2. Fanon the existentialist-humanist has to confront this delirium at every turn. A frightened, confused white child cries out on the street, “Look, a Negro . . . Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened.” Or, “Our women are at the mercy of the Negroes . . . God knows how they make love.” What’s so disturbing about Fanon’s writings on the psychological conditions of colonialism (“Manichaean delirium”) is that, in shifting the focus of cultural racism from the politics of nationalism to the politics of narcissism, he opens up a space of engagement “between mask and identity, image and identification, from which comes . . . the lasting impression of

ourselves as others.” “I had to meet the white man’s eyes . . . I was battered down by tomtoms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects . . . I took myself far off from my own presence.” Here Fanon is not talking about colonialism as a violation of some human essence or the black/white binary as founding terms (“The Negro is not. Any more than the white man”). The white gaze breaks up the black man’s body, and in that act of violence its own frame of reference is transgressed. It is not the Self and the Other but the otherness of the Self that is revealed under colonial conditions.

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keith moxey: I wouldn’t want to subscribe to a universal notion of a human subject. We belong to a culture and largely (consciously or unconsciously) share or contest its ideological commitments. Harry and Shigemi are steeped in the knowledge of another culture, and yet they have testified the ways in which translation—not just language—but the patterns of thought of, in this case Japan, cannot be represented in philosophical/theoretical discussions in this country or in Europe. For me, this is a matter of power—there is a power differential that prevents us from being able to appreciate the depth of thought and imagination that other cultures have to offer. joyce brodsky: Keith’s comment returns us to the issue of passion, small truths and political actions. How does the passion about the “universality of affective reaction” direct us to take political and social actions that will use commonality to bring about political change? I admire your passion, Susan, aroused by the horrors taking place everywhere in this war of all against all—and I share in it, but I don’t understand how it helps us to identify even the small truths necessary to begin to produce change. susan buck-morss: Mistrust of culture; mistrust of any collective that claims you, and of all the talk centered on “us” that benefits the national leaders who claim to represent “us.” Solidarity with the humanity that escapes these claims, a kind of humanist underground, one that has more in common with animals than with politicians. zhivka valiavicharska: For Foucault it is a matter of whose truth it is—it is not that there are no truths, but that truths are always bound up with power, they are in service of reproducing relations of domination. So the point here is whom these histories belong to. For Nietzsche there are truths as well—I am not sure if those are the truths Keith refers to because they are never too pretty. They are really bloody, in fact, because they come from intense suffering. It is only by uttering these truths, by exposing them, that a certain self-affirmation happens and an emancipated subject comes into being. This is why projects that find the radical space from which to contest and to recuperate certain silenced truths become political acts. susan buck-morss: Yes, it is a matter of having this fact decenter a certain narrative and speak a different truth that displaces the dominant one. It would be horrible if “Hegel and Haiti” became the canonical reading and the new “Truth.” james elkins: Just to put this in institutional terms, there is interdisciplinarity with a capital I and with a small i. The interview you set us as a text took place in the Journal of Visual Culture, which is, I think, about interdisciplinarity with a very small i. In that journal many things are recognizable: the parts that come from different disciplines can be parsed out, and texts are often comprehensible

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from various disciplinary perspectives. That’s “uninteresting interdisciplinarity” in Steve Melville’s sense.3 This book series is planned to end in 2011 with a conference and book called Farewell to Visual Studies, and part of the reason for that farewell is the dissolution of interesting conversations on interdisciplinarity within visual studies.4 What is at stake in our event this week is, in a way, part of that. Zhivka and I wanted these conversations to be intermittently incomprehensible in hopefully productive ways, and for that purpose your texts and your interventions are wonderful models—but wonderful, partly, because I don’t think they can be used as models. susan buck-morss: Here is an example that might be new to art history’s discussion of globalization (I think a similar proposal was brought up in Tom Kaufmann’s seminar). It involves having medieval art history begin with a consideration of Africa, where method becomes a means of constructing the past not as a narrative of political collectives, but as traces of human borrowing and local innovation. Historians like Jan Vansina trace the cross-continental movement of artifacts among Africans of different cultures, including across sub-Saharan Africa, an area impenetrable for Europeans until the nineteenth century.5 Artifacts move among people not as the spread of imperial cultural forms, but as the consequence of intercultural connections. Styles have a way of escaping political boundaries. Art not only emanates from power centers but disregards them. The Department of Art History at Cornell has come up with a brilliant way of doing global art history. When there was an opening for baroque art, rather than hiring a European baroque specialist, they advertised for an expert in South American baroque. And when there was an opening in medieval history, they hired someone who works on the entire Mediterranean basin and writes on the influences of Muslim architectural traditions on European architecture and art, and vice versa. This is one way of doing global art history that manages not to reproduce the Eurocentric art-historical narratives. james elkins: Yes, it is possible that art history can expand beyond its regional and national specialties—but I meant, in a more personal way, that what happens across disciplines in “Hegel and Haiti” and your newer work is not itself usable as a model. It follows that this discussion today is not an ordinary seminar about interdisciplinarity, in which texts and practices can become recipes and models. I think that is wonderful. angela miller: I think that “Hegel and Haiti” is an example of global history and the ways in which a global perspective fundamentally redraws the very substance of such disciplines as history. Take the history of ideas—intellectual history; it has too often been segregated from history, a discipline that has the tools to examine the widest possible web of interconnections between different locations, com3. This is elaborated in chapter 1 of my Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2003). 4. See www.imagehistory.org.

5. Jan Vansina, The Children of Woot: A History of the Kuba Peoples (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978); Paths in the Rainforest (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990).

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munities, and centers of power. History as a discipline is at its best when it is most global. “Hegel and Haiti” charts a new direction insofar as it resituates the history of ideas within this global network of historical forces. It breaks through the disciplinary blindness of intellectual history, which presumes a genealogy in which one idea begets another idea—a process of filiation that occurs independently of any kind of historical determination. In this sense, when one resituates ideas as part of global history, one may be transgressing disciplinary boundaries, but one is also reanimating intellectual history in a way that makes it newly relevant to the study of global processes. shelly errington: Angela, that is a deep point, and it relates to what Pedro said a little while ago—something about the fact that we don’t have to globalize something, but rather it has always been global. The point is that we have not always narrated objects or events as globally connected, because they have been subordinated to narratives of linear unfolding, or in disciplinary narratives of purity that do not admit of interconnectedness or “hybridity” to hearken back to a previous conversation. The issue, which Susan is addressing in Hegel and Haiti explicitly, is to find ways to narrate those interconnections, that “globalism,” that are persuasive. The point is not to strive for “interdisciplinarity,” but rather to see connections that a strict adherence to a disciplinary way of thinking might make one blind to—like seeing that Hegel might have been reading about Haiti in a magazine and might have been inspired by it, whereas that can easily be discounted or simply be under the radar if you have a mindset to write a big story whose structure you already know. michael holly: Susan, I would like to point to the affect, the passion in your writing— that affect then creates the effect of your analysis. Would you not agree that in so much historical writing—and this might be a problem when it comes to global art histories—research as research gets in the way of insight and understanding? In your interview with Marquard Smith and Laura Mulvey in the Journal of Visual Culture, Mark started talking about how to use images as philosophy, to make them speak. And then you responded: “I plunder visual culture for certain theoretical use, where affect is mobilized.” I don’t see that in “Hegel and Haiti.” There you use images as historians do—images are somehow transparent and you don’t use them in a way you’ve used them at other places where you use painting as nontransparent, painting as an argument that challenges . . . keith moxey: At some point in Dreamworld and Catastrophe you talk about the way you use images that might be analogous to the fragmentary quality of Benjamin’s writing in the Arcades Project. I am thinking of someone else who uses photographs in a very effective way, W. G. Sebald. He uses images that have nothing to do with his text, but they clearly work on another level—it is as if the book has an unconscious to it. You could call it a Benjaminian haunting—you are haunted by memories you remain completely unaware of.

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Is this what you are looking for? Is this the cognitive value or the affect value of your fragmented juxtapositions? susan buck-morss: Perhaps the argument in “Hegel and Haiti” is not based primarily on the interpretation of images, but images still play a crucial role throughout— from my critique of Simon Shama’s history writing, to the sections on the spread of freemasonry. The use of images has to do with method more than anything. The discovery of certain images is key to formulating questions with which to approach the historical sources. They provided clues as to where, and how to look. In Dreamworld and Catastrophe, the method was to build sections of text out of clusters of images. When I was writing The Dialectics of Seeing, finding the objects that entered Walter Benjamin’s visual field was fundamental to the interpretive process. I went to Paris and followed Benjamin’s footsteps around the city, traversing, as he did, its many arcades. I found catalogues of exhibitions and world’s fairs that he attended, and images from magazines that he might have read—anything that might help me encounter fragments of the past about which he wrote, so that I could see how these things happened to him. Images do methodological work. Very rarely do I use them as illustrations for what I already know needs to be said. And I try to let their ambiguities speak. james elkins: There is a very complex question lurking here, which I don’t think we can open now. (I hope you’ll forgive me if I’m thinking ahead: the second conference in this series, which we’ll have in these same rooms this same time next year, is on the subject What Is an Image?) So I’d just like to mark this moment. We approach the question of images in our texts in a very curious way, by asserting that they work in unexpected ways in our texts, and occasionally—as you’re saying, Susan, and as I’ve said and some others have said—that they can even create their own narratives. That is a strangely truncated rhetoric. It stops well short of saying what exactly happens when images like the ones in Dialectics of Seeing are permitted, for a while, to be something more complicated than either cognitive tools or affective opportunities.6 michael holly: What about Warburg? What about really strange similarities and differences that had points? They seemed that they were repossessed by the same historical sensibility. Warburg’s and Benjamin’s notions of eruptions through 6. To clarify that: like some other historians, I have also written books that began as sequences of images, with no narrative. But I do not think that the pictures are as undetermined or as potentially independent of our intentions as we may hope. And I am especially interested to notice that conversations on this subject, in and around visual studies, tend to stop with the assertion of the potential independence of images. (That is what happens in the Journal of Visual Culture interview that was set for this seminar.) It’s like saying an employee is

free to choose: after that assertion, it’s time to get back to work. Next year’s Stone Summer Theory Institute will be partly on this subject. I have tried several times to write books whose structure grew in surprising ways from images I had collected. One is The Object Stares Back (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1997), and another is Six Stories from the End of Representation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008). Each time the apparent freedom evaporated: it wasn’t much more than a desire I had in relation to writing and images.

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time and space might provide an encounter of Western modes of art-historical inquiry with global art. susan buck-morss: Yes—just the idea that he would put the image of a Greek statue next to a golf player because the drapery was moving in the same way. I find Warburg’s approach fascinating because instead of universal, timeless truth, he gives us moments captured in images from different times that resonate strongly with each other. shigemi inaga: Two years ago Griselda Pollock came for the first time to Japan to give a talk about Aby Warburg. She insisted that the Hamburg Library has a round reading or conference room.7 In reality, however, it is not round but oval. The oval was very essential because for Warburg there is no one center of knowledge—knowledge is interdisciplinary. How can one reduce this multiplicity into one center, to concentrate all knowledge into one system! If there are two centers, the orbit that gravity creates is inevitably elliptical; similarly, if we are talking about globalism and global knowledge, that knowledge has to be configured around an elliptical orbit—which is, I think, quite inevitable. My idea here is—and I am making a metaphor—elliptical: the subject we are discussing is always elliptic and not always very visible. While Warburg developed the idea of the Pathosformel and the pathology of images, Gombrich completely repressed that aspect and instead proposed a psychology of cognitive perception. In the same way, while Warburg put forward the idea of passion, Ernst Cassirer—because he didn’t have any passion—framed his theory of the visual in terms of symbol. In all these transformations—from passion to symbol, from pathology to psychology—signify a process of sublimation and repression of what Warburg was trying to accomplish. We must be careful not to subordinate images into solid narratives. T. J. Clark’s most recent book, The Sight of Death, is a great experiment in visual reading that stresses the necessity to make an effort to read images on their own, rather than reducing them easily to discursive narratives.8 In this, I think, he has much in common with the sensibility of Warburg’s project. james elkins: If by “discursive” you mean argued, propositional, empirical, polemic. If you mean something weaker, like “possessing a continuous sense or purpose,” then you could also adduce radical experiments like Jean-Louis Schefer’s, where the writing is not only nondiscursive but also illogical and even ungrammatical.9 I take all such experiments seriously, but I don’t think they are our topic here. 7. Griselda Pollock, “Visions of Sex: Wanderings in a Visual Feminist Museum ca. 1920” (January 16, 2006); “Disciplines, Interdisciplines and Transdisciplinary Perspectives on History of Art and Culture” (January 17, 2006), F-GENS Journal (Tokyo: Ochanomizu University, March 2006): 201–24. Inaga’s critical commentary on Pollock’s lectures has been published as “Pandora’s Hope—Exposed Subject, Matrix, and Ellipse,” Aida 122 (2006): 11–18.

8. Clark, Sight of Death (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). See my “A Calm Mirror of the Water and the Dark Realm of the Serpent: A Reading of T. J. Clark’s The Sight of Death,” in “Thought of Disease/Disease of Thought,” special issue, Site Zero\ ero Site, no. 1 (2007): 258–85 (in Japanese; ISBN 978-4-9903206-1-4). 9. For example, The Enigmatic Body: Essays on the Arts, translated by Paul Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), or

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From my point of view, the Haitian images in Susan’s essay “Hegel and Haiti,” the images in Dreamworld and Catastrophe, the images in Tim Clark’s book, the images in Warburg’s Mnemosyne, and the images in Schefer’s books are all different cases. At the moment I don’t see any of them as models for writing about contemporary global art, for two reasons: first because in each case I think narrative does dominate, even in Warburg; and second because the art world has an infinite capacity to dilute serious experiments into impressionistic pastiches.10 shelly errington: If I may go back to the idea of breaking the vase— james elkins: Michael introduced that metaphor, of art history as a beautiful vase that now lies broken, in fragments— shelly errington: One of the reasons that I like the idea of shards is that “we” are shards among others. We can no longer count on just one whole totalizing story like the beautiful vase of traditional art history that could contain everything and that will be the answer to everything, but there are lots of bits and pieces that don’t cohere. My question is: how do you use these bits and pieces without gluing them together to a mosaic of the whole, reconstituting them as another vase with another shape and design, but still an all-comprehensive story? My favorite globalization theorists address this issue, of how to make a big and even global story without making it totalizing or linear. One is my colleague Anna Tsing, whose ethnographic work was mainly in Borneo. She published a book called Friction, which is really about globalization, and her idea was to let the structural order of these stories and interviews emerge from their undisturbed multiplicity. I told her before it was published she might have called it “Traction,” because it is about how ideas, often misunderstood, land in alien places and get traction in these new contexts—they stick and produce something new. To her question of how we can engage in an ethnography of global connections, she talks about grasping the productive moments of misunderstanding, both in what we narrate and in how we understand what’s going on. In other words, she has a way of putting these experiences together not into a totalizing and bounded whole but in a way that leaves them contingently connected and open. There’s breathing space, and even if her story is big and comprehensive, it is anything but inexorable.11 susan buck-morss: Of course, you do have to know the canon, otherwise you are dominated by it without knowing it—there is no way around that, no shortcut. There would not be the disciplines as they are today without the neo-Kantian

Schefer, The Deluge, the Plague, translated by Tom Conley (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995). 10. Saying narrative dominates in Mnemosyne is saying that the reception of Warburg is a series of texts. Even Georges Didi-Huberman’s interventions are textual (although at the time of writing, fall 2007, he is said to be at work on a purely visual response). There is virtually no visual criticism or visual history. Around

2003–4, the Irish art magazine Circa staged an experiment in visual criticism, inviting anyone to review an exhibition with an image instead of a text. Almost no one volunteered. All this is to say, in a telegraphic fashion, that the issues raised here are peculiar to Buck-Morss’s texts, and misused as potential models for art writing. 11. See Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

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discussions in the late nineteenth century as to what “science” was, or what constituted “the humanities”—these were the debates at the moment when the modern disciplines in European universities were founded, and they influenced studies in and on the colonies as well. It is important to know about them because they are presumed as given by subsequent knowledge. Our disciplines were constructed on the premise that history is developmental in a Hegelian sense. Hegel remains important because his thinking permeates the epistemological structures of our thought. zhivka valiavicharska: Not to speak of his political effect, from Lenin to Fanon, to his influence on a lot of contemporary radical philosophy. michele greet: Western philosophy is always referring back to its own history. It is an enclosed system. How relevant is this intense knowledge of Western intellectual history to the formation of global theory of art history? Perhaps we could reframe this intellectual history comparatively, in a way that would allow us to understand Western ideas in dialogue with Chinese, African, or Latin American intellectual traditions. We really seem to be privileging certain intellectual histories in this discussion and excluding dialogue with other sources. harry harootunian: This is an admirable idea—the Japanese have spent an awful lot of time doing exactly that. There are writers that are in fact incredibly literate philosophically—they read Kant and Hegel, some of them actually studied with Heidegger in the 1920s and 1930s. They thought there was a dialogue, but it was only a one-way dialogue. There was both a total lack of understanding—because people didn’t read Japanese in the first place—and a kind of distancing on the part of Western philosophers. Take a statement like the one Husserl made in the 1930s when he asserted that only the West knew philosophy. A statement like this at this moment of global economic, political, and cultural crises forecloses any possibility for discussion— michele greet: I don’t mean discounting Western philosophy, but rather reframing it— harry harootunian: I understand, and it needs to be staged now. It seems that any global project, whether it is art-historical, historical, or political, would need to struggle to put together some kind of stage or a form where these kinds of discussions can be imagined and go on. james elkins: I agree. But I think we are missing two crucial things here. First, the art world already does this—it produces a myriad of promiscuous mixtures of references—and the result is writing that can appear ephemeral, labile, impressionistic, opportunistic, inessential. Second, in academic writing there are political obstacles to this kind of mixture: a young scholar cannot get a job at a major university by explaining Renaissance altarpieces in terms of Peruvian huacas. And a senior scholar who does that is likely to be ignored because her narrative will be idiosyncratic—it won’t speak to an engaged interpretive community.

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suzana milevska: When we were talking about temporalities, I kept thinking about the Russian philosopher Pavel Florensky, who, in his work Iconostasis, offers a really unique inverse conception of time, which he grasps in the inverse perspective of the Byzantine medieval iconographic tradition but also through experimental psychology of dreams.12 In addition to the issue of translation, these concepts come with all this baggage of different cultural conceptualization of time wherein cause-effect relation may be inversed both in space and time and therefore such mystical temporality is difficult to be communicated. darby english: As Shigemi said in his seminar, some translations produce losses.13 I was wondering if we can look at this loss as something that can be productive rather than as a threat. Perhaps if we think about how we respond to that loss, when we see in the loss an opportunity to attempt a recuperation, to accept the disorientation Susan is talking about and see where it leads. zhivka valiavicharska: I would also caution against foreclosures, and return to the idea of how imagining certain possibilities, rather than losses, within our given global conditions becomes a politically enabling practice. Benjamin has an essay on translation, where he focuses on the “translatability” of the work as its highest dimension, and understands translation not as a loss, but rather as a way of enrichment—rather than looking at how a certain meaning is lost, he looks at how the language it is translated from “expands.”14 So translation has possibilities for reconciliation and it is also a deeply ethical, if not explicitly political, practice. In a very similar way, postcolonial thinkers such as Ngugi wa Thiong’o have put forward a certain notion of humanism in the incommensurability of languages and the experiences they contain. But in their accounts, these incommensurabilities also harbor a radical possibility within: that of their communicability.15 susan buck-morss: If cultural languages are incommensurate, what is said in these languages at times converges despite their differences. When experiences are new, language needs to be stretched to articulate it. So the translation is not only across discrete languages, but within every cultural language, over time. And the need to translate local idioms, local traditions, into a global context is just such a new experience. Not all of our experiences are understandable in terms of identifiable cultures. Experience can cause cultural languages to be pushed to the breaking point. Between and beneath cultural languages, subterranean solidarities among people takes form. It is this process, threatening to existing cultures, that makes human progress possible in history. 12. Pavel Florensky, Iconostasis, translated by Donald Sheehan and Olga Andrejev (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996). 13. See Section 2 of the Seminars. 14. Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 75–82.

15. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: James Currey; Nairobi: EAEP; Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1986); Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms (London: James Currey; Nairobi: EAEP; Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1993).

7. n e o l i b e r a l i s m

The passages in this section are from two seminars led by Zhiva Valiavicharska, centered on different definitions of globalization and neoliberalism, and followed by a reading of Foucault’s work on governmentality and neoliberalism, together with several key critical analyses coming out of his thought.1 Starting points for discussion were recent texts from the political theory and political economy of globalization, including Hardt and Negri’s Empire, David Harvey’s Limits to Capital and The New Imperialism, and Gillian Hart’s work on the ethnography of development. Critical geographers understand emerging global and local geographies as social formations, a result of the development of transnational material relations. The uneven development of transnational capitalism, they say, is a historically contested process contingent upon social, cultural, and political contexts, forming uneven geographies in which various forms of power relations and material inequalities are manifested and spatialized. Our goal was to join materialist critical approaches to understanding how the growing contemporary “international” art production and its sites of display participate in transnational capitalist regimes, as well as to interrogate how dynamics of material power are obliterated in conveniently used categories such as “global” and “local.” 2 In relation to Foucault, we tried to find ways to reconceptualize newly emerging cultural institutions and practices as a functional element of neoliberal governance. We asked how the arguments in these theoretical accounts open or foreclose ways in which we can rethink global configurations of contemporary art production and display; how we can contribute to reformulating current understandings of the relationship culture-economy; and how certain instrumental uses of art relate to neoliberal subject formations. pamela lee: The one mention of art in Empire comes as late as page 382, where there is a brief nod made towards modern art’s relationship to the Cold War and cultural practice: the reference is, of course, Serge Guilbaut. It’s an important reference because when we’re confronting a theory of the Spectacle—which underwrites 1. For these seminars we read the following: Michel Foucault, “Governmentality” in Power, edited by James Faubion (New York: New Press, 2000), 201–22; Foucault, “Security, Territory, Population” and “The Birth of Biopolitics,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth (New York: The New Press, 1997), 67–71 and 73–79; Thomas Lemke, “‘The Birth of Biopolitics’: Michel Foucault’s Lecture at College de France on Neoliberal Governmentality,” Economy and Society 30 (2001): 190–207; Wendy Brown, “Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy,” in Edge-

work: Critical Essays in Knowledge and Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 37–59; Tony Bennett, “Acting on the Social: Art, Culture, and Government,” American Behavioral Scientist 43 (2000): 1412–28; James Ferguson and Akhil Gupta, “Spatializing States: Toward an Ethnography of Neoliberal Governmentality,” American Ethnologist 29 (2002): 981–1002. 2. The readings we had done in advance of these discussions included David Harvey, The Limits to Capital (London: Verso, 1999), chap. 13, 413–45; Harvey, “The New Imperial Chal-

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a lot of what Hardt and Negri do—there is an absolute convergence between the aesthetic and the economic: the fact that we live in a world where capital is aestheticized to the point where it’s image. This is something that Stuart Hall also broaches in his writing on globalization, if in an inevitably different register than Hardt and Negri. So if you want to take that as a general starting point for how so much social and political theory figures into art-historical reconceptualizations of practice—and I don’t just mean in terms of contemporary art—then we begin to open on to far greater issues, including the art market, and will inevitably have to draw from methodologies from the fields of sociology, anthropology, and so on. To my thinking, it is crucial that we as art historians engage in these issues, and certainly so if we are thinking about space as a term which we seem to have, especially after David Summers, limited to a Panofskian purview. I am interested in how we can produce a history of art that is somehow critical about its own relationship to the categories it uses—a history of art which is a bit more self-reflexive about its relation to the categories of the economic and the aesthetic where globalization is at issue. zhivka valiavicharska: I really support your idea of rewriting art-historical and artcritical concepts of space from a materialist perspective, especially when we are dealing with the globalization of labor and production. I was even hoping to complement our emphasis on temporalities and histories, which comes out in the work of Harry Harootunian, Fredric Jameson, and Susan Buck-Morss, to some approaches coming out of critical space studies. Much of critical geography of globalization examines, first, how the transnationalizing forces of production—meaning labor—constitute global geographies and spaces; and second, how material inequalities themselves come into existence through these geographical differentiations. Perhaps one way to go is to return to the practice of art, its sites of display, and its discourses as material practices, to think of them from the perspective of production that generates and absorbs surplus. suzana milevska: I cannot think of a better example of these phenomena than of the “biennialization” of contemporary art and its take on expansion of capital and its markets, the unequal exchange of profit and the accumulation by dispossession in global terms, to apply David Harvey’s concerns. Many paradoxes take place under the label of globalization and need to expand and disperse the art coming from non-Western art scenes. The most troubling and perverse example is no doubt Tirana Biennial: its creation for “beneficial” reasons by Giancarlo Politi, the owner of the renown art magazine Flash Art. His investment in Tirana Biennial in 2001 (he tried to launch a Tirana Biennial, still under the same name, in Prague, but had to call it the Prague Biennial, a name he succeeded in copyrightlenge,” in The New Imperial Challenge: Socialist Register 2004, edited by Leo Panitch and Colin Leys (London: Merlin Press, 2004); Gillian Hart, “Geography and Development: Developments Beyond Neoliberalism? Power, Culture, Political Economy,” Progress in Human Geography 26

(2002): 812–22; Hart, “Geography and Development: Critical Ethnographies,” Progress in Human Geography 28 (2004): 91–100; and Hart, “Denaturalizing Dispossession: Critical Ethnography in the Age of Resurgent Imperialism,” Antipode 38 (2006): 978–1004.

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ing) was carefully premeditated and calculated. Not only was he counting on the lower prices of local artworks that he purchased for his collection and museum in Torino but he also acquired lot of works by Western artists who were tricked into exhibiting for free, thinking of their participation in the Tirana Biennial as part of a mission to help the miserable art scene and the troubled political situation in Albania. isla leaver-yap: A key question to think about would be how biennales such as Documenta and Venice, but also the ones that are founded in cities in decline or in economic crisis, or in cities that want to establish themselves as international hubs, such as Johannesburg—how they all begin to feed into a kind of politicaleconomic order that Hardt and Negri have termed Empire. shelly errington: In this context it’s hard not to think about David Harvey’s article about a crisis occuring in capitalism when simply too much capital is accumulating at the top of the system. Buying art is a solution for what to do with it. Of course, it was ever thus—think of the Dutch and English in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We’re in another phase like that, or like with the robber barons in the late nineteenth century being great art collectors. Right now there is just too much money at the top of the system and of course not just the very top—so a lot of people who are not just the J. P. Morgans of the world are mad for buying art as well as other things that have no use-value. It’s too boring to put it into a savings account or even the stock market. Consuming art is more fun. pamela lee: I have to say that I found Harvey immensely compelling, despite the totalizing explanation that he ultimately offers. But I also think that, in terms of a certain crude Marxist historiography, relationships between culture and the economic are invariably based on reflection, the sense that culture is always seen as epiphenomenal to material relations. The best work, of course, goes beyond that. zhivka valiavicharska: It is absolutely crucial that we revisit connections between the cultural and the economic in new ways. And it is actually Jameson who first pointed to the need to reformulate relations between categories: there is an identity between the cultural and the economic, he noted, and this is a crucial aspect of postmodernity. He doesn’t go much further than this, but what this means for me is that cultural practice is no longer a superstructure derivative of economic relations, a field of reflections, representations that disguise and mystify a material reality—as it appears in a long tradition of Marxist thinkers who have taken seriously the notion of ideology from Marx’s early work. Nor do the material and cultural realms constitute each other dialectically, as in Gramscian cultural studies and some postcolonial theory, where culture is redefined in politically enabling ways. Culture, in the work of Amilcar Cabral, for example, acquires an agentic dimension, a quasimaterial quality, capable of exerting its own force upon material realities. We read Fred Jameson arguing that the free market together with the commodity and labor regimes have to be understood

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not only as economic categories but also as a set of cultural values practiced directly through activities such as labor. And vice versa: art and culture have the ability to transport political and economic mechanisms of capital—they are an immediate and functional aspect of the economy.3 But we are in need of more rigorous formulations of these new relations. I would even hesitate to call them relations; perhaps thinking in terms of new symbioses would be more appropriate. For me, what is crucially absent is the question of the subject: how are new globally articulated subjects formed through cultural practice? Recently, with critical discourses on neoliberalism and governmentality coming out of Foucault’s work, distinctions between the economic and the political—and more specifically the liberal claim that they constitute autonomous realms—have been under critical scrutiny. Much in the same way, in order to see how the arts take part in the realities of transnational capitalist relations and their everyday practices, we need to revisit some old theoretical discussions in radically new ways. Perhaps we need to dispense with these distinct categories altogether—even in their most rigorous dialectical configurations—for they no longer have analytical force. Jameson’s dialectical model is very invested in preserving the integrity of the cultural and the economic, but in a sense these have become discursive tropes that have a limited conceptual value. Just to follow up on Suzana’s concerns, there are new cultural practices that have emerged in service of neoliberal reforms: these function under concepts such as “cultural capital,” “cultural policy,” “social capital,” and so on. It would be a task of future scholarship to examine empirically how they are being practiced, how they function to enable certain economic reforms, what their rationalities are, what kinds of mechanisms they employ to produce not only political institutions and economic effects, but also subjects and subjective experiences. suzana milevska: The idea of creative industries, for example, which has been promoted by Great Britain in the last five years, is in need of serious critical examination in terms of economic reforms. There are entire institutions, even departments, which started programs in creative industries in Britain, thus promoting the idea that culture and creative activities such as graphic design, architecture, advertising, fashion design, or entertaining software can also be a basis for establishing and maintaining lucrative businesses, new jobs, and GDP increase. However, the idea of creative industry is a kind of neocolonialism— zhivka valiavicharska: —or neoliberalism perhaps— suzana milevska: Yes, of course, when taking into account that its purpose is even more pragmatic in the global context: it is imposed on different regions of the world and aims to change complete economic systems. A good example is Colombia, where there is a great infusion of British money to support traditional 3. Fredric Jameson, “Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue,” in The Cultures of Globalization, edited by Fredric Jameson and

Masao Miyoshi (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 54–77.

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arts and crafts or music. On the one hand it boosts the diverse local communities’ economic income, but on the other hand it is difficult to predict what it means in global economic profit turnover. We need to look at these phenomena closely in order to understand how cultural capital becomes real capital, how this transformation functions simultaneously on the local and global levels.4 Only then can we understand the reciprocal relation between the two levels and why creative industries became the new ideology of British Labour. shelly errington: That’s a good idea, and it’s the opposite of the Marxist one of overaccumulating capital then prompting people to convert it to art, or cultural capital if you will. What you’re pointing out is that you can also commodify, through tourism and marketing devices, culture and crafts, turning those cultural forms into things that can produce economic capital. shigemi inaga: It is crucial to analyze the notion of cultural capital as different from the traditional economic notions of capital. Lee Eo-ryeong (1934–), the first Korean minister of culture, is the person who initiated drastic change in Korean society by way of information technology in the last ten years. He is saying that “possession” is no longer equated with capital, and cultural capital cannot be reduced to economic capital. His paradigm is quite different from the classical notion of capital. According to him, mobile phones are the key. Previously the possession of the telephone was a status symbol and represented by itself a cultural capital. The logic of “primitive accumulation” was still intact. But who possesses the mobile phone in which place is no longer essential in the ubiquitous environment. Instead, who is connected to whom has become the capital interest.5 Thus, interconnectedness would replace the old notion of capital possession, and in this sense, the idea of the spectacle—in the sense of Guy Debord—would be out of date because spectacle consists of someone who possesses capital and the audience who gathers together around this centralized capital. With the interconnectedness, in contrast, there is no center anymore. One of the consequences of Lee’s paradigm shift is visible in the advertisement industry. A tremendous number of advertisements are created with enormous capital investment. They are massively diffused, but to whom do they belong? Within two weeks, most of them disappear. To prevent this massive loss of cultural capital, Korean society constructed the public online database covering the total number of advertisements and made it accessible to the public free of charge. Advertisements are not regarded as the exclusive possession of the copyright holders or diffusing agencies, but they are recognized as a common cultural capital from which the whole nation should benefit. Here is a radical redefinition: cultural capital is not something to be possessed according to the logic of the capitalist market but something to be circulated in the open network, which not only guarantees but also multiples its value, and people gain profit from it. 4. Gerald Raunig, “Creative Industries and Mass Deception,” Framework—Surplus of the Arts, no. 6 (January 2007): 8–13.

5. Lee Eo-ryeong, Janken Bunmei Ron (Tokyo: Shinchô-sha, 2006) (in Japanese).

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pamela lee: I think what is original about the current situation and one of the most important questions that we need to pursue when approaching the work on globalization from the social sciences and political philosophy would be the question of representation—what do we do with representation. And I think this is where Jameson might again provide something helpful to us, in his early accounts of postmodernism. There, it seemed to me, he was working much more critically with the theories of representation and the limits of thinking in terms of representation— keith moxey: In terms of Hardt and Negri: who is representing whom? We are allegedly being represented by something that exceeds our capacity to understand. What is the nature of the concept of representation in the order that they capture? pamela lee: Yes, these are the questions that need to be asked. And if we are thinking about contemporary art, one has to take that problem seriously as it applies to the stock, iconographic possibilities that are trotted out to map globalization as visual phenomena. Those iconographic conventions can only fail to represent a term—“globalization”—about which there is next to no consensus in either the humanities or social sciences. Not that any of us ever imagined some perfect adequation existed between iconography and object, but I worry that we risk reifying our topic when we place too much faith in representation as such. Where, for instance, are the readings that take up the materialist dimensions of artistic production? If this is an epoch in process, just how do we account for that process in our own work as critics and historians? For me, the great and inspiring lesson of Empire is ultimately that of immanent cause and the biopolitical mode of production continuous with this model of causality. It’s a controversial notion, immanent cause, because it’s inevitably bound up in debates around the possibility or impossibility of an “outside”; but at least it presses us to think critically about production. And if we are indeed immanent to that thing called “globalization,” then it seems premature that we restrict our analyses to representation, which implies some degree of critical distance from our object of study. zhivka valiavicharska: Of course, and the concept of representation becomes especially problematic when we begin thinking of the art or visual object in terms of its agency—as something that has formative power, acts upon us, produces us as subjects, affects our self-understanding, and so on. Much of that work has been done by poststructuralist visual theory and anthropological approaches to the visual object—but also methodologically, to look at the work not as some reified and self-sufficient object, but to focus on how these objects enable and reproduce human relations. In other words, to understand how these objects become agents in historical change means to understand how they participate in human interactions, to see them in their interconnectedness and in their function of mediating relations of power. I am thinking of Lukacs’s elaboration of Marx’s dialectical method as a mode of historical inquiry: it’s a notion of history

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which, rather than ordering a rigid causality out of events and objects with fixed and immutable nature, focuses on the constantly changing relations of humans that produce these objects. Objects and events become derivative of historically constituted relations, rather than vice versa. I am reminded of that because you also seem to be suggesting a methodological approach where objects and events never exist outside of the subject—an emphasis on the process would not posit a reified subject but a subject always open to enunciative possibilities. I am wondering how this mode of historical interrogation might give us a useful way of rethinking discourses of representation as they persist in the art disciplines. bhaskar mukhopadhyay: If I may go back to the question of neoliberalism and its cultural dimensions: recent empirical research, which makes use of Foucault’s work on governmentality, is crucial in understanding how neoliberalism works, and I would be curious to see how, in this era of internationalization of art, we can think of art itself as a strategy of normalization or governance. susan buck-morss: It’s a wonderful question, and, absolutely, there is no more influential institution for policing the imagination than the art world. The issue is not only who is funding the art world, whether it is private or public, governmental or nongovernmental. The art world is the space in which some of the most innovative practitioners of visual culture, those with the most creative potential, are contained and managed. At the same time, the art world produces art consumers by focusing its attention on the specific objects that produce value by attracting an audience. zhivka valiavicharska: In other words, the question of how art and culture have become an agent and an instrument of social transformation projects with neoliberal agendas. For example, the concept of cultural policy— bhaskar mukhopadhyay: Which is all over Europe and in parts of Southeast Asia and Latin America, instrumentalizing the entire domain of civil society6— zhivka valiavicharska: Yes, for example, I have been doing research on European funding in the sphere of contemporary arts and culture in some postsocialist countries in southeastern Europe. This funding comes with very clear politicoeconomic agendas and enhances the neoliberalization of these countries. Now we implement “cultural policies” and draft “strategies for culture” that have an openly instrumental approach. I am particularly interested in the rationality of these projects and how successful they are in inserting new subjects. angela miller: Isn’t the question of subjective formation really prior to the question of cultural policy and art, insofar as it becomes a reflection of, or an embodiment of, a certain kind of political subjectivity? 6. George Yúdice, The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).

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zhivka valiavicharska: Can’t subject formation happen through cultural and artistic self-realization, rather than being prior to it? angela miller: A contrary notion of society, and subject formation, as prior to the state is very deep-seated in American art history; it is part of the same intellectual climate that has largely ignored class formation or other social determinants of consciousness. There is a great deal of resistance to the idea that objective social structures produce, rather than project or embody, the will of the individual subject. Foucault’s impact on cultural studies has been enormous, but the idea persists that somehow creative agency is primary. zhivka valiavicharska: I think you are absolutely right. Rather than asking how the arts and culture express a preexisting subject, it would be more interesting to examine how a certain subjectivity comes into being through artistic practice. And further, how cultural self-realization at some point in time becomes an instrument of the modern state—an instrument of governmental conduct—to produce particular subjective effects and experiences. Foucault’s almost exclusive emphasis on the biopolitical strategies of governmental power may be somewhat limiting when it comes to our problems of culture. His “population” is almost exclusively a biological category: it governs life, health, and death to produce economically efficient masses. It forecloses an inquiry into the question how neoliberalism instrumentalizes the ethical values of entire groups of people towards rational-economic ends—what he has called “the political technology of the individuals” elsewhere.7 In other words, the question would be how the moral, cultural, and ethical relationships between individuals and their self-understanding turn into an explicit concern and a governing method of state conduct, a method of achieving an economically productive citizenry. That would be very different from framing these questions in terms of ideology. shelly errington: Don’t you think it is through promoting consumption? I mean, no one believes the trajectory of history is moving in a good direction, as Europeans did a century ago and in fact until the late twentieth century with the myths of modernization or development. The new myth that is taking over is the socalled free market and the subjectivities it produces and depends on—the selfactivating entrepreneurial consumer, who is completely governable because the purpose of life is to consume, and the life story is the story of what you consume and when, and your tastes. Wendy Brown’s article, which I thought was extremely clear and persuasive, gives a way to understand how the state “governs” by creating subjects who are consumers above all. thomas dacosta kaufmann: How does this differ from the period of Louis XIV, where you have most directly the arts being used as an element of state expression? 7. Foucault, “The Political Technology of Individuals,” in Power, 404.

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harry harootunian: There is a real qualitative difference between the time of Louis XIV and what Foucault is talking about: when Foucault concentrates on the population, he is really talking about mass society—it is not the same thing as seventeenth-century France; he is dealing with massive forms of differentiation and the entire division of labor. susan buck-morss: But today people refer to the “demassification” of society. Audiences have become fragmented, diminishing the effectiveness of any remaining public sphere. The art world is one such fragmented audience, a niche market for selling not so much art as the promise of cultural belonging on new, global terms. bhaskar mukhopadhyay: What you had during the Sun King’s reign was royal patronage; the state more or less coincided with the royal domain.8 It was only after the Enlightenment that something called “society” clearly emerged with a will to govern which began to shape what we nowadays would call “public opinion.” The German historian of ideas Koselleck has clearly analyzed what really changed between absolutism and Enlightenment: the emergence of civil society as an almost autonomous domain which has a very precarious relationship with political society.9 What has happened since the 1980s (the time when Thatcher and Reagan came to power) is that the institution of the (civil) society as something in between the state and the family has collapsed. Thatcher went to the extent of proclaiming the death of the social when she said that there’s no such thing as society, there are only families and the state. susan buck-morss: I don’t think we can avoid the distinction between Enlightenment liberalism and contemporary neoliberalism. This is a historical question. What we describe as neoliberalism is post-Thatcher, post-Reagan, post-Soviet, which is to say that ours is not the same world that even Foucault described. There is a huge difference, and a real problem in conflating the neoliberal agenda with Enlightenment liberalism, much less anything that went before. But Foucault remains useful in helping us understand where to locate these neoliberal practices when the state is no longer an adequate space for considering problems of power. The governmentality of the 1970s, when Foucault was writing, still presumed the social welfare state that has now been significantly dismantled. Sarkozy’s neoliberal liberalism, its so-called reforms of the state, are not a phenomenon of the 1970s. zhivka valiavicharska: In other words, we have the classic neoliberal move of state withdrawal from social responsibility, and placing that social responsibility onto individuals or groups—we see that formulated in his lectures on biopower. It is also important to note how this neoliberal withdrawal happens through tech8. Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (1957; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).

9. Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988).

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niques of “self-empowerment”; these reforms succeed by “empowering” the subjects they produce: you read policy statements and they always aim to give you the means for your own self-control, self-empowerment, self-knowledge, and selfsustenance. This is why these projects always require the active and willful participation of these subjects; in other words, the human values and human behavior neoliberal projects prescribe have to give the opportunity for these subjects’ selfrealization; they provide a terrain for their self-constitution. The question is how this is happening through the arts as well, which are some of the most powerful means for crafting social and political values. For example, this self-realization aspect is key when you see an openly neoliberal organization such as the Balkan Trust for Democracy, for example, which commissions large-scale art and theater projects on peace and reconciliation from artists and intellectuals from the Balkan countries who are genuinely concerned about peace in the region. keith moxey: I would like to respond to this point: what about the imagination? Surely it is the imagination that prevents us from distinguishing governmentality from the social—because we can’t really pull them apart. If that is the case, then the social imagination becomes a really important issue. I am referring to Arjun Appadurai’s work on globalization, which argues that it is not the economy but rather the imagination around which social arrangements revolve. If the imagination is responsible for the incorporation of what seem to be external ideas, the appropriation of values, for example, then presumably those ideas and values can also be turned on their head, as they apparently were in the Polish experience— there are possibilities for liberation here. Foucault had this notion of power as reversible, and we have to think about his notion of governmentality as potentially containing possibilities for reversal within itself. Perhaps as a footnote, I would like to bring García Canclini back into the discussion. He says that “commodities are good to think with,” that the realm of consumption is just as important as that of production in trying to understand the social. This sounds improbable and utopian, but it gestures toward the power of the imagination. Commodities, key elements in Marx’s understanding of how capitalist mystification happens, are clearly products of the imagination, and what we do with them is way more complex than a Marxist analysis of production allows us to imagine. susan buck-morss: This is important in relation to the society of the spectacle, or the spectacle that produces the social—it is not exactly an ideology; there is something else on the spectacle side of the mirror. There is a play of mirrors going on now, where something seems to be happening in public space. It is so mediated and constructed—governmentality seems to be operating at a little bit of a distance—you use statistics and govern masses, you produce policies, but it’s not face to face, there is not this directness as in the spectacle, where so much power

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is staged. I am not talking about the old ideology but something different where people act in this space and take themselves seriously in the logic of that space, where the self-fabrication of the subject happens— joyce brodsky: —A perfect example would be the recently installed piece by Anish Kapoor in Millennium Park a few blocks away from here.10 Because people’s actions are reflected, there is a lot of movement going on, but it’s totally circumscribed by the reflective material of this gigantic piece. There is a sense of an experience of total freedom that is giving you the power to play and allows you to see yourself as a part of this situation as if you were fully interactive. However, you cannot really change the “situation” because it is set up for you, everyone is interactive in exactly the same ways— susan buck-morss: Isn’t that Zhivka’s point? Neoliberalism claims to roll back state intervention, leaving the field of the social open to private interests by dismantling the public sphere, but its cultural policies provide all kinds of new techniques for governing and controlling the visual field and shaping the subjectivity of viewers. There is a difference between commodity consumers—subjects shaped by weekend trips to the mall—and “consumers” of art, most of whom are viewers rather than buyers. Consumers of art are engaged in the formation of a different kind of community, including the one produced internationally by art-world NGOs. Art-world participants are connoisseurs, in the know, international travelers, members of a global elite, witnesses of visual breakthroughs—all this is more important than owning the art. Ownership is in fact too private a goal. The excitement of the art world is that acquiring insider knowledge allows initiation into a privileged group, where nationality and race are of decreasing importance and gender and sexual preferences are wide open. Yet the price to pay is the policing of imagination and self-expression, which in modernity once provided a means of cultural resistance (for bohemians, Surrealists, hippies, dropouts, and refuseniks of all persuasions). Artists today are businesspeople with managers, agents, and hightech labs. Artists are commercial performers rather than cultural resisters, and their audiences are a well-heeled, global jet set, who practice deterritorialized belonging on the basis of exclusive access to what has value. Together artists and their publics are unwitting collaborators in shutting down possibilities for escape from neoliberalism’s self-proclaimed freedom, which is in fact highly regulated—all the while they are supposed to be having fun. But there is a growing fatigue with this kind of culture. The global circuit of biennales is so well traveled it no longer can give the illusion of being on the cutting edge of free expression. The whole experience has become predictable, and artists working in local contexts, which neoliberal policies imagine as satellites of the global art world, are eager for an alternative. Keith’s optimism has merit—if somehow the entire apparatus of the art world can be turned inside 10. Anish Kapoor, Cloud Gate, 2004, Millenium Park, Chicago.

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out. It is hard to imagine . . . but that is just the point. Imagination freed from the cynicism and defeatism of neoliberal hegemony is precisely what is at stake in this discussion.

8. f o u r f a i l u r e s o f t h e s e m i n a r s

This section and the last are from the five-hour closing roundtable. Here James Elkins introduces four themes that remained unresolved during the week of seminars: (1) the slightly suspicious ease we experienced in talking about contemporary art, as opposed to the difficulty of talking about history and our place in it; (2) contemporary art practices that are excluded by the international art market; (3) whether or not there are emergent histories of art that are structurally different from the one developed in North America and western Europe; and (4) the fact that most of the week of seminars had been devoted to finding oppositional concepts and practices, instead of understanding the current shape of the market. james elkins: Welcome, everyone. Well, by my count we have finished thirty hours of conversations. Zhivka and I have decided to divide this conversation into two parts. First I will introduce issues that pertain to the contemporary art world, and then Zhivka will give an account of a concept that has haunted our discussions during the week. I said at the opening roundtable that I wanted to make life more difficult for people who write about contemporary international art, and I would like to propose four themes that I think we have not adequately conceptualized. The first has to do with the ease or pleasure of talking about contemporary art. At several points during the week, we were struggling to find new ways to think about the concepts that drive talk about the “global” in art-historical and art-critical discourses. When we talked about our relation to history (the history of the discipline of art history, universal histories before modernism, the histories of national identities in art), it was sometimes difficult to make headway. But when we turned to contemporary issues, our conversation went much faster. Everyone had lots to say. There is something very easy about nationalism and internationalism in contemporary art: that’s not to say anyone solves or resolves anything, but that concepts can be deployed with minimal resistance. We talked freely and quickly about capitalism, globalism, the biennale culture, national traits of artists, and many other things. Too freely. I was glad when we turned back to the past, and to other disciplines, and got bogged down. I was most happy when one of the Fellows said, during a break, that he liked this event because, as he put it, “Normally when I go to conferences I understand everything. Here I don’t.” The second is what remains invisible to the global art market. A useful way to approach this is to think of a map of places and practices that participate in

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the global art market. In this cartographic metaphor the areas that do not participate are like the parts labeled terra incognita on some famous old maps. According to the self-enclosed euphoria of the global art market, there may be such places (art practices) that are not yet known, and in fact it’s one of the art world’s principal hopes that there are still such places. (Another hope is that there might be oppositional spaces within the terra cognita, which can critique it, in part, from within—but that leads to my fifth point, which I’ll defer to the end.) I want to point instead to the enormous regions of art practice that are perfectly well known to the global art world, but excluded: I mean the many kinds of sincere, nonironic practices, from old-barn watercolors to midcentury gestural abstraction. They would be the oceans in my metaphor. I’ve already mentioned Howard Behrens, the cruise-ship palette-knife painter. Actually, some of the richest artists in the world work on cruise ships, as an article in the Wall Street Journal demonstrated. Here’s another example: Ipek Duden, an art historian in Istanbul, told me once that the Istanbul Biennial has “no effect” on the art market in Istanbul. “Once it leaves,” she said, “the galleries have to go back to what they can actually sell,” which is principally painting.1 Susan Buck-Morss and I have both recently made trips to Central Asia—they were entirely separate trips, but to some degree I think they shared a motivation. As Susan said, she wanted to visit the place where the map folds. susan buck-morss: Where our map folds, or mine did, at least, when I was in school. But this is precisely the geographical area of the Silk Road, a trade route that long before the rise of the West connected the world economically and culturally and spread the influence of Islamic culture and higher learning from the Niger to China. james elkins: One of the things I found in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, and to a lesser extent in Kazakhstan, is that contemporary artists feel more isolated now than they did under the Soviet regime. An artist in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, told me that once he could go to Moscow for forty rubles; now it costs four hundred dollars, and he can’t afford it. In some communities, there is less access to the Internet than before. In Almata, Kazakhstan, Amandos Akanayev, a very welltraveled artist, universally known in art circles there, said that when he teaches art in Kazakh (as opposed to in Russian), his students do not recognize names like Salvador Dalí or Ilya Repin. Artists and students like those are already well outside the discourse we have been developing about neoliberalism: not merely because they haven’t read Hart or Harvey, but because they are not interested in oppositional spaces or the articulations of governmentality. I’m afraid it is one of the signal failures of this event, but also of academic discourse generally, that we have left them out. I want to register the fact that most of the art practice around the world remains disconnected from the global art scene: most art would not be viable 1. Conversation, March 2006. I thank Rana Ozturk for introducing me to Ipek.

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in biennales—including Akanayev’s. He paints rainbow-colored animals and nudes with three-dimensional buttocks, sculpted from papier-mâché: they just wouldn’t work in the international market. I propose that all of that—not at all unknown, just ignored—is the real Other of the art world, not the oppositional practices we have been privileging all week long, and certainly not the “undiscovered countries” of avant-garde art practice that some hope—even though they know it’s an imperialist hope—to continue discovering.2 zhivka valiavicharska: What you are saying is really interesting. For example, take Saskia Sassen’s formulation of global cities as hubs of transnational capital: she says that they have become global spaces of exchange of information, flows of money, the sites where a transnational finance capital class is concentrated.3 Her analyses are very good, but the question of localities remains very problematic: we won’t get too far if we understand them as isolated and cut out from these global exchanges; we have to see how they exist in an unequal relation to it. And not only that—critical geographers have showed us how these localities are actively produced by what we’ve called the global. So I think your argument cautions against a similar methodological assumption. It also makes another theoretical gesture: rather than seeing the local arts in some isolated and disconnected way, we could look at how they enable global formations of art markets and art practices; how they’ve become their constitutive Other. I would be very interested to see a good, rigorous analysis of how this is happening in each particular case. james elkins: Exactly. That is why it is significant that we choose not to include such practices. To continue the listing: first was the difficulty we all had in describing how our conversations are situated in history; second was the blindness on the part of both the art market and academia to certain contemporary art practices, which I proposed are the majority of all contemporary practices. The third point concerns problems that arise when it comes to writing histories of world art. The largest unsolved divergence of opinion among the authors of Is Art History Global? was between two versions of the globalization of art history. On the one hand were writers who felt that the discipline of the history of art—including, here, its apparatus, its interpretive protocols, its institutions, including conferences and books like this one, its journals and their guidelines— that the discipline of art history may indeed be becoming global, but that its globalization is not a problem in the end because the various elements of art 2. All this is the subject of a work in progress, Success and Failure in Twentieth-Century Painting. A chapter has appeared as “Two Forms of Judgement: Forgiving and Demanding (The Case of Marine Painting),” Journal of Visual Art Practice 3, no. 1 (2004): 37–46. Prominent among the perpetually rediscovered “undiscovered countries” is naïve art. I discuss naïve and outsider art as tropes of modernism in “Naïfs, Faux-Naïfs, Faux Faux-Naïfs, Would-Be-Faux-Naïfs:

There Is No Such Thing as Outsider Art,” in Inner Worlds Outside, edited by John Thompson, exh. cat. (Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2006), 71–79. 3. Her exemplary books on the subject are The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001) and Globalization and Its Discontents: Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money (New York: New Press, 1998).

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history are sufficiently malleable so they can rediscover themselves in their new occasions. They can adjust, adapt, and expand. That perspective was exemplified for us, in that book, by David Summers’s Real Spaces, which uses Western art theory to describe world art practices. One the other hand, there were writers who hoped or knew or suspected there are other forms of writing that constitute viable interpretations of art, and those writers were, to differing degrees, content with the possibility that those interpretive practices might not appear useful for art history, or even appear as art histories. When we were discussing this divergence of opinion earlier in the week, Michael Holly introduced a suspiciously felicitous metaphor, which I would like to revive. She compared art history to a beautiful vase, which has broken. The shards are art history’s methodologies—semiotics, deconstruction, iconography, and so forth—and they are what now confront us. (Later in our conversation, the shards weren’t methodologies but other kinds of fragments.) We are then faced with three alternatives. In the first, which was Michael’s point when she introduced the image, we should celebrate the fragmentary state of things, because it can be wonderfully productive. In the second, which Tom suggested, we try to glue the vase back together. I’ll call that the archaeological instinct: we see the shards had a shape, so we can’t just treat them as separate wholes. We embark on the process of reconstituting them, not because we’re antiquarians, but because we have no choice but to be distracted or even compelled by the original shape. And in the third alternative, we try to do something with the shards: we smash them, we cut ourselves on them, we glue them together into something new, and we do that because we are impelled to avoid that haunting form. For me, Michael’s vase metaphor goes to the question that remains undecided in Is Art History Global? because hypothetical new, non-Western ways of describing art would necessarily appear partly—sometimes nearly wholly—as fragments of something we recognize, and we would feel or resist the pull of the vase. harry harootunian: I think what’s implied in these last points is a very interesting but problematic set of assumptions. I like the metaphor of the vase because it speaks from a culturally specific perspective. You’re really talking about how art history has been practiced in Europe and the United States. But when you begin to speak about other traditions, you already imply that there are such traditions. I don’t know of any historiographic tradition about art in Japan before the nineteenth century. There are forms of classification, for example, but they would be parts of larger practices. james elkins: That is exactly the case with premodern writing in Chinese, Arabic, and Sanskrit. These discourses have sometimes been enlisted as different or parallel art histories, and sometimes as non-art-historical texts usable for art history, but

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they are always, in my experience, distinct in ways that are as obdurate as Shigemi’s example of karate bows.4 harry harootunian: I guess I object to the presumption of some kind of native theory. In order to compensate for the enormous amount of Eurocentric or Americacentric emphasis on interpretive strategies, there have been attempts to find Chinese theories, or Japanese theories. That too makes a presumption, namely that such forms of theorization exist formally or systematically, or even unsystematically, as a kind of analogue to the Western understanding of interpretation.5 All this depends on the period in question. It’s one thing if you’re talking about premodern practices, or for example about premodern Asia or Africa, or even Europe, as Tom is. But when you’re talking about the modern, the Japanese and Chinese have already, without even being conscious of it, they are already recuperated by the very theorizations you are trying to bracket. james elkins: That is certainly true in recent art history. My own position is that modern and contemporary writing on art is overwhelmingly bent on straightforward and often unreflective emulation of what is taken as art history. In that sense the discipline of art history is nowhere near as diverse or multicultural as it often portrays itself as being. It harbors a hope about divergent practices, but contact with the discipline of art history in places like Paraguay or Kazakhstan (or, of course, any number of places within the first world) nearly always provokes either wholehearted emulation, or a kind of reaction that begins only after the writers have adopted the language of their adversary. harry harootunian: I keep thinking of the art historian Kazuko Okakura, who was a late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historian and curator. He wrote a wacky book called Ideals of the East, which is intended to provide some kind of supplement, from Asia, to fill out the picture—but it is basically a Western narrative.6 thomas dacosta kaufmann: Harry, I think it is useful to recall earlier forms of history writing as well, especially if we are talking about earlier models of writing art history, and about art history as an institutional practice, and what happened 4. In addition to Is Art History Global? see the references in On Pictures and the Words That Fail Them (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), which considers Arabic, Sanskrit, and Chinese texts from the ninth to the sixteenth centuries. Zhang Yanyuan’s text is the most vexed of these examples because it has been suggested it be revived, and it has been taught alongside Vasari in European and North American art history classes. For a discussion see my afterword to Discovering Chinese Painting: Dialogues with Art Historians, edited by Jason Kuo, second edition (Dubuque: Kendall/ Hunt, 2006), 249–56. 5. See Harry Harootunian, History’s Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life (New York: Columbia University

Press, 2000), 25–58. The recent reaction to the surfeit of theorizing in area studies has led to a dangerous fetishization of native theory and knowledge, as if both could be found in some pristine, unmediated state. This appeal, which today is institutionalized in every job advertisement inviting candidates with “native or near native fluency” in languages like Chinese or Japanese to apply for teaching positions, reflects the more insidious presumptions of a fraudulent hermeneutic once embraced by a generation of anthropologists and historians who, following the lead of Clifford Geertz, actually believed they could stand in the footprints of the native. 6. Okakura, The Ideals of the East, with Special Reference to the Art of Japan (1903; Rutland, VT: C. E. Tuttle, 1970).

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when it entered into universities. All the latter is bound up, as Michael Holly said earlier this week, with Hegel. But models of history including models of progress were certainly in place prior to the nineteenth century, and to Hegel. Many of the ideas we tend to associate with art history were already there during the Enlightenment, and even before that; in the sixteenth century (and implicit in the fifteenth century) there are models of history of one kind or another found in discussions of art. There is also a long tradition, as you know better than I do, of historical writing in China, and of art history there as well, and there are now efforts, exemplified by the work of Yukio Lippit, to reinvigorate a Japanese sense of art historiography that may found in the past as well. These Asian and earlier European models may not be adequate to the issues we face now, but certain practices and ways of thinking are continuous. The exhibition that is upstairs right now, of Jeff Wall’s work, may clearly be related to Asian traditions—the display of the master’s work, the biographical model—as well as to earlier Western traditions such as Vasari’s. james elkins: It may be useful to distinguish two forms of this question. One would be the very attenuated survivals of these historical models in contemporary art practice, and the other would be the force exerted by desires people in the global art world have that there will be these unassimilated historical models and practices. The desire for history, and the actual history. zhivka valiavicharska: Tom, you are talking about traditions that persist through history and culture—are you making a claim about some inherent value in them? If so, I have to say there is something deeply troubling about erecting this notion of value. The example of the Wall exhibition assumes the value of the artist as an autonomous subject: that persists in Western art-historical practices, and the assumptions that go along with this presumed autonomy remain completely unquestioned. It’s a fact that such practices remain hegemonic: but why, in art history, should they remain unquestioned? And what are the stakes of preserving the discipline? thomas dacosta kaufmann: I wasn’t claiming such things have value in themselves. I was describing continuities of practice. The point of my intervention was to suggest the problem of looking at the present as completely cut off from previous periods. Fred Jameson said earlier in the week that he is interested in disjunctions in history. Of course breaks occur, but there are also continuities, and we have to be able to recognize them—otherwise the possibility of the kinds of change you suggest will not be there to begin with.7 7. In fact, I have raised questions about relying about the authority of tradition as a way of determining interpretations: see my review in the Art Bulletin 80, no. 3 (1998): 580–85, of Dieter Wuttke, Dazwischen: Kulturwissenschaft auf Warburgs Spuren, Saecula Spiritalia 29 (BadenBaden: Valentin Koerner, 1996); Jeffrey Morrison, Winckelmann and the Notion of Aesthetic

Education (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); Catherine M. Soussloff, The Absolute Artist: The Historiography of a Concept; and Michael Ann Holly, Past Looking: Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of the Image (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). In the review I also comment on notions of the restriction of the canon.

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zhivka valiavicharska: Yes, we need to recognize continuities. But my question is about how by insisting on these continuities we privilege certain narratives; and in turn, how those narratives enhance certain power configurations, which we reproduce by clinging to them. I am talking about a set of bourgeois liberal assumptions that structure the traditional core of the discipline’s methodology. thomas dacosta kaufmann: Well, I was suggesting that there are a number of disciplines, including anthropology, that are germane to these questions. Here at the Art Institute there is also a show of Islamic pottery, which is not arranged according to the same principles pertaining to the Wall show in the same building. susan buck-morss: Here is a methodological suggestion. There is something that hasn’t been problematized during the three days I have been here, and that is that we’re talking, on the one hand, about art history and the teaching of art history, and on the other, about museum practices, which is a contemporary problem (although it has a historical dimension). And we have also been looking at artists, but not as extensively. I do not think those three problems can be solved in the same frame. Jim, you started with the problem of the artist, with that anecdote about Central Asian artists—the ones who can’t pay to go to Moscow, now that they are free to go where they want. That resonated with my own experiences of Moscow philosophers, who were the top of the top, totally able to have conferences on Heidegger, discuss Foucault, and do all these wonderful things during glasnost—but as soon as the Big Bang happened, and the ruble went down in value, they could not leave Moscow. They became very isolated. My own methodological way of pressing further with that anecdote would be to go into history. If I take the metaphor of the urn— james elkins: It was a vase!—but it can certainly be an urn. susan buck-morss: Urn, then! Using that metaphor, my impetus would be to take a piece of it, and put it together with a piece that came from a different urn. james elkins: You would be a postmodern archaeologist. susan buck-morss: I don’t want to be postmodern—but I think that would be an interesting approach. You would not be putting pieces together to make a whole, but instead experiencing a flash of recognition that came from very different cultures. In that way you could give much more valence to a cultural practice of the past, because of its resonance with the present, than you would have given it before, when it would have remained invisible no matter how much work was done on problems of narrative or translation. An example: let’s say there’s a line that goes from Kyrgyzstan to a Venice biennale. Resistance would flow the other way: if you exhibit in Venice, you show as a critical artist, criticizing globalization, but you do it in Venice. Your resistance takes you back to the local, but the objective dynamics takes you to the higher point of power. There are two lines, going back and forth.

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The analogy I would love—I’d love to go home and write an article about it—is what happened to Soviet artists who moved both ways along this line, literally to Venice’s biennale and back, because it engages a significant part of the Soviet story in the decade of the 1920s. james elkins: That is just what I was in the “stans” to study. Some artists have turned to Sufism, which makes it even less likely that they will be in a biennale. An artist named Ahmadaliev in Tashkent does serious Sufist paintings on wool, and so does a man named Abdrashit Sydykhanov in Almata, Kazakhstan. Both are in their sixties or seventies, and both worked under the Soviet regime. Their current work would be just barely viable, in theory, for the international art scene, but the further they go in the direction of their own beliefs, and the less pressure they feel from the international art scene, the more likely it is they will never show outside their countries. susan buck-morss: Some Soviet artists also went to the West: that’s where the fame was, and the money. The movement goes toward the center, because that is where money and power flow for artistic practice—and yet resistance goes in the other direction. james elkins: We’re talking about different kinds of resistance: one accomplished by artists who already know how to play the game of the international art world, and the other by artists who cannot play, or don’t want to try, and resist by “passively” comprising the static local store of art production. They “resist” by being useless to the system. Your examples resist, without scare quotes. susan buck-morss: The double direction of resistance is a nice way of comparing apples and oranges, and linking the three separate issues that have been raised here (art history, exhibitions, and artists). james elkins: The idea of taking pieces from two different urns, or vases, raises the possibility that the pieces might not belong to any vessels: they might not be parts of discourses on art that we could recognize as such. thomas dacosta kaufmann: A note on the vase metaphor: one need not think of putting the vase together into its original shape. It could become something quite different; I am thinking of Bernini’s addition to the Mars, or Bertel Thordvaldsen’s re-creation of the pediments from Aegina, which was then destroyed.8 So your model, Susan, is also one that is creative— susan buck-morss: I wouldn’t try to make a whole. I am talking about taking two pieces and superimposing them. thomas dacosta kaufmann: Yes, sometimes you would just be creating new forms. 8. For this destruction, perhaps relevant here to consider in terms of this discussion of fragments and fragmentation, see William J. Diebold, “The Politics of Derestoration: The

Aegina Pediments and the German Confrontation with the Past,” Art Journal 54, no. 2 (1966): 60–66.

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james elkins: Before we stop, I want to append a fourth and final point, one that has been drifting along with us the whole week. I note that some of the texts Fred Jameson set for his seminar were attempts to describe cultural globalism, and others used the word “resistance” and were more concerned with slowing or problematizing globalism.9 I think we need to be careful not to lose sight of the fact that we may be attempting to understand the globalization of art principally in order to understand how to resist it. We have been focusing on a small percentage of practices that are aimed at resistance. This was the second of the talking points I raised at the opening roundtable, and I have to say I don’t think we have made very much headway with it.10 All of us here are not really studying the globalized art market as it exists, but rather the tiny percentage of intellectually serious, politically engaged, conceptually oriented art that critiques the market. I very much like Fred’s idea that globalization exaggerates and foregrounds the nation-state—from which I draw the conclusion that apparently uninteresting, politically passive, historically irresponsible art, the kind Buchloh hates, is of a piece with apparently cutting-edge institutional critiques. The artists from Central Asia I mentioned are not resisting globalism, and the majority of art at any art fair is celebratory, recherché, or otherwise less than captivating. Boring, really. No one writes about most of Art Basel Miami, what most of it is like, and yet those practices are the same as cutting-edge initiatives like superflex and the Critical Art Ensemble, because they are dialectical parts of a larger practice. It’s important, I think, to keep thinking about boring and recherché art, and not just the avant-gardes. michele greet: I’d like to address the question Tom raised about using models from the past for present concerns. I wonder, conversely, how we can use the theories that are emerging from our experience of globalization to understand the past. Clearly we always write history in a particular moment, but is there something about our current moment that demands a break with older art-historical methodologies, or can we rethink these methodologies and continue to use them in a productive way? Where along the continuum of break vs. continuity is the most productive place of inquiry? harry harootunian: But isn’t that what we have always done? Aside from those pieties and claims about understanding the past on its own terms, and so forth, isn’t that what we basically, invariably do, without knowing it? In some ways, the mediations that have constituted our own education and socialization comprise the past. Perhaps we worry too much about breaks and disruptions demanded by a certain mode of periodizing, as Jacques Rancière, in The Politics of Aesthetics, has recently proposed and as I have suggested above. james elkins: And so an interesting form of the question is: Why seek to understand globalization of art better, or differently, now? And why ask Tom’s question, 9. See Section 1 of the Seminars.

10. See the Introduction.

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which is also my question, now? What experience prompts us to wonder about the utility of a specific past, or pasts, to the understanding of the present? And what change—what familiarity or overfamiliarity with the art market, what staleness in the world of art fairs, makes use look backward in just this way just now? All that I think we register about this is what journalists like Jerry Saltz and Peter Schjeldahl register: dissatisfaction or unhappiness with the slipperiness of the present.11 harry harootunian: I think we tend to valorize that past moment, which in some ways enhances one’s conception of the present. suzana milevska: The vase metaphor has been appearing and reappearing all through this week: but we have all been assuming that art history as a compact concept once existed. What if it never did? james elkins: Imagine you find some fragments of pottery; they are curved, and they look like they belong together. You are probably going to wonder what they once were, even if you have no interest in gluing them together. I don’t think it is possible to imagine an “aesthetic of shards and fragments” (I think that is the philosopher Guy Sircello’s phrase) without the idea of an original.12 For me, that’s all that counts: it animates the uses to which we put the pieces of our interpretive traditions. claire pentecost [artist, School of the Art Institute Faculty]: If someone puts the vase together, they are reconstructing something that was always Frankensteinian. It seemed to be a single thing, but was more a bricolage, a collective process. In relation to Jeff Wall, why not show other artists who have worked that way? Why not ghost the show, Aby Warburg fashion? I was glad to hear what Susan said about bringing different things together. james elkins: This vase, this urn, this cenotaph, these fragments, this group of unaffiliated objects, is actually quite a fruitful metaphor. I just don’t want to lose sight of the fact that a concern over the nature, history, interest, purpose, and fate of the vase, urn, or cenotaph is completely invisible in contemporary art discourse. Where are the writers who worry about the traditions of interpretation on which they draw? Our mutagenic metaphor doesn’t exist anywhere in the current art world: it’s just the air people breathe, the language they speak. It’s history naturalized. 11. I am thinking of Jerry Saltz’s “Ugh, Venice,” a column for the New York Magazine Art Review, July 2, 2007, which explains why he isn’t going until the crowds thin, and pictures a new art journal called Biennial, with columns called “This Month in Relational Aesthetics,” artists discussing “how they had ‘intervened with the local culture,’” and writers “asserting that their work is a ‘subversion of biennials’” (nymag.com/ arts/art/reviews/33952/, accessed July 25, 2007). I’m also reminded of Peter Schjeldahl’s unhappy review of Miami Basel in the New Yorker, which muses that “fairism (if you will) is inexorable,” even though shows like Miami Basel create “a

stupor of overstimulation.” Schjeldahl, “Temptations of the Fair,” New Yorker, December 25, 2006/January 1, 2007, 148–49. 12. Guy Sircello, “Beauty in Shards and Fragments,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48, no. 1 (1990): 21–35, quotation at 22. Or, as an elective affinity, there is Wallace Stevens’s “Anecdote of the Jar”: “I placed a jar in Tennessee, / And round it was, upon a hill. / It made the slovenly wilderness / Surround that hill. // The wilderness rose up to it, / And sprawled around, no longer wild. / The jar was round upon the ground / And tall and of a port in air,” etc.

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karl hakken: I’d like to make an observation here, on behalf of the students. It came up at lunchtime, in conversation about the week of seminars. Most of us have recently had an experience of the master narratives of the discipline, in the form of a textbook by Gardner or Janson. So giving up entirely on the metaphor of the vase, acting as if it is merely shards, is not entirely true. There was a vase: it actually existed when we arrived on the scene. michael holly: As the author of this now very misshapen vase metaphor, I would like to say that I like, Susan, your turning my vase into a burial urn. But for the other Fellows here, the vase links to things we talked about this past week—W. G. Sebald’s use of images, urn worship, Sir Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia, and even Nietzsche, who worried that all we historians do is lament time’s passing. Maybe, until this moment, as art historians we have felt no urgency toward the present. The trouble with the historical profession is that it causes us all to feel related as epigone, latecomers, even voyeurs to the past. Nietzsche said, and I think this has relevance today, that the most powerful mode of inquiry in the humanities is to think one unlike thing with another: to rub them up against one another like two sticks when you’re trying to start a fire. I like this mode of inquiry, the idea of encounter: between two cultures, between past and present, or as we did this week, between high political theory and low, regular art history. What also has to change is the way we conduct arguments in art history. Maybe arguments have to be done by innuendo and implication, rather than by influence. At least in art history, influence was once upon a time the master narrative. I would like to think of a way of thinking, a way of relating the very disparate things we have been talking about here. An argument (“fiction”) created by friction. darby english: I should probably let this lie, because Michael has articulated it so well, but there is something about the friction that different approaches generate, that pertains directly to the comments that have been made about contemporary art discourse. I want to try to think about Michael’s insight about friction in relation to Jim’s observations throughout this week about contemporary art discourse. Maybe we need a language for translating understanding itself, rather than being content with the potential or lack of potential of a translation, or being content with the compromise that is reached. Translation itself sets the outer boundaries of our conversation about it. We don’t ask questions about the kinds of understanding we are moving toward. james elkins: Darby, Michael, those are beautiful questions—and suitably abstract. They are just the kind of friction I think we need to move forward. I hope that some people who write commentaries on this conversation can find ways to “translate understanding.”

9. u n i v e r s a l i t y

Zhivka Valiavicharska led the second half of the five-hour closing discussion; in the portion excerpted here, she leads a discussion on universality. Two of the most abstract concepts that articulate writing on globalization are universality and particularity: they appeared in the very first seminar (see Section 1), and they persisted throughout the week. Whatever sense globalization is to make as a dialectic complement to the particular artwork (or the individual artist, or the particular cultural gesture), it will depend on a concept of universality. As usual, the literature that is produced in the international art market entirely ignores this issue, preferring to continue to privilege a Romantic notion of the individual autonomous artist, contrasted with a treacherously unexamined notion of the universal human culture of the twenty-first century. Here Valiavicharska concludes the week’s discussions by proposing a new sense of universality, one that can respond to the crises and vicissitudes of contemporary art. james elkins: Welcome back, everyone, for the last two hours of our thirty-five-hour conversation. I’ll turn it over to Zhivka, who will introduce conceptual issues that have arisen in the course of the week. zhivka valiavicharska: It has been a challenge to think of a theme that would link the messy and uneven discussions, in which I was really surprised to see various positions, investments, and knowledges seriously collide. I found these clashes extremely productive in a difficult way, in the sense that I myself experienced some kind of displacement. That displacement was quite strong for me because I never knew how much I could assume; it pulled me out of the discursive frameworks my interpretive acts operate within. It produced a serious uncertainty: for example, when Jim was saying something in the seminar that was meant to be very clear and simple, I could look at it as two radically different statements, almost opposite to each other. [Laughter.] As one of our Fellows said—the one Jim quoted in his introduction—I often did not know what was going on. And I don’t think I ever will know what actually happened. james elkins: The meeting is concluded. zhivka valiavicharska: Well, in a sense it has just begun. This is precisely why I would like to call this gathering an event: events are never too pretty, they are always messy, and they are events precisely because they seriously disturb our semantic references, our modes of intelligibility. They leave an opening that is always already gaping—they are structured by an a priori incompleteness. Whether we

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attribute this opening due to a void of meaningful frameworks or to an excess of experience—of human experience—it will never yield itself to a final fixing. So the theme I came up with last night is quite risky: universality. It is risky but also very tempting because it came up in discussions in several strongly conflicting modes. First was the immense universalizing drive of the discipline of art history in our discussions, and it seemed to me that at times the force of that knowledge was much stronger than us. Then there were the voices of the critique of universality: much of capitalist development and European colonial projects was realized under universalizing concepts of history, humanity, civilization, progress. And third, meanings of universality, humanism, and cosmopolitanism also emerged in their emancipatory aspects—in some attempts to rescue these from their essentialist discourses and practices perhaps, to recuperate their indwelling possibilities for overcoming the historical present. For example, in her public lecture two nights ago, Susan Buck-Morss put forward her own notion of universality: for her, it emerges at the limits of human experience, where we not only have an experience of displacement, but are also confronted with our humanity in a radical way. This is where, she said, we are all the same—where the possibility for a collective human subjectivity emerges. As I understood it, this is not to give a new substance to the human, which would congeal into a yet another essentialist notion of universality that transcends the historical moment. It seems to me that she argued for universalities seen as possibilities within the historical moment; universalities that are always already within history—where human subjectivities are constantly being constituted and reconstituted in ways that can never escape the singularity of the event, the contingent historical forces that enabled them. Certain events, she said, can be powerful enough to trigger experiences of collective displacements. I would like to ask Susan, however, if she could go further into what precisely she means by an “event,” or what makes what she means by “event” an event? Aren’t events and collective subjectivities mutually constitutive, or, to put it differently, can we talk about events outside of their discursive frameworks? Some of our seminar discussions raised the issues of incommensurability of multiple truths, human values, and human languages, which reminded me of a number of African postcolonial thinkers, who have put forward an emancipatory notion of universality. For these postcolonial thinkers, it is through revolutionary action, through often violent self-enunciations, that we can gesture towards universality. Like Fanon, Ngugi wa Thiong’o has defined universality as an open field of perpetual historical contestations and struggles.1 And like Benjamin, Ngugi has also imagined a humanist universality in the multiplicity of languages stored in the very possibility of translation—translation here being not just a matter of language, but, as Darby has elegantly framed, of modes of 1. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Moving the Center: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms (London: James Currey; Nairobi: EAEP; Portsmouth N.H.: Heinemann, 1993); Decolonizing the Mind: The

Politics of Language in African Literature (London: James Currey; Nairobi: EAEP; Portsmouth N.H.: Heinemann, 1986).

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understanding within which we operate. Ngugi speaks about how languages can be “opened up” to the realities of the struggles in order to convey their revolutionary content. There is an act of emancipation—universally human and yet historically situated—that happens in communication, in the possibility to communicate the incommunicable. And of course Judith Butler—following Laclau and Mouffe—has seen the political promise of a kind of universality that belongs to the open-ended field of hegemonic struggle. For her, the promise that universality harbors for a radical democratic project is precisely in its failure, as a historical project, to articulate itself fully without being haunted by that which it negates. Its failure is conditioned by the fact that from the very beginning, universality is already contaminated by its other and haunted by the possibility of the return of the excluded; and this failure—as a condition of possibility—is what could enable its future radical reinscriptions.2 susan buck-morss: There is one word, which may make a difference in your very lucid description of the problem of universality: you said at one point that this new form of humanism could be understood by thinking of violent confrontations, at the limit of our humanity, and that at those moments we might all be the same. There’s a twist there: for me, it’s not the limits of humanity, as if we have to experience a life-and-death struggle before we can recognize each other. Then we’d be hoping for more of those experiences, so that we could finally realize our humanity. I would say it’s a matter of violent confrontations with the limits of our subjectivities, our acculturation. Suddenly our culture doesn’t allow us to say what we have to say. Our culture betrays us. That is what worries me: the moment when your culture betrays you, when your very affirmation by the cultural collective places you in a precarious position. Welfare mothers, for example, are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. If they resist the conditions put upon welfare distribution, they are considered ungrateful for the assistance they are offered. In the United States, that can mean their children are taken away from them, because it is said they are bad parents—refusing money, not taking care of their children. What concerns me lies at the limit to the cultural constructedness of your experience, and events can expose those limits. Nine-eleven was that kind of event in the collective consciousness: that kind of event is not supposed to happen in American’s consciousness of itself. But it happened, and the response was totally inadequate. Katrina, even more so. There is a kind of betrayal involved, and the fascist mindset emerges—you’re either for us or against us, and so forth—but it is also possible to imagine a kind of collective solidarity based on the betrayal. 2. Butler has also invoked translation to imagine a possibility for a common politics on the Left that retains the multiplicity of its movements. Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Z˘iz˘ek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London: Verso, 2000). To follow back the discussion on universality and hegemony, see also Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and So-

cialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985); Ernesto Laclau, Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 1996); Judith Butler, “Sovereign Performatives,” in Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (London: Routledge, 1997): 72–102. See also Linda Zerilli’s review of Laclau’s Emancipation(s), “This Universalism Which Is Not One,” Diacritics 28, no. 2 (1998): 2–22.

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We have been discussing a lot of real-life contradictions, the kind under which we all work. Adorno says contradictions aren’t resolved in the head; or, if you do, you end up justifying the status quo. But then to glorify friction as in itself the salvation of humanity is wrong. I guess I’m saying that I do not experience a “we” as existing today in the U.S. I am supposed to be part of American culture, and I am, in zillions of ways, but for me the sense of a “we” has been betrayed by the government’s perverse invocation of America to attempt to justify an unjustifiable foreign policy. Perhaps precisely when the “we” has been betrayed, that is the moment when one can break into another space. But the problem is that this positive possibility is severely limited. I have seen democracy function in its pure form once in my life, in late glasnost. I saw democracy when people went around Moscow listening to live debates in the duma, the Assembly, of people criticizing the Afghan war, problems in the state, environmental issues, the economy, everything. And when the duma was in recess, instead of getting into black cars and speeding away, the politicians walked across Red Square to the subway stop—and the people who had been listening ran up to them, and tapped them on the shoulders, and said things like, “What you said there—that was really good!” That was democracy in action, and I had never seen it so vividly before. Once the Soviet Union fell, however, and officially Russia was pronounced a “democracy,” that was gone. Underneath the radar of the categories of belonging, outside of concepts like the subaltern, stuff goes on that could actually deserve the appellation of a concept like democracy. zhivka valiavicharska: You are absolutely right: you are arguing for the subject’s radical displacement from the context of her own self-understanding. I would call precisely this displacement a confrontation—and a violent one—if not violent in the ordinary sense. Who knows what kinds of violence are involved in these forms of displacement? They are the junctures that form and reform the human subject. susan buck-morss: I am saying there is a we which emerges, which is not constituted anyplace. That is the utopian event: the product of these encounters is not yet an official we anyplace. zhivka valiavicharska: The we is constantly being constituted in and through various historical moments— susan buck-morss: No, and that is where we differ. I would never say “constantly”; I wouldn’t say that is the human condition, as if to imply that I could step outside the process, and proclaim it, and know it. I think the formulation you are describing forgets that we are in there. As we try to grasp it, it hits us from behind. I don’t want to propose a general philosophical position. I am trying to communicate a lived experience, which cannot do the work that philosophy demands of it.

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harry harootunian: Susan, the problem of democracy these days is a particularly interesting one, and I hesitate to pronounce on it—but I have been reading Jacques Rancière for many years, and he has recently come out with a book called Hatred of Democracy.3 It is a reworking of some of his earlier philosophic work, especially the book Disagreement.4 Rancière has a view of democracy similar to the one you’re describing. One of his observations about the many attempts to democratize other countries is that it is usually done by people who really hate democracy, who distrust it. I don’t have to elaborate on that, especially with the current U.S. administration. He says that it is a mistake to think of democracy in terms of inclusion. That leads to polling, counting, efforts to make sure everyone has his or her place. Rancière says that is not democracy, although it seems to have become one of the prevailing views of democratic practice in the United States and western Europe. I hesitate to put a label on his view of democracy, but there is an anarchist dimension to it. Rancière was one of the more radical students of Althusser, and he has a Maoist phase, but he’s abandoned that in recent years—although there are shards of it shot through his writing. The kind of democracy he is talking about was impressed on him in May 1968 in Paris, and he interpreted it as a kind of explosion (Susan, when you mentioned glasnost, I thought immediately of Rancière’s description of May 1968) that just happens. You have politics, he says, precisely at the moment of disidentification, when people are no longer willing to accept identity as a kind of inclusion. The difficulty, as Rancière knows, is that it’s an enormously difficult view to sustain. Putting it into some kind of expectant historical narrative would immediately turn it around— susan buck-morss: But I think you can put this democratic experience into an institutional context, which would be different from a historical or ideological context. I think you can base it institutionally on a balance of powers—a principle that I respect enormously—and on human rights, that could allow at least some protected space, some room for the experience of disidentification. The problem is that these principles are always precarious, and their institutionalization cannot be taken for granted. harry harootunian: I think you’re right, and I don’t have more to add, but I think it is a fillip to what you were saying. susan buck-morss: I am a great fan of institutions. You can’t institutionalize democracy by having everyone get involved, I agree. But you can by struggling to sustain a balance of powers. You can by having checks on civilian use of the military. The problem is not that we have these institutions in the U.S., but that we are in danger of losing them. Institutional guarantees have disintegrated in this country. And the public is not up in arms about it. That’s the scandal. 3. Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, translated by Steve Corcoran (London: Verso, 2006).

4. Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, translated by Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

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harry harootunian: Alain Badiou criticizes Rancière, saying that Rancière has no means to regularize, institutionalize, or continue his particular form of democratic practice. As a good Marxist, Badiou sees the danger of relying on a kind of spontaneity that cannot be sustained. But Badiou has also grown old: he is actually older, chronologically, than Rancière . . . Universalism, and appeals to it, make me nervous. I am never sure where it is coming from. Whose universalism? By whom, and for whom? susan buck-morss: And whether you’re allowed in it! harry harootunian: Right. Basically, this concern has come from my own study of an area outside Euro-America. It agitated Chinese and Japanese throughout the twentieth century. Who was determining what was universal? When Japan resorted to the construction of the nation-form, which was intended to be interchangeable with other nation-forms, they were well aware of the fact that history itself, the narrative of world history, still excluded them. james elkins: As usual, I am listening with an inappropriately allegorical ear, and hearing things that have to do with the art world. What is biennale culture if not a universalism that welcomes alternate histories, but never articulates them? A culture that is impeccably inclusive, and yet excludes the majority of modes of art production worldwide? It is also problematic that Susan’s model cannot describe a consistent practice that could be represented in the art world. Individual artworks can certainly give evidence of the kind of experience that she describes: but to my ear, the discussion in the last ten minutes has been dispiriting because it shows the lengths— the sheer radical, anti- or extra-philosophic lengths—to which artworks must go if they are to genuinely “disidentify” and refuse to “do the work that philosophy demands.” And also the impossibility of ordinarily local practices, nonoppositional ones, working apart from the universality of global art. (Harry’s senses of everydayness are more optimistic in that regard.) I’m imagining the conversation may have sounded promising from the point of view of resistant art practices and institutional critiques. But surely it would be exactly wrong to hear a prescription for contemporary art practice in what has been said here, as if it were a call for an even more vigilantly radical avantgarde. If anything, Susan’s model and Harry’s amendment show how complicit, how weak, how predictable, how misguided about their own independence, artworld gestures toward radical disidentification must be. And how far from a viable sense of the local we really are. shigemi inaga: My principal problem is that I constantly feel the danger of the desire to be included in the so-called master narrative, or to be properly represented in a dominant economic market. The fact that I am here on this stage is already very contradictory in that sense, and personally I’d prefer to be in the audience, or even underground!

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The global art market is like the top floor of the Titanic, which is sinking. There are many laborers, who are not unionized, working in the hold of the ship. (And why not? The revolution comes from the bottom.) james elkins: Well, if they’re in the lower decks of the Titanic, they’re all drowning. shigemi inaga: Hmm . . . they can probably find a submarine. james elkins: Shigemi, that is the second great maritime metaphor we’ve had this week. The other one we stole from Julian Stallabrass: he described the art market as Ahab, tied to the whale of capitalism. bhaskar mukhopadhyay: The only universality that exists today is the universality of capital. I think we should be cautious about universality as such, because if you think historically, Western universalism has always been a mechanism for exclusion.5 Even in today’s mediatized, globalized world, how many people are citizensubjects in the Kantian sense?6 I would say not more than 20 percent. However, unlike the eighteenth century, today’s noncitizens have to negotiate, perforce, with various institutions which are metropolitan in origin but touch upon the lives of millions of Third-World people. Think of the NGOs in Bangladesh, UN humanitarian organizations in Africa, the institution of democracy in India, and the civil society movements in Latin America. There are also widely dispersed diasporic and refugee communities from the Third World in various parts of Europe and the U.S. Today, real politics in “most of the world” does not take place in the sanitized domain of “civil society”—the precious flower of associative endeavours of “free” citizens. They have bartered politics for good living. Politics worth its name goes on in those dark, nebulous zones where the mass of disenfranchized, marginal population of noncitizens negotiate with the various institutions of global civil society.7 These are the places where new political imaginaries are being forged, and it is through these tentative, hesitant, and often violent negotiations that a new political modernity is emerging. These are the spaces of hope, this is how newness enters history. The celebration of people’s so-called enthusiasm (a typical Kantian trope) about “politics” in Moscow during the last days of Soviet Communism or the legacy of the “Black Jacobins” of Haiti will only help perpetuate the Eurocentric legacy of the Enlightenment. So, Susan and others of her ilk, encore un effort si vous voulez être republicans. Hence, instead of looking for 5. Through a rigorous deconstructive reading of a canonical text of Kant, Gayatri Spivak has demonstrated that “the subject as such in Kant is geopolitically differentiated.” Which is to say, non-Europeans (e.g., “New Hollanders” and “the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego,” in Kant’s own words) cannot be citizens precisely because they are not yet subjects. Thus Kant signaled the axiomatics of imperialism—White Man’s Burden—which was put in practice by European colonialism in Asia and Africa during the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries and whose echo is still audible today in Bush’s

rhetoric on Iraq and the discourse on clash of civilizations. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 27. 6. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Minority Histories, Subaltern Pasts,” in Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 7. Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).

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some vestiges of the stale Enlightenment ideas, instead of this leftist melancholy and nostalgia, it would not be a bad idea to follow Negri. Under the present restrictive conditions, our immediate preoccupation should be, not a pedagogic project of elevating not-yet-subjects to citizenship, but the activist project of demanding global free mobility of labor—now! zhivka valiavicharska: Bhaskar, thank you for your fiery response to my provocation. Of course, no one who has experienced the dismantling force of a powerful critique would disagree with you. It would be wrong, however, to prescribe universalizing modes of thought entirely to the Western historical and intellectual tradition: any normative claim implicitly gestures towards the universal. And I also don’t agree that the forms that universality takes within modernity have enabled only practices of domination. We shouldn’t go as far as denying the critical modalities inscribed within modernity itself, which have given birth to modernity’s own historical overcomings, to its own self-undoing. The socialist struggles, for example, clearly articulated themselves around the international idea, while the African national liberation movements claimed there is a universal human endeavor in each historical instance of struggle against colonial domination.8 They argued for multiplicities of interconnected experiences, a kind of universality— or rather, a gesture towards it—that is not reified in some essentialist content because it remains open to the outside, it dwells in a state of becoming. Recent discourses on popular cosmopolitanisms and various pluralized forms of global political consciousness have suggested that there might be some political agency in rearticulating and reframing these ideas for the sake of the historical present, especially in a moment of vast global reorganization of labor. That would mean subverting their universalizing drive and reinscribing them into concrete material realities.9 I think it is rather these performative gestures of active subversion that open up productive possibilities. pedro erber: But even if we could get rid of the problem of exclusion, inclusion itself is not less problematic and tyrannical. This is precisely the problem of imperialism—or “empire,” which in this case does not make much of a difference. And I don’t think it can be solved within the realm of universalism. james elkins: But even so, if I persist in my perverse allegorical reading, Bhaskar is right: “citizens” of the global art world certainly exclude many others, and they do so in the only way that is genuinely ideological: they do it while imagining they are incapable of it by definition. suzana milevska: It was interesting for me to listen to all these thoughts about belonging and inclusion. In the opening roundtable, I was concerned that we talk about these themes, and somehow we have come around to them at last. 8. Pheng Cheah’s Spectral Nationality provides a brilliant exploration of this question. Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003)

9. Look at Anna Tsing’s previously cited Friction, as well as Pheng Cheah’s Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006).

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I would like to propose a link between our concern with the narratives of art history and these concerns about inclusion and universality. Perhaps it is important to return to belonging without belonging or belonging without having something in common: Rancière and Agamben both talk about this in relation to the events in Tiananmen Square, where the students did not want to claim certain identity—they did not want to write manifestos, or define and sign lists of demands. The students wanted not to belong, not to be overwritten by one identity, but still to participate. For me, this was not only a question of participation, but also a question of longing to belong without belonging, to be-in-common without a common cause or identity.10 So when we’re looking at a model for universal art history or criticism, we don’t need to look further than this event. When the book Is Art History Global? came out, I saw it as participatory, because it had a whole series of events linked together—seminars, transcripts, assessments, commentators. All this thorough and complex process of redistributing and circulating ideas through rhizomatic networks produces an unprecedented multilayered knowledge art-history model. We should look for new, participatory models of art history. Even though this one event—this week—by itself is problematic, because it brings together authorities, provokes stress, and so forth, a different structure, a series of events, would be welcome. thomas dacosta kaufmann: That is a very productive idea. In all our talk about Kantianism and so forth, a distinction that has slipped away is one made in Panofsky’s commentary on the difference between works of art and historical events.11 I would like to push this point further, and consider the distinction, if we can make it, between the subject matter of the field—works of art, their histories—and the theorization of them, that Panofsky was considering in his argument—the methods by which they are approached. Would you, then, have anything more to add about how you might treat contemporary art that might be related to your suggestion about belonging? suzana milevska: Well, you could look at the practices of artists and try to find models there— james elkins: Participation and collaboration are well thematized in contemporary art12— suzana milevska: My idea came from contemporary artistic practices, actually. There is already a predominance of more or less successful participatory models in contemporary art that intervene in art history or in institutional practices. Let me mention Jochen Gerz, whose participatory book project Anthology of Art consisted of contributions via Internet by artists and art theorists who sent their 10. Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 86–87. 11. Erwin Panofsky, “Der Begriff des Kunstwollens,” reprinted in Aufsätze zu Grundfragen der Kunstwissenschaft, 2nd ed., edited by

Hariolf Oberer and Egon Verheyen (Berlin: Bruno Hessling), 29–43, especially 29–30. 12. For example, Charles Green, The Third Hand: Collaboration in Art from Conceptalism to Postmodernism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).

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answers to the artist’s question “In the context of contemporary art what is your vision of a yet unknown art?”13 Or David Medalla, who created a participatory noninstitutional London Biennial by gathering mostly the immigrant artists in London with whom he collaborates on daily basis.14 Often participatory art functions as a kind of institutional critique of art history and institutionalization of art practices. james elkins: For what it’s worth, the idea of this book series is to be participatory in such a way that no position is ruled out of court: any engagement with the themes that can be seen as such—that can be understood as engagement, by any of the participants—will be included. claire pentecost: Regarding participation in art practice, as it is usually seen in gallery art. One of the reason I often find participation extremely disappointing is that the artists themselves do not participate in heterogeneous or interesting worlds beyond their own art practice. So what they are inviting us to participate in is something that remains isolated in relation to the culture at large. So I think the whole rubric of participation needs constant, thorough deepening, if we are to go in that direction in art. susan buck-morss: At Cornell, the Visual Studies Program organized a conference called “State of Emergency,” before George Bush invaded Iraq. Paul Chan took advantage of that moment, when it was inevitable that we would invade: he went to Iraq and made a video of people in a park, people enjoying their Sunday afternoon.15 It’s a historical document, and whenever I see that video, I see the images of the war that followed, the destruction of the country, superimposed on that video. He situated himself in a moment of time and space, used the global possibility of travel, went there, and made the work. claire pentecost: Paul went there at the invitation of Voices in the Wilderness, a group based in Chicago, which had been taking food and supplies to Iraq for years, during the embargo. So it’s significant that he did that by connecting with a group that was involved in the world. andrzej szczerski: I agree with Suzana, and I would like to add the dimension of geography, or space. The very narrative of globalization implies participation, and yet the kind of participation is clearly implied in each case. I am participating differently when I speak from Kraków than I do when I speak here. I think this question of location can be crucial for the degree and kind of participation. For example, in relation to Susan’s “Hegel and Haiti,” about the Haitian revolution and its relation to Hegel, I would be interested to know if other colonial revolutions that were taking place at the same time could themselves be points of reference: instead of our thinking of Hegel in relation to Haiti, Haiti could become a point of reference in relation to the other revolutions. And so forth: I would insist on the importance of the spatial and local. 13. Jochen Gerz, Anthology of Art (Cologne: Salon Verlag, 2004). Available at www.anthology-of-art.net (accessed October 1, 2007).

14. See www.londonbiennale.net. 15. Paul Chan, Baghdad in No Particular Order, January 2003, 51 mins.

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james elkins: So, sorry to be the perpetual allegorist, but if I read that in terms of narratives, I see the same possibility that first came up in Is Art History Global?—that the points of reference of art history and criticism might become unmoored from Hegel, Benjamin, Foucault, Barthes, Lacan, and the others, and take as their compass points Vico, or Sor Juana, or Gombrowicz.16 That would be an example of Susan’s idea of direct juxtapositions, and it is also the most radical possibility for current art history and visual culture. The cultural geography of art writing could be forever altered if we dared change our methods as well as our subject matter. And yet in the contemporary art world this possibility is once again invisible, because it seems everyone already does it (what with the myriad obscure references that are sprinkled into every account of art), and yet few people do it in any profound sense, because art narratives remain closely bound to the Hegels, Foucaults, Lacans, and so forth. bhaskar mukhopadhyay: India is about to have its first biennial.17 As some of you may know, India had its own art history, its own homegrown modernism: it had the Bengal school, the Calcutta group, and it developed an interesting art history. Indian modernism did not so much negotiate with the Western avant-garde as come out as a reaction against Indian indigenism. Tagore, who took to painting late in his life, was hailed by Kandinsky as an Expressionist avant la lettre. We had powerful figures like Jamini Roy and Ramkinkar who blended the virility of folk art with Western modernism. As the biennial culture comes in, we are confronted with works which are Indian in name only. I am not being judgmental. I am merely recounting where the force of global capitalism takes us. The indigenous, “small” tradition has been completely obliterated by the globalization of Indian contemporary art. Yet nothing has come up to compensate for the loss of our autonomy and agency. susan buck-morss: Well, hold on. We have to ask about the difference between global capitalism, as far as India’s cultural autonomy is concerned, and the present form of cultural dependency. bhaskar mukhopadhyay: In India, we have a home-grown, indigenous capitalism as well as a home-grown indigenous democracy. These were achieved through a long process of anticolonial struggle. Until recently, we could decide what we would do. We dared to go against the powerful U.S. hegemony during the hey16. This is something I argued in Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2003)—that the field could grow most radically if writers gave up the familiar methodological sources and looked to Vico, etc. The theme recurs in the review of David Summers’s Real Spaces, in Art Bulletin 86, no. 2 (2004): 373–80, reprinted in Is Art History Global?—there the context is the possibility that art history might respond to visual studies, postcolonial studies, and cultural theory by shedding its reliance on its stock of philoso-

phers and theorists and finding non-Western interpretive methodologies. I still think these are important possibilities that are not pursued. To put it in emblematic form: even Gayatri Spivak relies on Derrida for methodological structure, rather than taking Sanskrit texts, for example, as methodological models. 17. This is supposed to take place in Delhi in November 2007, but there is a strong chance that it may be postponed for reasons that have to do with funding.

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day of the Cold War; we preached nonalignment from Bandung. In sum, we had control over our own destiny. And that is much better than being swamped by global capital, IMF, the World Bank, and biennials. susan buck-morss: Good. But it’s not home-grown indigenous art. bhaskar mukhopadhyay: I am not advocating indigenism. By no means. “India” is not an object apart from the world; we must acknowledge its entanglements with various elsewheres. But the global village is counterintuitive, and nobody lives there. So long as the debates remained local and the imaginary called “India” was considered as a relatively autonomous place, we had space for maneuvering, we had agency. And we produced interesting art. Now all that is gone. james elkins: Bhaskar, I do not disagree about the overwhelming effect of biennial culture. But I have to say that your advocacy of Indian modernist painting is problematic. I wish it were so simple. The painters you admire, Jamini Roy among them, cannot be described in texts that will be read in western Europe and North America in such a way that the artists appear necessary to modernism. They are representable as local, but not as necessary. I agree there was an indigenous critical and historical discourse in India; actually, I think it is still well embodied by people like Geeta Kapur. But that discourse can only seem necessary when its context is outside art history. That is why Geeta is so often welcome at conferences of cultural history, postcolonial theory, subaltern and area studies, and so seldom invited to speak to art historians who study Western modernism. I’m sorry to be such a broken record about this, but without taking this problem into account, a gesture in the direction of Indian modernist painting and modernist art history is a gesture in the direction of something that cannot be valued because it cannot be translated. michelle eischen: I am an art professor, and I’ve been attending the public events this week. I kept thinking I should define what I have in mind before I say it, but then again no one else seems to have any idea what they’re talking about either. I attended the Venice Biennale this year, and I was blown away by the work, and the amount of work. Living in South Dakota, and coming to Illinois—from a very conservative state to a very liberal one, although Bush has spoken in both places—it occurs to me that I often have no idea what people are talking about in South Dakota, and people there sometimes have no clue what I’m talking about. They use the same words, but they mean something completely different there. So in translating other cultures, including those that exist within your own nation, you look for things you recognize. I wonder, then, about the effects of globalization on America, instead of the effects of America on globalization. It seems like we’re imagining that America is somehow in charge of globalizing the world, and we’re trying to understand what our effect is, but there is also the effect we have on ourselves—

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james elkins: It’s a wonderful point. So the confusion of our topic would be an effect of confusions about the effect of globalization on America. michelle eischen: Yes. The products of isolation in regional America are political and racial intolerance. Those things exist in other nations, and our communities are gateways for bringing people from other nations, and specific populations go to specific regions in America. So I am trying to understand how this kind of regionalism has a place in globalization. harry harootunian: I really like that question. It dovetails with something I have been thinking about for the last few days. I have always thought of global capital in terms of the way it acts on the local. But you put it well: some form of globalization really does situate itself on the level of the local or, as I would prefer to say it, the everyday. But we have not dealt with how that local is able to disaggregate or segregate capital, or capital’s time. It does, in interesting and unpredictable ways. zhivka valiavicharska: Gillian Hart’s Disabling Globalization, for example, poses the problem with the totalizing force of what we mean by “capitalism” methodologically: global processes, she says, are being actively transformed and transfigured in their concrete instances, and it is up to our methodological and conceptual ability to capture these processes in politically “enabling” ways.18 susan buck-morss: I think Michelle’s question is brilliantly stated, and necessary to open a whole situation that our discourse has somehow not even allowed. It is totally relevant. It is a way of really bringing things together that did not seem to be linked. claire pentecost: I met a South African artist, Garth Erasmus, a couple of years ago at Bellagio. He said after Picasso, painting, for Africans, is impossible. The generation of European artists who used African art totally screwed us. Where do we enter a globally understandable art language, without either being derivative of Picasso and the surrealists, or parading some false authenticity? This really interests me. I am very interested in the responses of artists who do not normally participate, when they are asked to participate on a global level. pedro erber: This reminds me of the case of Brazilian modernism in the 1920s, and more precisely of what a group of intellectuals theorized at that time in terms of antropofagia. They defined the specificity of Brazilian culture in terms of its capacity to “eat,” to cannibalize the foreign. Although this was portrayed by Oswald de Andrade in the 1928 “Anthropophagic Manifesto” as a Brazilian particularity in relation to the European world, it can be understood as a cultural strategy for the periphery in general. What cogently emerges in the case of Picasso’s relationship with African art is that, in a sense, European culture too has always been “anthropophagic” through and through. It grew by cannibalizing the rest of the world. So even that possibility is foreclosed as an original cultural strategy for the periphery. 18. Hart, Disabling Globalization: Places of Power in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

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james elkins: Claire, that fits perfectly well with what we were talking about during the week, and it is the main reason I travel to places like Kyrgyzstan. When I said to Bhaskar that Indian painters like Jamini Roy cannot be described in such a way that they appear necessary to modernism, I didn’t mean to imply there weren’t counterexamples. Abanindranath Tagore and Amrita Sher-Gil come to mind, and there are others in their generations. But no Western text is going to be able to find a place for an artist like M. F. Hussain, whose work will appear—sorry to have to say this so nakedly—as belated, watered-down cubism. This is a very serious problem, which I think needs protracted, sympathetic attention. And Pedro, Tarsila do Amaral, and other artists of the antropofagia have places in North American and western European pedagogy, but they are the places so well understood from Fanon and Said onward: the entrancing and innovative but ultimately marginal optional artists of modernism. claire pentecost: There are art histories being constructed by artists, through their negotiations. Fred Wilson is a mainstream, inside-man example, but he is making new art histories. zhivka valiavicharska: There is, for example, East Art Map— claire pentecost: That was done by irwin, a painting group in Slovenia, which has made a map of the art that was happening in the Soviet bloc—Brian, you can explain this better. brian holmes: If you want to do something in art and art history, you have to address yourself to experimental devices, where people are trying to do something that is social, that isn’t limited to the realm of education and peer reviewing. There are a lot of these projects, and they take place on many levels, from activism to something as complex as intervening in art history. The East Art Map is an ongoing project of the irwin group, which is part of the Neue Slowenische Kunst group in Slovenia.19 They began from the observation that if an Eastern artist goes to the West, they die as an artist, whether a literal death, or by disappearance and absorption into a field that ignores them. So they decided to stay in Ljubljana, and one of their projects is a map, which they made by selecting artists in the former Soviet sphere. At first it was a special edition of a magazine, then a Web site, and now a large book. suzana milevska: I am sorry that I have to intervene here, but it is relevant to mention that irwin did not make the selection of artists on their own: they invited more than twenty art historians from eastern Europe make the selection and to write about the artists and art practices that were overlooked by Western art historians and critics. So there are two omissions in our conversation: the irwin artists did not make the selection themselves, and it was not only artists from Soviet sphere that they looked at, but the book also included artists from former Yugoslavia. 19. East Art Map: Contemporary Art and Eastern Europe, edited by IRWIN (London: Afterall Books, 2006).

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brian holmes: Whether their choices are right or wrong, and whether the artists stand up to historical scrutiny or not, some will, and that will lead to other choices. That will create comparisons different from the usual ones, in which people say, “Oh, that artist is derivative of what happened in New York.” irwin are convinced that scrutiny and study will result in an extension and multiplication of what art history can be. It is an intervention in art history by people who are outside it. james elkins: Yes, I’ve met the irwin group, and I’ve seen that project. I agree with the first part of what you said, that interventions in art history need to find new forms. And I can’t disagree with the last part of what you said, that artists need to bring artists to scholars’ attention. But I don’t think of that example as anything other than an art book—which is how it is presented—and a curiosity. It is often mentioned as an example of an intervention in art history. I think the problem is far more serious than anything that can be addressed by just presenting new artists for consideration. That has always resulted in the marginalization, the oblivion, of the “new” artist: it happens in Steven Mansbach’s book, in Clark’s book, in the case of Indian artists, in innumerable attempts to present “new” modern artists.20 I really don’t want to sound doctrinaire or conservative. I am not at all defending some status quo, or hoping for some universal art history, or defending some version of the discipline. I am working hard on this problem in my own research, and my stubbornness comes mainly from seeing the enormous quantity of these efforts, and their universal failure. In Kazakhstan, I “discovered” a wonderful Kazakh modernist, someone who could plausibly catch the attention of western European and North American historians of modernism: a truly exceptional, bizarre, captivating artist, a kind of Alfred Kubin. But I know it will take more than exhibitions and books to create a narrative of modernisms that needs to include him. It takes a foundational criticism of the terms of art, history, and the global, and foundational reconsiderations of concepts like cubism, expressionism, and so forth.21 claire pentecost: But so what that East Art Project was presented as an art project? Why is there a line between what counts as art history and art criticism? james elkins: There doesn’t need to be, but the discourses have to speak to one another. In that case, I don’t see that they did. susan buck-morss: But we are not trying to solve the problem, we are showing models. In other words, the question is: what models are the right ones for changing the situation? Should we look at theory, or at artists? zhivka valiavicharska: I think there are two sides here. I side with these emancipatory knowledges that are emerging, and these self-constituted art histories, that do 20. For Mansbach’s book, see Is Art History Global? Clark’s book is touched on earlier in this transcript.

21. See the end of Section 3 of the Seminars.

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not want to be incorporated. One could read projects like the East Art Project in this way, and this is precisely their political gesture. But on the other hand, I do have to agree that there is such an enormous hegemony of practices, discourses, and methods in art interpretation and art history. This is why I would caution against making foreclosures by erecting impossibilities and staging universal failures. For me the question is not about whether alternative art histories and translations are possible, but how they are possible within the art-historical discursive and institutional contexts; more importantly, we need to embrace them as they are, in their imperfect formulations, and move towards their practice. Only their practice can test their validity against history. suzana milevska: I am not completely convinced of the irrelevance of the issue of inclusiveness. I doubt that the book would have been published with the wellestablished Western art publisher Afterall Books had they not wanted to be included. Moreover, when I was invited to write the section on contemporary artists from Macedonia, I encountered another inner contradiction of East Art Map book project methodology: it was exactly the fact that we were expected to stick to the national model of reflecting on art. Even though the ambition of the irwin group was to deconstruct the limitations of the national framework, there was no relevant cooperation among the invited writers, and we each had to write about artists from our own countries. We were all working independently, communicating only with the group members who thus became the masters of the overall narrative by drawing the relations among the suggested artists into a map (using questionnaires that were completed by all of us). The map was later woven into a kind of carpet. It is bewildering how what are assumed to be vibrant relations among different art phenomena in eastern Europe have ended up “objectified.” It’s so contradictory to the project’s otherwise important initial intention of opening new potential interpretations, relations, and collaborations. andrzej szczerski: The project has also been contested because despite its emancipatory rhetoric—that is, its bringing back lost knowledge—it actually reproduces the very same essentializing categories of East and West. It can also be argued that it is a product of globalization, in that it foregrounds those categories, which operate in a global register. thomas dacosta kaufmann: We can distinguish here between agents, modalities, and the means of distribution. The agents are artists in this instance, and I agree there isn’t a distinction to be made between art historians and artists; after all, before art history became an academic discipline, most of the people who wrote about art were artists. Second, the modality or form of the presentation includes the geographic means of presentation, and its presentation in book form, and this has also been done before.22 What is distinctive, and gets to the global side of the matter, is that communication has changed. In all our thirty hours of conversation, we have talked very little about that issue. In regard to continuities and dis22. See Toward a Geography of Art.

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ruptions: it’s not necessarily only the scale or the speed of things that is involved, but differences in technologies of communication that become important. The Internet creates possibilities that are genuinely new, and this point relates to the question of hegemonic discourses, because Internet sites can be seen very widely. james elkins: This, of course, pertains to modernist art—in India, in the Balkans, in other places—but not international contemporary art. It’s another example of the curious phenomenon I noted when we started this morning: when we talk about premodern art, or modernism, there are all sorts of ragged edges to what we say. But when we turn to contemporary international art, even if it’s problematic, our conversation flows ever so easily. It’s the effect Leo Steinberg called “modern oblivion.”

chris cutrone: 23 In conceptualizing “commodification,” we have assumed that it is simply an effect of homogenization. It could instead be understood as an effect of heterogeneity and homogeneity. Value is said to deconcretize, decontextualize, and homogenize. These categories are being raised only negatively or pejoratively, and posed as the problems of capitalism. But I would propose that we could raise the question of the commodity form as a kind of participation and not only as constraint or destruction. Recently we have seen the “wiping out” of various forms of particularity in globalization, but we have also witnessed the emergence of the local and the particular through such things as the local/informal economy, which has become an important aspect of post-Fordist and neoliberal capitalism since the 1960s. All the discourse on art community, situating art as concrete and irreducible, partakes of this phenomenon. We should beware of falling into a one-sided understanding and hence potentially reactionary critique of capital and the social forms it conditions. Such a dialectical approach to addressing capital, as a temporal-historical process that is the fundamental structural context for concrete phenomena of modern society, and the commodity form as double-sided, as bound up with a process of both emancipation and domination, owes to Marx’s mature critical theory in the Grundrisse and Capital, elaborated subsequently by the critical theorists of advanced, twentieth-century capitalism Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno, and, more recently, Moishe Postone in his critical exegesis and reinterpretation of Marx.24 james elkins: That is a wonderful note to strike here at the end, because it keeps alive the possibility that we might not be investigating our subject only in order to find new ways to break the system. The global art world is so enormous, so rich, and yet so vapid, that it deserves serious study and not just intervention. Thank you, everyone. See you next year. 23. Cutrone teaches in Liberal Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. See home.speedsite.com/ccutrone/.

24. Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

globalism/globalization

Caroline A. Jones

If constructing the future and settling everything for all times are not our affair, it is all the more clear what we have to accomplish at present: I am referring to ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be. —karl marx to arnold ruge, 1843

In the sheaves of documents associated with this book was an intriguing inconsistency. Reading various proposals and synopses, I wondered: was the book to be Globalism and Art (as in some versions) or Globalization and Art (as in others)?1 In other words, was the brief to examine artistic representations of an actively evolving world system? Aiming at “globalism,” to operate within the discursive sphere of art, with its traditional “isms” producing situated subjects by leveraging a protected aesthetic realm? Or was the book going to wade into charged debates over the powerful economic, environmental, and political processes that are captured by the term “globalization,” imagined to harry art’s autonomy at every turn? The former imagines that the work of art can be given attributes by the artist so that the object may knowingly reflect on its global situation from a protected sphere; the latter suggests the artwork’s helplessness, its inability to avoid translations, transactions, transportation, and transformation by pervasive processes of globalization. The latter seems to dominate the Seminars—but the utopian dreams of the former haunt every page. Thus we find the traces of these two formations in the printed seminars: globalization [G] dominating globalism [g], anxious Left academics battling for intellect’s autonomous realm. My goal here will be to advocate [g] over [G], but what is also worth noting are the topoi that wind between the two possibilities and reveal them as interdependent. Take Jim Elkins’s constant admonishment that we should really be thinking about global art production in quasistatistical terms. He asks roguishly whether there isn’t more tourist than “fine” art, aren’t more collectors acquiring “art” from the cruise ship than from the dealer next door, more visual things on people’s walls and the screens of their computers than have ever passed through the so-called art world. Elkins’s demotic desires motivate an argument that no theory of art can call itself “global” if it cannot leave the (still modernist) fascination with “critique” and elite art production [g] 1. Yet another was Theorizing World Art, which suggests the packaged consumer panoply of “world music.”

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to deal with the globalized labor that produces art-like objects every day [G]. Yet to address this question properly (and frame it, as does Shigemi Inaga, in terms of “cultural capital” per Bourdieu), one would need to bring the work of more quantitative social scientists into the discussion.2 Yet they were not invited to the seminars—art, literary, political, and cultural theorists predominate. Thus the fear that we should really be dealing with [G] kept erupting, despite the fact that [g] is much more accessible to our analytic tools. The second trope emerged in the shadow of those absent quantitative social scientists. Marxist economist Ernest Mandel’s category of “late capitalism” was important for reorienting the work of culture from individual genius to social agency, yet its thoughtful adherents Buck-Morss, Jameson, and Inaga have no interest in measuring art by numerousness, ubiquity, market share, or consumer satisfaction. They ask instead a more urgent set of questions inherited from modernism’s Marxist past, and its productive twilight in the 1970s—what is to be done, and what is being done even now? The urgency is driven by the certainty that “trickle-down” globalization is most pernicious when it hits the ground of local practice. Artists outside the center (which center still exists, apparently, and is here in the good old U.S. of A., according to a performative claim made by [the American] Fredric Jameson) have little chance of negotiating with the hegemony of capitalism in its late, Hardt and Negri–style dispersed imperial phase. [g] is dwarfed by [G] at every turn. Unless, in Inaga’s and Kaufmann’s very provocative interventions, we reckon with the fact that culture is always moving, acquiring ideas and producing other ideas and “things to be collected.” In this fruitful model, we can argue that the dominant mode of all kinds of cultural production is, in fact, appropriation and translation. This activity neutralizes the hidden imperialism of an always-discursive “center” by producing an infinitely extensive surface of borrowings and mimetic adaptations. Potentially fusing the [g] and [G] strains, creative misprision emerges as the first path to “local” identity, and identitarian cultural forms can be strategically reconnected to a global flow. Yet this promise of synthesis never really happens, and the two strains never fully intertwine. Elkins never gets anyone to care about the kitschy cruise ship artist, and Jameson never seems to convince anyone (certainly not this writer) to agree with resurrected twentieth-century epigrams such as “There is only the national situation . . . It’s a boundary that cannot really be transgressed.” Younger participants in particular seemed restive with such pronouncements. I don’t blame them: it’s not that the national disappears, it’s just that it needs to be understood as an ideological effect of globalization rather than some impervious boundary to its invasive force.3 2. I’m thinking here of the work of economists such as Bruno Frey, who argues that the measurable economic effects of having an opera in your town, for example, far outweigh the likelihood that you will actually attend. See Frey, Arts and Economics: Analysis and Cultural Policy (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 2000).

3. It is, in this argument, the intensifying pressures of internationalizing technical regimes and world orders that stimulates the highest pitch of nation-talk and ethnic action. In his analysis of the “Nation-Thing,” Slavoj Z˘iz˘ek cites Lacan in locating the upsurge of ethnic nationalisms “as the reverse of the striving after uni-

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Perhaps because few actual artists got discussed, the seminars were more about the problem of the global in art history than in art. Actually existing art production would be a good place to begin questioning this scalar divide—between, on the one hand, the dispersed microeconomies implied by Elkins, who wants to think about isolated but highly productive “art pockets” around the world (whether the now-infamous cruise ship artist, or the painter of big-bottomed nudes for local living rooms in Kazakhstan), and, on the other, the worldgirdling hegemony of capital suggested by Jameson, where the only conceivable form of resistance is to “do work that doesn’t want to be looked at by Americans” (the Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai’s work set in Buenos Aires being his example—although he does seem to have looked at it).4 Actually existing art production does happen in pockets5—but then we need to ask how the pockets are sutured together into economies and discourse networks (such as the event itself, the Stone Theory Institute). It turns out that this suturing happens through practices that are already global, including Elkins’s travels around the world, his increasingly well-published and distributed lectures, and his now also public discussion of the Kazakh artist—who is suddenly less isolated than one might have thought. Similarly, the “resistance” Jameson wants to see in local production is already global if it is positioning itself against an imagined tractor beam of global proportions—at least in the rhetoric and discourse of “central” scholars. A potential for bridging Elkins’s thesis and Jameson’s antithesis was a third trope that began to emerge from the eddying debates. Inaga’s emphasis on translation, and Kaufmann’s on transportation, fueled younger scholars’ interests in the localized production of the subject in and for globalization. Here is where Jameson connects (at least for this reader): “As for consumption: I think an excellent way of talking about it is in terms of constructing subjectivity. Art and culture program people to live in this new world of globalization, and in particular in its new spaces . . . The ideas people have about globalization and the free market are certainly part of what the artwork works on, and it is very much involved in consumption.”6 I would argue, however, that the Marxist distinction between production and consumption is too rigid to be useful at this moment, for the contemporary art world is full of shifting models that mix and muddy versality that constitutes the very basis of our capitalist civilization”—but “reverse” understood not dialectically but psychically, as residue or effect. Z˘iz˘ek, Looking Awry (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991): 162. 4. Echoing “actually existing socialism” here is not purely a joke (mocking the blasted terrain of Brezhnev’s plans for Eastern Europe). It means to take our leftist anxieties about what global capitalism is doing to us seriously, both by reminding us of the roots of our utopianism and by bringing these ideas to the measure of actual praxis. 5. Indeed, Alice Kim provides this gloss on the supposedly “unavailable to Americans” work Jameson references: “This movie won the best

director prize at Cannes (Wong Kar Wai attains recognition as global auteur director), Tarantino introduced and released Wong’s Chungking Express to American film audiences, and most of Wong’s films have been re-released as DVDs by the Criterion Collection. And In the Mood for Love and 2046 didn’t do too badly in the U.S. box offices either. Wong’s highly stylized movies may not be on the short list of Hollywood enthusiasts but they are avidly consumed by many American cinephiles—especially fans of the French New Wave, as well as art students etc.—you can even find this film at some Blockbusters outlets.” E-mail communication, March 3, 2008. 6. See Section 1 of the Seminars.

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these very categories (just as outside the art world’s semipoliced boundaries, categories of vee-jays and d-jays, mixers and matchers, YouTubers and Facebookers fatally complicate the model of maker and receiver).7 The artist herself experiments with subject formation, being the first “consumer” of the art in its ideational phase; the collector fiddles with aesthetic subject formation, installing the piece just so; the art critic’s subjectivity shifts, sometimes cataclysmically, in direct encounter with whatever it is we still call “art.”8 In this ever-shifting context, what frame could it be, in which “there is only the national situation”?9 Given that globalization (like internationalism before it) works as a surfactant, spreading across world systems to break the surface tension of “the nation” (with “German” pavilions famously exhibiting a Korean American, or Documenta Platforms operating in New Delhi, Dakar, and Lagos, or Manifestas and biennials leveraging global attention on cities, rather than states). That “nation thing” (per Žižek) is produced today as a trauma-scarred remainder in globalization’s biennial culture—produced only to be broken, and reformulated, and broken, performatively, again and again.10 Such forces of translation and transportation make it equally problematic, in my view, to describe Hélio Oiticica as an artist whose effectiveness was confined to the “smaller country” of Brazil (smaller than what, and how would that be measured?), where presumably, per Jameson, an artist emerging “outside the center” would need to remain in order for his work to have its greatest political resonance. Umgekehrt! Oiticica was engaged in actually existing globalized art production—and this can be studied in historical terms, since he was most active from the 1960s through the late 1970s. The only way one could agree with Jameson’s depressing judgment that a non-“central” artist works best at home would be to ignore this history, as when Pedro Erber blames “a generalized blindness among critics and scholars in the United States and Europe” for their supposed incapacity to recognize “the international or transnational implications of the works of artists in these ‘smaller countries,’” such as Oiticica.11 His writings were collected and studied in English (see the Witte de With catalogue of 1992) in parallel with their collation and publication in Brazil.12 7. See Jones, “The Server-User Mode,” Artforum 46, no. 2 (October 2007): 316–25. 8. Here one thinks of Diderot dealing with Greuze, Baudelaire encountering Guys and then challenged by Manet, or Greenberg transformed first by Mondrian and then Pollock. 9. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann’s salutary focus on “things made to be collected” (or, I would add, gifted as tribute) reminds us that long before the national, the trade in fancy goods had always vexed the boundaries of the local—that was its job. The Bronze Age dagger of Ahmose found in Queen Aah-Hotep’s Egyptian tomb uses Phoenician palmettes laid in niello techniques from Byblos with Syrian animal-style motives to make tribute to the knowing tastes of its royal recipient. This tribute item already knows the tricks of a trade that will display exotic distinction along with a bravura syncretism

available to the skilled artisans and cosmopolitans of the day. Objects at this and larger scales (the architecture of Venice, for example) perform their worldliness—not as hapless “influence” but artistic strategy—and it is only the blindered optics of regionally organized art history that have hampered us from telling these more nuanced tales. 10. Z˘iz˘ek, Looking Awry, 162. 11. See Section 1 of the Seminars. 12. Hélio Oiticica (Rotterdam: Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art; Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1992). The exhibition appeared in Rotterdam February 22–April 26, 1992; Galerie nationale du jeu de paume, Paris, June 8–August 23, 1992; Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, October 1–December 6, 1992; Centro de Arte Moderna da Fundaçao Calouste Gulbenkian, Lis-

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Oiticica is a good historical example of actually existing global production. Increasingly in the postwar period, we see a globalism that required a multicontinental set of contacts, whether imaginative or actual. Oiticica’s imagined “contact” with Mondrian even when he was still in Brazil is important to my argument, precisely because—via the theory of antropofagia (aggressive consumption of the culturally “Other” by the culturally “native”)—it appropriates, translates, and aggressively interprets the dominant master of Western abstraction. To my reckoning there is no theorist or historian who captures the sublimated spiritwork of the Dutch modernist more accurately, or gets its spatial implications more fully, than Oiticica. Providing an “object lesson” for us today, Oiticica shows what it means to transform the utopian universalism of Mondrian’s European abstraction into a strategically local “efflorescence,” referencing its latitudinal concerns with a different kind of light and color even as it gives important feedback to European modernism about what systems of repression and exclusion undergird “universalist” claims.13 Oiticica’s history exemplifies something of the real-world practice of actually-existing-globality, which in his case would include the artist’s important correspondence with Lygia Clark in Paris, his enduring bond with Guy Brett in London, his cooperation with curator Kynaston McShine in New York (McShine included him in MoMA’s 1970 Information show), and of course the informal global network of cocaine trafficking that paid the rent on his Manhattan apartment and kept Oiticica buzzing.14 All of these contacts tethered him to an increasingly global art world during a punishing military dictatorship in Brazil, where he didn’t have a chance of showing his face, much less his art, for decades. How to understand and configure such actually existing globalization of art production and reception? In the case of Oiticica’s work, we trace the figure of his globality in the very rootlessness of his practices: surfing on information (in the form of magazines, music, gossip, and his own intensively documented designs) and creating “Bablyonests” for temporary habitation within the confines of a usefully anonymizing Manhattan. Nomadism is the constructed “nature” of his art, with its tents, habitats, performative cloaks, and portable nesting pods. Yet while antropofagia was effective for Oiticica to theorize the localized work of negotiation with the global, the concept imports a toxic metaphor of essentialized “savages” that encounter and devour the Euro-American Other.15 Antropofagia bon, January 20–March 20, 1993; and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, October 31, 1993–February 20, 1994. Brazilian publication was quite slow until military rule ended in the mid 1980s. 13. Recall Greenberg’s comment on the global ambitions of Mondrian’s project: “[The] final intention of his work is to expand painting into the décor of the man-made world—what of it we see, move in, and handle. This means imposing a style on industry, and thus adumbrates the most ambitious program a single art has ever ventured upon.” Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 188.

14. Kynaston McShine, Information (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1970). [This is discussed below, in Esther Gabara’s Assessment. —J.E.] 15. Based on the 1928 manifesto by poet Oswald de Andrade, antropofagia has to be seen in parallel with other “racialized” theories of contact and modernization, such as Mexican minister of education José Vasconcelos, who published in 1925 his theory of mestizaje (miscegenation), in which the four world races would ultimately merge into a fifth, “cosmic” race.

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is eventually inadequate, because Oiticica always operated on both sides of the constructed border. What I am calling “actually existing globalisms” or “actually existing globality” are sets of conscious aesthetic strategies concocted in response to increasingly obvious conditions and constraints on visibility in a truly worldwide art system.16 Without taking up the fanciful French distinction between mondialization (a kinder, gentler, cultural worldliness) and globalization (that nasty American form of capitalism), we can make our own useful distinctions between these terms in English: the global, globalism, globality, globalization. Just as we usefully deploy the semantic differences among derivations of the modern: “modernism” as an aesthetic strategy for responding to a condition of “modernity” being pressured by ever-quickening “modernization”; so we can use “globalism” to designate the artist’s conscious reference to the condition of “globality” formed by ever-expanding regimes of “globalization.” Globalism or [g] is the artist’s mining of widely shared references, against which he or she might pose the strangeness, wonder, resistance, or irritation of local residues—the abjecta of the nation-thing, the friction of the other’s body, the re-production of sexual difference, the existence of mottled temporalities, and so forth. The [g] I am analyzing is in full-throttle negotiation with [G]. Yet despite what the majuscule and minuscule relation of those typefaces suggests, this is no longer the superstructure teetering on an enormous base. Rather, we have to see [g] as multiple, molecular, interstitial, and as widely dispersed as [G]; these multiple aesthetic globalisms are both the surfactants that produce us as subjects for globalization and also the textures that give us the consciousness to resist its more pernicious homogenizations. In the most effective art of today, the analytics and strategies of globalism form an already existing set of practices. They are still-being-theorized beliefs, convictions, and behaviors analogous to those we once called modernist: but in place of an active aesthetic negotiation with the condition of modernity and the process of modernization, we are forging an active aesthetic negotiation with the condition of globality and the process of globalization. As we look at historical and present cases of actually existing globalism, the constituent elements of a larger demographic might be outlined (within which I positioned Oiticica as an exemplary model). And in this longer-term demographic are clues to contemporary globalist practices: the artist will have a dealer on several continents, a world phone not tied to any landline, a proprietary Web site (with nonnational e-mail address to match) in which artist-certified documentation can be accessed from any network portal on earth. Media that are easily transported, such as video installation, are favored, as are commission structures in which work can be designed (or adapted) after a site visit and then installed by assistants. Artwork and discourse networks speak to subjects who are 16. Here I disagree with Jameson that the U.S. remains “the center,” when the Basel Art Fair, British Frieze, and even Beijing may be more economically active centers of the art mar-

ket. China, for example, moved into third place for art revenue during the U.S.-led recession in 2008 (just behind the U.S. and the UK).

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not universal, but multiply locatable (in the manner of translations, often made manifest in the catalogues accompanying the globalist show). The ex-nationals and transnationals moving restlessly through this global art world are subjects who demand from us nonessentialist thinking. Oiticica, for example, was upper class in the Third World and lower class in the first, possessing class mobility in both directions. His “transnationality” became “translational” indeed—abetted by the gay identity that drove him to cross racial and geographic boundaries even when “home” in Brazil. It’s truly a bizarre twist on Oiticica’s complexity to cement him into a “national” context, where he becomes a victim “ignored” by the Anglo-European hegemony.17 Partially educated in the United States, shown in London at an important and transformative phase of his career, often diasporic or exiled, lapsed from Brazilian art history until the mid-1980s, Oiticica can neither be seen as exclusively Brazilian nor precisely anything else. These are the conundra that should properly beset an art history still locked in regional taxonomies (from the slide drawers to the database)—and it is time to complicate such fixities, if we do nothing else. Mind you, the national, regional, and “international” rubrics that established art history die hard. They are rising again in “contemporary” art history. A shifting target that began with the canonization of postwar art, reset the clock to the 1970s in the 1990s, and is now considering the 1980s or ’90s fair game, histories of “contemporary art” are threatening to recapitulate the area studies of an earlier age: students study “Contemporary art of the Middle East,” “Postwar performance art in eastern Europe,” “Painting factories in China,” “Contemporary art in North Africa”. . . Will there be jobs in these domains in the decades to come? Will departments that used to clamor for modernists now look for “contemporary” and be willing to accept a subspeciality not in EuroAmerica? That will be the day when actually existing globalism in the practice of artists is truly reflected in our putatively “global” histories of art, when we are truly willing to move beyond the endlessly asserted Euro-American “center” of our discourse to examine and learn from art of the other three continents. But of course what we crave is more than an endless nominalism, where boxes are ticked to register nations, regions, or continents. We want globalism built into the consciousness of the art object itself. And so Xu Bing’s magisterial Book from the Sky displays itself as a translational model, where its ideograms will be verbally empty (and thus aesthetic) on both sides of the East–West “divide.”18 Santiago Sierra’s edgy performance-based works address transnational labor, using the boundaries of the art world as the perch upon which to pivot an Archimedean lever that swivels globalization into view as globalist art.19 Walid Ra’ad 17. WorldCat lists sixty-two publications on Oiticica in Portuguese, forty-three in English. 18. Xu Bing, Book from the Sky, sometimes also translated as Book of Heaven, 1987–91. Now owned by Queensland Art Gallery, Australia, it is made up of hundreds of books, “sutra”-type scrolls, and wall-mounted hangings that are printed with four thousand hand-cut woodblock

ideograms that appear (to the illiterate) to be Chinese characters. Since the fluent reader of Mandarin knows them to be “false,” fabricated precisely to be meaningless, they perform the impossibility of translation across shifting contexts each time the work is installed. 19. In a well-known work by Santiago Sierra, 250 cm line tattooed on 6 paid people

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isolates and mimics the visual tropes of “universalizing” informatics, so that its global “look and feel” will become palpable, even if the contents are open to local doubt.20 It is for this reason that the critic must demur: not all global art is globalist. Elkins’s Kazakhistani bottom-painter—who is certainly “in view” for this global crowd—will not be successfully in view, and will not be capable of being taught in the majority of pedagogical situations (which are still mostly in Europe and the United States) unless his work can be seen to “talk to” our present concerns, as examined with the analytical tools that we have honed in this discipline over its century-plus existence. But conversely, actually existing globalism ensures that the discipline itself is no longer just Euro-American. Its tool kit now incorporates many more of the devices from those non-European loci—Susan Vogel’s contribution to our understanding of Baule aesthetic systems in West Africa, for example, or renewed theoretical interest in the seven Confucian “arts” (which didn’t include painting!), or research into the Islamic theories of perception that fueled the Renaissance. In other words, I am not interested in adding the objects of “other” cultures to our survey courses without teaching the epistemological and social systems that give them value and propel them into global exchange today. Vasari paid no attention to the cassoni, decorated cuirasses, and majolica plates being made in Tuscany—even though many of these objects “made to be collected” found their way around the world. Similarly, we remain uninterested in Elkins’s cruise-ship palette-knifer or the putatively isolated Kazakh21—until a Riegl comes along to convey something of the interpretive frames that give them (local) value, discover the (local) knowledge they are able to produce, and learn how such situated knowledge contributes to a (global) world picture. The implicit value scheme I am bringing to this discussion can be made explicit: unless the art historian can use the objects under study to explore modes of subjectivity we are experiencing under globalization, then they are of no use to our study of the global. They will lay the groundwork for Kazakh studies, or the basis of sociologies of kitsch, but they will not have bearing on our histories from the present. To quote Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay’s admirable challenge to the old humanist model fueling this area study or that artist monograph: “the void created by the disappearance of Man (leading to a certain deontologization of the very category of ‘art’) has not created a deficiency . . . It has led to a prolifera(1999), Sierra uses the “lens” of the art world to train a burning gaze on the global circulation of migrant labor—those bodies willing and available to earn small sums of money from what circulates unevenly in a global economy (here the art world). The workers he pays to participate in his performative projects literally loan their bodies to the work of Sierra’s mordant aesthetic, whether allowing their hair to be dyed blond (mostly Africans working quasi-illegally in Venice during the 2001 Biennale) or having a line tattooed on their backs, temporarily aligned for the “job” at hand.

20. Walid Ra’ad, The Atlas Group: Fakouri File, 1999, features some of the elaborate historical characters Ra’ad creates, producing materials that inhabit an equally elaborate archive. The works on display exhibit the clean typography and ordering characteristic of global knowledge systems, juxtaposed with handwritten Arabic and other traces of the “local” knowledge of a lost history of the war in Lebanon that is Ra’ad’s true subject. 21. But how isolated could he be, if Elkins could find him?

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tion of empirical works, often microstudies, to a resurgence of local knowledges, and finally, to the writing of philosophical genealogies which show that far from being an attribute of some mythical Man, ‘art’ is, at its best, a convention.”22 Let us study those conventions! Particularly to address the surge in what I have called globalist art: let us decode their systematic attributes, their modes of circulation and reproduction, the operations through which they provide such uncanny mirrors of our globalized existence. The surfactants of globalization that dissolve the national (while producing it as residue or effect), that propel globalist art, and that place the linguistically specific in tension with its translation are just as full of convention as the art of those “local” microstudies Mukhopadhyay praises. Thus his call for what Isabelle Stengers terms radical empiricism is surely a way to empower art history in this globalizing frame. Examining the conventionality of art and its systems at every level is what art history should be doing, and what the most interesting artists have always done. Globalism is neither a paradigm nor a master narrative. It is a set of already existing aesthetic strategies begging to be understood. 22. See Section 3 of the Seminars.

letter on globalization

Karl Eric Leitzel

[Note: when we canvassed for writers to contribute assessments, we did not want to limit ourselves to academic scholarship. Leitzel is founder and director of Landscape Artists International, and so he speaks for another kind of international art community, one that is bypassed by art fairs, biennales, and academia.—J.E.] Dear Jim, I read over the entire seminar packet you sent me, skimming some portions and reading other parts carefully. I’m afraid this field of art history theory is something so foreign to me that I would be of little use in attempting to contribute any specific commentary. I’m totally unfamiliar with the publications and sources cited, and equally unfamiliar with the various theories and lines of art history mentioned. When most artists get together and actually find time to talk about technique, style, or our own influences, it’s much more in the realm of everyday life and language. Someone might mention Monet and the palette he is known to have used, or the glazing techniques employed by the Dutch masters, but there is seldom any talk of what line of artistic expression one wants to study and then further develop. Frankly, most of us operate mostly in the intuitive sphere. I see a pastoral scene in front of me in the early morning light, and I get out my canvas and paints and begin painting. Certainly, every piece of art I’ve ever looked at and every painting I’ve completed previously has a bearing on my approach and execution of the piece, but I seldom think a whole lot about it. It’s the same with my approach to global art. I’m in e-mail contact with painters around the world as the director of Landscape Artists International, but we really don’t think much at all about the country or cultural line of art we represent. We comment on what we like about the others’ work, perhaps compare notes on the availability of certain materials in different place, or perhaps discuss the relative difficulty of making a living as a working artist in different countries. I think what you have is the world of art historians and art theorists representing the science of understanding art, and most artists living in the art of understanding art. A scientist concentrates mostly on understanding a large thing by taking it apart into little pieces and then studying those pieces to death, hoping to be able to end up with a detailed, accurate description of what is going on. An artist looks at a big thing, whether it is a subject to be painted or an idea like the history of all art that has preceded him, and soaks it in, plays it through the

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filters of his emotional response and his sensory interpretation, and then decides what he wants to create out of the whole resulting pot of soup. For many artists, to be too focused on achieving some precisely defined goal or meeting critical expectations would get in the way. I’m sure this does not hold true of all artists, who are a very varied lot, but I think it is typical of most that I know.

letter on globalization

Rasheed Araeen

Dear Alice Kim, Thanks very much for sending me the transcript of the seminars, which I find extremely interesting and useful. But why do you expect me to respond to them? You can only respond to something when there is a common ground. How can I respond to the debate of which I’m not an active part, not as a subject but an object which is being looked at by those who claim to possess knowledge? But do they? What is the source of their knowledge, if not the very institutional discourse which is under their scrutiny and critique? Do the participants of the seminars know that they themselves are the victims of the ignorance perpetuated by the very institutional space they occupy? In fact, I’m amazed and baffled by their ignorance, if not their patronizing attitude. Why are they looking at faraway India, China, Central Asia, or Latin America? Postwar European cities of Paris, London, Amsterdam, and so on were transformed into multiracial and multicultural metropolises by the new immigrants, among them artists, from Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America—let alone New York, which has been multiracial since long time ago. Why do they not look at what these cities have produced? I’m not alluding to multiculturalism or the diversity of so-called ethnic cultures, but what happened within the central space of postwar modernism or the avant-garde as a result of the entry of nonwhite artists into this space. Did they follow the beaten paths of modernism or bring into it their own innovations by which the canons of history are formed? The participants of the seminars would say that they know nothing about them. Why don’t they? Most of the participants are art historians and teachers of art history. What do they teach? Have they ever doubted that what they have been teaching might be flawed, that what they teach is at the expense of what has been suppressed? I do realize that they may not be happy with some of what they teach, this is clear in the Seminars. But if Eurocentricity of the prevailing art history is the problem, this problem affects not only what is located away from the metropolises, but, more importantly, what has happened within its own modernity, particularly in its postwar period. How can one deal with this problem when those who are concerned with this problem are looking only away from where the problem lies? How can one deal with this problem when one is unaware of the fact that the Eurocentricity of art history has already been challenged and demolished, by the very people who are not supposed to be within it? The problem now is not Eurocentricity, but the institutional suppression of what has already challenged and demolished it.

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I’m amazed and somewhat baffled by the fact that no one seems to know the work of the art journal Third Text, which has been in existence for more than twenty years and so far has produced eighty-nine issues. The very basis of Third Text scholarship has been to deal with the issues which the seminars have now raised. If the participants of the seminars knew about this work, they would have not looked at the issues as they did. The nature of the whole debate would have been different. If they did know the work of Third Text but decided to ignore it, then this raises the disturbing question of the intention and aim of the seminars. What did they actually want to achieve, beyond an academic exercise that perpetuates the status of those who are already in power and are unable to see that the nature of this power is part of the problem? They can use this power to look at others, but this power cannot allow others to challenge it. My advice to the participants of the seminars would be that they should first look at what has been suppressed within and by the institutional space they themselves occupy, and then set up a framework in which a dialogue can occur between those who possess power and those who have been excluded from it. When this happens, I will be happy to be part of the debate and respond to the questions it wants to deal with. In fact, I will be happy to provide the knowledge that has been missing from the seminars.

hybridization and the geopolitics of art

Néstor García Canclini

Is it useful to talk of hybridization in the twenty-first century?1 Is it a concept that can accommodate different kinds of “mixture, coherence, and incoherence”? Or is it inappropriate for the current condition of intercultural and global artistic development? These questions, discussed in one of the Stone Theory Institute seminars, prove the need to work on the concept of hybridization in a similar way to the work required by any other concept whose internationalization happens in multiple ways: we must situate hybridization within the various historical conditions in which it appeared and developed, as well as its different geopolitical contexts.2 If we want to avoid the imposition of Occidental (or Euro-American) models to other regions, as this Seminar attempts, it is crucial to consider the different periods and sociocultural conditions in which concepts emerge and are interpreted. Why has the study of the hybridization processes been on the horizon in the last decades? Its origins as a concept are as old as the text of Pliny the Elder. He mentioned it referring to the migrants who arrived in Rome and motivated exchanges and mixtures. If systematized studies on hybridization began only twenty-five years ago, it is because globalization increased the interdependences and exchanges between cultures. But hybridization is not understood in the same way in the first two books devoted to its study: Hybrid Cultures, which I published in Spanish in 1989 (it was translated into English in 1995); and The Location of Culture by Homi Bhabha, published in 1994.3 The understanding of the concept of hybridization was extended by studies undertaken during the 1990s by Eduardo Archetti, James Clifford, Román de la Campa, Stuart Hall, Penelope Harvey, and Robert Young, among others, as well as by the theoretical contributions of Nikos Papastergiadis and Pnina Werber.4 These works demonstrate the multiplicity of possible uses of hybridization when analyzing interethnical and decolonization processes, cross-border connections, artistic, literary, and communicational fusions, gastronomical mix1. In addition to sources cited below, see Penelope Harvey, Hybrids of Modernity: Anthropology, the Nation State, and the Universal Exhibition (New York: Routledge, 1996); Rem Koolhaas, Delirio de Nueva York (Madrid: Gustavo Gili, 2004); Pnina Werbner and Tariq Modood, Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multicultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-racism (London: Zed Books, 1997). 2. See Section 4 of the Seminars. 3. García Canclini, La globalización imaginada (Mexico City: Paidós, 2001); García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering

and Leaving Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). 4. See, for example, Noel Dyck and Eduardo Archetti, eds., Sport, Dance, and Embodied Identities (Oxford: Berg, 2003); De la Campa, América latina y sus comunidades discursivas: Literatura y cultura en la era global (Caracas: Fundación Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos Rómulo Gallegos, 1999); Harvey, Hybrids of Modernity; and Papastergiadis, The Turbulence of Migration: Globalization, Deterritorialization, and Hybridity (Cambridge: Polity, 2000). [—J.E.]

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tures, and the combination of discursive and museographic strategies utilized in universal exhibitions. In the first edition of Hybrid Cultures, I found the concept of hybridization useful in challenging fundamental conceptions of ethnic, national, or local identities, and also because hybridization is inclusive in relation to the interethnical mixtures called mestizations in Latin languages (syncretisms when referring to religion). Hybridization also helped conceptualize combinations of the traditional and the modern, the erudite, and the popular. Because the use of the concept diversified and the debates around it increased, I elaborated the epistemological debate, and that analysis is included in the new introduction published in Spanish in 2001 and incorporated in the English edition in 2005. Let me consider some of the variations that appear in these heterogeneous registers. Angela Miller argues in the Seminar that “hybridity has long been a fundamental strategy of cultural survival for indigenous peoples under colonization”; James Elkins and Michele Greet identify in the Latin American perspectives a wider use referring to “lived experience” in the societies that articulate the aborigine, the European influences “between two or more specific, local contexts, or else between a local context and a wider regional or global context.”5 Other constructions of the concept were elaborated by Homi Bhabha referring to the interrelations of national ethnic cultures with metropolitan cultures, or to the interrelations of nations with the strategies of global institutions, such as the 1992 Universal Exhibition held in Seville, studied by Penelope Harvey. It is not easy to establish a single concept of hybridization that could be applied to all processes, or to be suitable in the various theories of art and culture. I agree with Darby English on the need to distinguish between hybridity as a “condition” and as a “process.” To emphasize this last aspect, I argue that it is convenient to talk about “hybridization” more than “hybridity.” Some critics of my first version of Hybrid Cultures (John Kraniaukas, Fredric Jameson, and, in the Seminar, James Elkins) have rightly questioned a tendency to celebrate hybridity as a generative state. I still value several processes of hybridization as movements that allow groups to transcend their fundamental identity, and allow social scientists to avoid defending nonexistent authenticities. However, in the first edition of my book, as in Bhabha’s book and others, hybridization did not appear simply as a synonym for easy conciliation. Ultimately, hybridization is a general descriptive notion. It alludes to fusions that must be examined independently in order to establish if they are hegemonic or resistant, and whether or not they are fecund. Intercultural studies are wider and more specific: they consider not only fusions but also other interactions between cultures, such as conflict, discrimination, or combination without hybridization. Research on intercultural mixtures are still undecided on the question of how to organize social interactions and power relations when monotheistic and polytheistic religions have to coexist, how to address incompatible conceptions 5. See Section 4 of the Seminars.

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of humor (as the Danish cartoons of Mohammed), how to think about different family models, diverse generational styles in the same society, or what to do with intercultural misunderstandings. Therefore, I would argue that in contrast with what occurred in the last decade of the past century, the exploration of the hybridization process cannot be more than a chapter of the multiple forms of intercultural studies. The attempts to build a new, general theory of hybridization are often related to the framework of postcolonial theory (as was the case of some participants in the Seminar). Several Latin Americanists from American universities have attempted to translate postcolonial characteristics to contemporary Latin America. As a consequence, they redefine conflicts of the late twentieth century as if they had a structure and political options similar to those of India or African countries. This theoretical transference has produced attractive reinterpretations of the period when parts of the Americas were Spanish or Portuguese colonies and for the time after their independence in the first half of the nineteenth century. Such interpretations often analyze the postcolonial situation with more sophistication than the classic works from Latin American historians. The same is true for the ideological debates of the 1960s and 1970s that tried to describe the fight against Latin American dependency as anticolonialism or anti-imperialism. The best sociological, anthropological, or cultural studies academic writing done in Latin America considers postcolonial thinking hardly applicable to a continent in which many countries will celebrate the bicentenary of their independence in 2010. Postcolonial theory does not apply if by colonialism we understand the political and military occupation of the territory of a subordinate population. Latin American societies stopped being colonies two centuries ago, with the exception of Puerto Rico. Therefore the socioeconomic and cultural conditions should be explained as part of modernity and as a consequence of our subaltern position in the unequal modern world. What is happening in this last modern phase called globalization has to be understood using accurate information; the disregard of the empirical data that reveals how our continent is in a different situation that Africa and Asia is what has led most postcolonial analysts to see America Latina as a discursive community oscillating between the colony and postmodernity. After two centuries of modernizing development, and after having been integrated (unequally) to globalization in the past few decades, we not only find postcolonial hybridizations and traditional mestizations, but also new inequalities and stimulating differentialist reactions.6 At times, corporate and consumer globalizations are exploited in order to assert and expand ethnic particularities or cultural regions, as in happening with Latin music.7 Some social actors discovered in these processes resources for resisting or modifying the processes of globalization and for reformulating the conditions of exchange between cul6. Ulrich Beck, ¿Qué es la globalización? Falacias del globalismo, respuestas ala globalización (Barcelona: Paidós, 1998); Ulf Hannerz, Conexiones transnacionales: Cultura, gente,

lugares Cátedra (Madrid, 1998); and see also Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).

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tures. However, the example of musical hybridizations, to mention just one, demonstrates the inequalities and differences that exist when hybridization takes place in countries of the periphery: one has only to recall the distance between the homogenized fusions of Latino culture and the distinct modes of Latin music in Miami, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, or Mexico. Still, the previous argument does not present the decisive theoretical turnaround needed to theorize art in the era of globalization. Colonial or imperialist conceptions of culture have tended to subsume the development of art in a scheme of domination from a colonial capital over a nation or a subordinated region: India depended from London, Latin America from Madrid or Lisbon, and each region of Africa from some European capital. The world no longer functions according to this regime of subordination of each periphery to one center. As in politics and economics, power is articulated in transnational networks more than it is concentrated in capitals: we have left behind the time when Paris, London, and New York were the geographical centers that determined cultural power. Understandably postcolonial thinking is more useful when analyzing countries that attained their independence fifty years ago, while for Latin Americans the main question is how to reorient modernity. From the perspective of the geopolitics of art, the challenge is to consider networks organized in biennials that are held not only in Venice, Kassel, or Miami, but also in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. There is still an “international division of cultural work,” in the formula proposed by Toby Miller and George Yúdice when referring to the cultural industries: the movements of artistic markets and the circulation of aesthetic prestige are developed in networks with several prestigious points and many others that, working from their position of disadvantage, propose ethnic identifications and alternative criteria of evaluation.8 A few decades ago we speculated on how New York stole from Paris the idea of modern art. Now these capitals share their partial hegemony with Shanghai, Hong Kong, Madrid, Saõ Paulo, and Johannesburg. There are no universal paradigms, but the concentrations of power and the risk of totalitarianism prevent us from sheltering under ethnocentric localisms. There is no reason to celebrate a global market of hybridizations or the dispersion of the falsely autonomous fragments falsely so exalted by postmodernism. We need an art theory that works both with these persistent differences and with their intercultural intersections. 7. George Yúdice, “La industria de la música en la integración América Latina—Estados Unidos,” in Las industrias culturales en la integración latinoamericana, edited by Néstor García Canclini and Carlos Moneta (Buenos Aires: EUDEBA; Mexico City: Grijalbo/SELA/ UNESCO, 1999); see also Ana María Gautier

Ochoa, “El desplazamiento de los espacios de la autenticidad: Una mirada desde la música,” Antropología [Madrid] 15–16 (March–October 1998): 171–82. 8. Yúdice, “La industria de la música en la integración América Latina.”

the oxymoron of global art

Blake Gopnik

Is it possible that “global art” is a full-blown oxymoron? That the terms “global” and “art” contain within themselves a contradiction that is simply irreconcilable? Throughout many of the Seminars’ discussions—and certainly elsewhere in the art world—there seems to some longing, hidden or less so, for a future time when Western art will have fully opened itself to the rest of the globe. But what if the very notion of art, as we understand it in the West, is so peculiar and particular as to be essentially untranslatable to other cultures? “Art,” in our Western sense, is an absolutely bizarre game, hedged round with peculiar, nearly arbitrary rules by which it is both governed and constituted. If that is definitionally true—that an object is determined to be art only and essentially according to the moves it makes within a set of arcane Western rules of play—then the only way the Euro-American art world can open itself to the rest of the globe is by inviting other peoples to play that game and obey those rules. And that, of course, simply negates the whole idea of a genuine opening up. In my experience, several decades’ worth of attempts at expanding the West’s artistic field have simply resulted in the importing of foreign art objects that are in essence indistinguishable from the art already churned out in the West—they are the art world’s “signifiers of the local and national,” in James Elkins’s terms, without much in the way of truly local significance. Or, alternatively, where the foreign objects don’t seem fully to partake in Western models, they end up functioning as objets trouvés or ready-mades—as novel art supplies used to satisfy Western-style looking, rather than as objects that follow a truly different set of rules. Of course, such a different set of rules would result in the objects simply not being art at all, according to the West’s peculiar model. If, as Jameson states, “one form of resistance is to do work that doesn’t want to be looked at by Americans” (by which I assume Jameson means the entire Euro-American West), it’s not clear to me that such resistant work could function as art, according to its normal Western definitions. (Jameson’s example of a film by Wong Kar-wai seems insufficiently resistant to count as truly non- or anti-Western art—it could as easily have been made by any number of indie film makers in North America or Europe.) What if the notion of art that Westerners use “to isolate certain things from the mass of visual culture in order to grant them status and prestige” (in Keith Moxey’s words) is simply so idiosyncratic as to render it incompatible with other cultures’ models for such privileging? (Shigemi Inaga’s contributions to the seminar suggest such a possibility.)

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If I am right in suggesting that for the West “art” is in essence a game like, say, chess, it’s not clear what it would mean for it to go global. More people might have the chance to play, and that would certainly be a very fine thing: It would be good because the game itself is worth playing, so new people would profit (I use the word advisedly) from playing it; and it would be good because the quality of play might increase with a bigger pool of players. But the game itself would not, could not be profoundly changed by any foreign influx, without simply vanishing from view as the game it started out as. Or rather, even if the rules did end up being changed over the long run—imagine chess becoming checker-ized—its status as a game would stay the same. That is, the art game’s fundamental, and fundamentally Western, metastructures would not have changed. The contents of works of art can come to address non-Western subject formations, but the “art” such content comes packaged in cannot be anything but Western, so long as it remains identifiable as art. And that may be the crucial issue: the very idea of a rule-bound game called art, whatever those rules might be at any given time, is foreign to most of the world’s cultures (as it is, in fact, to most of the West’s own domains of image use). The West could never truly embrace a foreign, nonart model for art, because then we wouldn’t have art as we know it. There may not be—and perhaps cannot be—the “art outside of Western categories” that Elkins posits as missing from the Pompidou’s Le Japon des avant-gardes exhibition. The best we could hope for—and this is perhaps a perfectly fine hope—is that, under foreign influence, art as a rule-bound game would absolutely disappear. That images would stop being art at all, that is, and would change—or in fact revert—to fulfill some fully nonart functions. I, for one, would badly miss playing the stimulating, sometimes revelatory game of art. But if we’re to continue, we’d better recognize it as a game, within a fully and exclusively Western model of game playing.

circulate, but without differences!

Marina Grzinic

There is no border, there is no border, there is no border, no border, no border, no border, I wish.

This sentence, written by the artist Sejla Kameric, from Sarajevo, Bosnia, and Herzegovina, addresses the topic of the border, a concept regulated by social, territorial, and artistic conditions. I claim that today, although although we have the feeling that invisible borders prevent the space of the global capitalist neoliberal world from being truly open and mobile, actually we see a vast circulation of positions, and it has become impossible for us to think of the space of contemporary art and culture as being closed by borders. The capitalist First World presents positions (such as the Third World positions that are so common in biennales) that were denied visibility in the past. Third World and First World works even share a common platform in such exhibitions: borders have become invisible, and that is a problem. There is another problem that is related to this one. First World capitalism has lately been engaged in an attempt to reevaluate feminism as a world process, but in the boom of recent books, panels, and exhibitions, almost no one has been invited from what was called Eastern Europe. An example of this is the exhibition Kiss Kiss Bang Bang: Forty-Five Years of Art and Feminism, curated by Xabier Arakistain and shown at the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum.1 The exhibition brought together sixty-nine works by forty-five artists from different countries that have produced feminist art. None of the forty-five artists were from the socalled former Eastern Europe, even though a moderate number of the artists in the exhibition were from the Third World. My thesis is that what is going on has to be understood strictly on the level of internal developments in contemporary global capitalism, along with the powerful process, imposed from the outside, of erasing any sense of a divided Europe. The new appetite for the Third World, mostly Asia and Latin America, is part of a geopolitical logic that proposes a redistribution of capital allocations from the present (or former?) axis Europe– U.S.A. to the supposedly new capital reorientation toward Europe and Asia, with the shadowy presence of Latin America. The reasons for this sudden complete lack of interest in the East European region are varied. My second thesis is that the reasons are connected with financial capital as the prevalent (and in some states the only) form of contemporary 1. Bilbao, June–September 2007. [See also Trans-Sexual Express: A Classic for the Third Millennium, edited by Xabier Arakistain (Berce-

lona: Generalitat de Catalunya, Departament de Cultura, 2001). —J.E.]

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capital that accumulates differentially through circulation. Past divisions and the ideology of difference within Europe are seen as an obstacle to this circulation. If you behave as if Europe is already one uniform space, it is not necessary to advocate for any inclusion: it is enough to behave as there are no longer any differences. We are all identical through a process of evacuation that David Harvey calls accumulation by dispossession.2 That is a process of expulsion from the possession of any possible difference—if necessary even by means of law. It is a process that is implemented by institutional, legislative, bureaucratic, infrastructural, theoretical, and cultural platforms. Accumulation by dispossession might not be effective anymore in Europe—it has supposedly ceased to exist here—but it is at work elsewhere, for example in the Third World. In order to understand fully what is going on at the moment, it is necessary to connect Harvey’s concept of accumulation by dispossession with another process that is characteristic of financial capital and is described by Michael Hudson in his Super Imperialism.3 Hudson argues that today, instead of a crisis caused by gaps in distribution, we are witnessing a contrary process that he calls the imperialism of circulation. This has to seen not as a simple change of modes of accumulation of capital (from accumulation by dispossession to the imperialism of circulation), but as the preparation, through dispossession, for the current domination of circulation. The condition named by Harvey permits the condition named by Hudson. Both processes are part of an important debate regarding the question of accumulation and redistribution of financial capital, which have to be seen as a larger background for any serious debate about what is to be done in the present moment regarding questions of agency for a possible liberation politics, as Walter Mignolo calls it, in global capitalism.4 Needless to say, this problematic is part of the new feminist perspective. Hudson’s concept of the imperialism of circulation, together with an article by Jelica Sumic-Riha, can help explain why what is impossible in today’s world of capitalism is impossibility itself.5 Clearly, the imperialism of circulation without differences is the primary logic of the condition of production of global financial capitalism. That implies that what is to be produced is money, capital; it also testifies that capital accumulation reinvents itself in a straightforward manner. 2. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). See also Harvey, Spaces of Neoliberalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development, Heffner Lecture for 2004 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2005). [—J.E.] 3. Michael Hudson, Super Imperialism: The Origins and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance (London: Pluto Press, 2003). 4. It is also the case that the recent capitalist economic crisis that has been described as stagflation (differential inflation amid stagnation) is not only the sign but the realization of these new modes of capital accumulation. Individually and institutionally we can detect the ris-

ing prices of goods and services as processes of differential inflation in the midst of what experts describe as capitalist stagnation (after more than a decade of prosperity and deflation!). The consequences of the crisis are still not predictable and will escalate further. [For Mignolo see, for example, “From Central Asia to the Caucasus and Anatolia: Transcultural Subjectivity and Decolonial Thinking,” Postcolonial Studies 10, no. 1 (2007): 111–20; Mignolo, “Delinking,” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2 (2007): 449–514. —J.E.] 5. Jelica Sumic-Riha, “Jetniki Drugega, ki ne obstaja” [Prisoners of the Inexistent Other], Filozofski vestnik/Acta Philosophica 1 (2007): 81–103.

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Capital has only one agenda—a surplus value—and that is more than a program or a Hollywood film conspiracy: it is a drive! Human desire is an unequal opponent to this mad drive. In its frenetic striving for more and more possibilities, the imperialism of circulation prohibits any subversion, any attack. Everything circulates, and exchange is dispossessed of any difference. No obstacles are to be seen in the network that structures reality for us. Those once perceived as enemies (including both individuals and institutions) behave as if we are all in the same merde (to use the juicy French word), so that we all have to find the remedy to our problems and needs—and this is done even while those once perceived as enemies forget that they themselves generated the problems. Today it is impossible to say that something is impossible.6 With the title of his book Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance, Jon McKenzie formulated what was supposed to be a rhetorical question but seems to remain suspended in the air.7 I propose an answer (or perhaps it’s a command): circulate, but without differences! The act of circulation changes the very coordinates of impossibility. It is only through an act that I effectively assume the big Other’s nonexistence. I place a border within the cynical situation where it appears that what is impossible is impossibility as such. And it is necessary to build a framework, a foreclosure that will set the parameters, and give the coordinates to the political act. In sum: today what is impossible is not a set of impossibilities, but rather impossibility as such. This has clear repercussions on the level of resistance. SumicRiha argues that a declaration of existence is the first step, but what follow is the rigorous practice of consequences, the logics of consequences, where the impossibility of the foreclosure of capitalist discourse turns into the condition of a new possibility. It is the act that interrupts the consistency of the situation; it is, precisely, a step outside. The question is always to which histories we attach our representational politics and how we resituate our position within a certain social, economical, and political territory. Self-organization and self-referentiality are not born from empty space. The effects of critique should be measured not solely by what is said but also, according to Garcés, by the grounds on which we base our criticism.8 And finally: universities are the outcome of the modern colonial experience, as Mignolo has emphasized. What does this mean? The universal is founded on a fake neutrality in order to hide the bloody histories of colonial violence and the 6. Or to put this differently, in the past a subversive act was possible if it was a subversion against some clear foreclosure or division in society. The symbolic network (the big Other) that structured reality for us also gave that reality a certain consistency. It presented almost a guarantee for any possible intervention. Today the world presents itself as an endless circulation (imperialism is an excellent concept to capture this drive) that is seen as a friendly exchange. Therefore, to get rid of expropriation, enslavement, and neocolonial interven-

tions by capital, one only measure is proposed: coordination. Of course, those who propose coordination as the remedy for all the maladies of capital have a card hidden in their pockets. In order for things to circulate smoothly, the process of exterminating those who still bother us with social antagonism, class struggles, or unthinkable expropriations and misery needs to be properly coordinated. 7. McKenzie, Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (New York: Routledge, 2001).

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looting of local histories, experiences, and knowledge. Today the universality of knowledge has been cut off from the roots of modernity, and modernity can only be understood properly if it is seen in connection with the imperialistic colonial adventures of capitalism. What is to be done? Instead of presenting ourselves as victims, as the inevitable outcome of a regulative policy that comes from the outside, it is necessary to think about the colonial from the inside. Walter Mignolo, in his endeavor to establish a new geopolitics of knowledge, talks about a radical proposition: dismantling internal colonialism and validating knowledge and power from the internal colonial difference. What matters is the construction of a new conceptual genealogy. Establishing such a genealogy means waking up and rising precisely when we have been knocked down by capitalism and postsocialist, transitional power relations and expropriations. Here is Mignolo: “The central issue of the geopolitics of knowledge is to understand . . . what type of knowledge is produced ‘from the side of colonial difference’ and what type of knowledge is produced ‘from the other side of colonial difference.’”9 That task will be different in Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, Africa, Europe, Germany, Serbia, Slovenia, or Austria. 8. Marina Garcés, “The Experience of the US,” Zehar 60–61 (2007). Online at magazines. documenta.de/attachment/000000343.pdf (accessed May 2009).

9. Catherine Walsh, “The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Coloniality of Power: An Interview with Mignolo,” Zehar 60–61 (2007). Online at magazines.documenta.de/attachment/000000345.pdf (accessed May 2009).

a c a d e m i c d i f f i c u l t i e s w i t h “ c o n v e r g e n c e ”: globalization and contemporary art

Jonathan Harris

The sociology of culture . . . has to be seen as a convergence of very different interests and methods. Like other convergences, it includes at least as many collisions and near misses as genuine meeting points. But so many people, in many countries, are now working in it that it has entered a new phase. —raymond williams, culture (1981)

Focus on global scope and global intent . . . distinguishes . . . globalization from yet another history of the world . . . Globalization develops in a jerky, not gradual, fashion. —alex macgillivray, a brief history of globalization (2006)

There is a we which emerges, which is not constituted anyplace. That is the utopian event: the product of these encounters is not yet an official we anyplace. —susan buck-morss, in section 9 of the seminars

In bringing together the theorists who discussed globalization and art, the 2007 Stone Theory Institute constituted a transient utopian convergence of intellectuals which—though reflecting both traditional academic disciplinary and interdisciplinary interests—happily exhibited little of the intellectual inertia that characterizes institutionalized teaching and research in universities.1 Beyond Chicago’s brief but effulgent dialogic bubble, the topic of globalization has moved rapidly towards the center of the concerns of many academics worldwide. This has occurred because, given that it is a topic—rather than an ideology or a position, much less a proto- or neodiscipline—virtually anything can still be stirred into the analytic mix. Given especially the rapid internationalization of higher education, in markets for both students and academics, the widespread focus on globalization became inevitable for some practical reasons. For instance, how can British university faculty teach effectively the large number of overseas Chinese students who understand English only as their second or third language? The University of Liverpool’s long-term answer to this question has involved building a new campus in Shanghai, taking its faculty to China’s students as well as employing local academics to do the teaching in local languages. As this indicates, academic industry has itself become a major global state-capitalist business, though its networks of labor, goods, and capital exchange are like the 1. Pierre Bourdieu and Jean Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (London: Sage, 1990); Pierre Bourdieu et al.,

Academic Discourse: Linguistic Misunderstanding and Professorial Power (London: Polity, 1994).

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ancient trade routes—well trodden and lucrative in certain directions but still nonexistent across great tracts of the world. Accounting for globalization exemplifies what Williams called the problem of intellectual convergence facing the formation of new fields of study. The sociology of art, he remarked, had simultaneously been claimed by scholars working in, but away, from a range of established disciplines and shunned by others ensconced in those disciplines who saw the convergence either as some kind of threat, reductive reformulation or as mere irrelevance.2 Neodisciplines partly descended from art history, such as visual culture, visual studies, and visual anthropology, have suffered much the same fate over the past thirty years or so.3 Though “globalization and art” for now remains a topic rather than a neodiscipline—the “and” both connects and disconnects—it is best thought through as an intellectual problem within a historicized sociology of art, and therefore constitutes one problem of convergence trickily lurking inside another. If we set aside for a moment the deeply prejudicial disciplinary histories traditionally lined up against each other on either sides of the neologism “sociology of art,”4 those interested in the conjunction of specifically contemporary art and globalization have to wrestle in addition with the task of making historically intelligible art produced now or in the very recent past. Though art history certainly has tried of late to incorporate within its curriculum the study of quite recent artistic production, this usually means the assimilation of those producers, practices, and products to normative conceptual-disciplinary paradigms—mobilizing still-dominant received categories such as “originality,” “influence,” “national style,” “modernist”—or a simple switch from art-historical to equally normative art-critical modes of explanation, in a move that deftly avoids troubling questions of general procedure and value.5 A transformation of the topic of globalization and art into the beginnings of a organized field of study requires the continued generation of novel empirical research materials—deep knowledge, that is, of actual contemporary producers, artifacts, organizations, and forms—assessed both within and against the emergent yet conflicted conceptual apparatus of globalization discourse. This heuristic process has been and remains bound up with long-standing attempts to systematize a radical pedagogic project able to provide a new paradigm for making sense of art and culture everywhere in the world. Two earlier phases within this inquiry—problematically divergent rather than convergent, however, in many key aspects since the 1960s—have been cultural studies and the social history of art.6 2. Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Studies and the Center: Some Problematics and Problems,” in Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79, edited by Stuart Hall (London: Unwin Hyman, 1980). 3. Harris, “Putting the ‘Culture’ into Visual Culture: The Legacy and Challenge of Raymond Williams,” Visual Culture in Britain 5, no. 2 (2004): 63–75. 4. Anne Bowler, “Methodological Dilemma in the Sociology of Art,” in The Sociology of Cul-

ture, edited by Diana Crane (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). 5. See Section 8 of the Seminars. [—J.E.] 6. T. J. Clark, “The Conditions of Artistic Creativity,” Times Literary Supplement, May 24, 1974, 561–62; Adrian Rifkin, “Marx’s Clarkism,” Art History 8, no. 4 (1985): 488–95; Clark, “The End of Left Art History?” in Value: Art: Politics: Criticism, Meaning and Interpretation After Postmodernism, edited by Jonathan Harris (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007).

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Williams’s eight conceptual and theoretical frames—producers, institutions, formations, means of production, identifications, forms, reproduction, and organization—constitute the thematic outline of a historical sociology of culture and can serve to define the field of study of globalization and contemporary art, the particular convergence upon which the rest of this essay focuses. production A focus on novel types of producers generated by globalizing forces such as tourism and international divisions of labor leads to consideration of various hybrid cultural practices and practitioners created around the world, a differential process creating makers whose complex conditions of production and self-identity as producers and agents are shaped both by modern Western notions of art and relations of patronage as well as by local, indigenous traditions and values. Work in this area includes, for example, Will Rea’s account of such mixed identity and practice in late twentieth-century and contemporary Nigerian-Yoruban sculpture and Karen Jacobs’s nuanced analysis of how the Freeport Mining Company’s recent patronage of sculpture and decorative crafts made by the New Guinea Kamoro people has generated novel redefinitions of the meaning and value of these artifacts for the social actors involved, with neither local artisan nor multinational industrial client all winner or loser in this production process.7 Case studies such as these indicate that all ostensibly neutral terms, such as “sculpture,” “decorative,” and “craft,” as well as the obviously loaded “artist,” are highly valueladen and potentially misleading. These empirical analyses begin to shed light on very basic questions of language use, intelligibility, and translation under conditions of globalized cultural production—concern, that is, for the meanings and values of words and artifacts produced both by academic researchers involved in the work of intellectual convergence and village-based artisans working for the tourist trade and relocated multinational industrial conglomerates. institutions and formations The category of institutions serves to identify the new kinds of transnational public/private agencies of many kinds created and radically expanded around the world over the last twenty years or so—biennales, art-commissioning bodies, art fairs, and competitions such as the UK Tate Turner Prize (open to all artists working in Britain) and offers to evaluate their global, as well as continuing national and regional, significance. The notion of producers’ self-generated formations intersects to a degree with the category of institutions—the former term nominating novel kinds of artists’ groupings developed since the 1970s, though important also is the task of tracing their relationship to earlier kinds of 7. Will Rea, “Finding Your Contemporaries: The Modernities of African Art,” and Karen Jacobs, “‘United Colours of Papua’: Kamoro Arts and Cultural Appropriation,” in Identity Theft:

The Cultural Colonization of Contemporary Art, edited by Jonathan Harris (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008).

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more familiar formation within, for example, Western avant-garde culture since the late nineteenth century. The question of the increasing interpenetration of commissioning and exhibiting agencies with artists’ own independent and autonomous groupings is crucial here. Has globalization helped to produce new kinds of social incorporation of art and artists reminiscent of the pre-twentiethcentury epochs of European arts patronage dominated by church and state? What examples of artists’ formations from outside the European and North American models might there be? Documenta 11, held in 2002 in a number of cities around the world, presents a significant case study: it was one of the first self-globalizing hybrid arts organization—events that intersected with and offered to reshape artists’ individual and collective work as producers and explainers of their own activities. Caroline Jones’s Assessment identifies a set of key problems and issues.8 means of production With what range of physical and intellectual materials and resources do artists work in our era of late capitalist globalization? The Marxian notion of means of production allows consideration of a number of connected historical and theoretical questions. For instance, how has the recent rise of super-museums like Tate Modern and Beacon in New York State, and multinational museums such as the Guggenheim chain, affected the materials, scale, and working processes of some influential contemporary artists? How might the historic displacement of painting and conventional sculpture media be a consequence of, and contribution to, emerging global capitalist and state corporatist economic conditions? Brandon Taylor’s recent analysis of super-large art projects, such as Anish Kapoor’s 2002 Marsyas construction, built for Tate Modern’s Unilever series in the Turbine Hall, examines such issues. Are these types of commissions introducing a novel kind of meaninglessness into contemporary art—a Merleau-Pontian effective nonsense of form and genre?9 identifications This concept opens up discussion of the global reconfiguration of art writing in the period since the 1960s—identifying its changed, multiple, hugely expanded discursive forms, the internationalization of contemporary art publishing, and the impact of postcolonial movements upon received practices of both criticism and “postcriticism.” Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe is a key text within the study of transforming globalized identifications. However, it is also important to stress continuities and inertial forces active in art-critical production 8. In addition, thirty-five essays based on Williams’s eight themes will be published in Globalization and Contemporary Art, edited by Jonathan Harris (Malden, MA: Blackwell, forthcoming).

9. Taylor, “Virtuosity and Contrivance in the New Sculpture,” in Harris, Value: Art: Politics, 397–423.

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and their interdependence with the globalized art market and the institution of the art museum. Other topics for discussion include marginal forms of art writing surviving around the world and the enormous yet differential impact of the Internet. Chin-tao Wu’s recent account of corporate art investment strategies offers important empirical studies, as does Diane Rankin and Karen von Veh’s new work on feminist art writing in South Africa.10 forms This notion really starts from an examination of the fate of now residual yet foundational art-historical concepts such as style, idiom, genre, type, meaning, and intention, reconceived in relation to globalizing culture produced around the world. In what ways, for instance, have tourism, work and retirement migration, corporate investment, and market penetration transformed artistic and objet d’art production and consumption in the West, Asia, and Africa? Empirical work on this theme ought to analyze local instances of globalized conditions as well as evaluate connected major conceptual problems of definition—in what ways, for instance, might notions of art or fine art have become redundant terms to use about much cultural production taking its cue from mass media or folk rituals rather than from the legacies of traditional painting and sculpture? How are forms and their critical identification determined by multiple, often contested, contextual, historical, and institutional factors? This is not simply a pressing question about contemporary or twentieth-century art—the British Museum, its director recently acknowledged, was one of the first results of a global economy, while a genre of Chinese pottery produced in the mid-seventeenth century replicated English porcelain, mirroring the contemporary cult of Chinoiserie with which Westerners are much more familiar.11 reproduction and organization Reproduction concerns the macroprocesses and mechanisms through which the globalized art world is able to carry on, although the concept must acknowledge alteration as well as continuity in expanded development. Pedagogy in art and art history is a core issue, relating to matters including the modes and extents of internationalization, higher education’s relationship to world capitalism and political neoliberalism, and higher education’s varied degrees of openness around the world to democratic and multicultural discourses. These were themes emphasized valuably by Zhivka Valiavicharska in Chicago when she raised developments in eastern Europe. The related category of organization is concerned above all with theorizing and anatomizing what is meant by the “globalized art 10. Chin-Tao Wu, Privatizing Culture: Corporate Art Intervention Since the 1980s (London: Verso, 2002); Elizabeth Rankin and Karen von Veh, TAXI 013—Diane Victor (Johannesburg: David Krut, 2008).

11. Joseph N. Newland, “The Global Publication of Asian Art: The Role of the Museum,” Art Book 14, no. 2 (May 2007): 54–55.

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world.” In what ways, and through what mechanisms or processes, does such a single system exist, if indeed it does? Globalization, to stress the point, remains a heuristic conceptual tool—a useful, generative hypothesis. In what ways do, or can, or should continental, national, or regional cultures, societies, and art traditions persist or actively struggle against globalization’s homogenizing systematization? Is this characterization still tenable? How and why has the art world in the West become a part of the global capitalist economy? Key art world system phenomena include international biennales, biennale-hopping guest curators, and international dealing-auctioneering houses. These require explanation via subtle theoretical and detailed historical accounts of contemporary global economy, global society, and global culture. It is as well to remember, however, MacGillivray’s stricture—how can we be sure that the convergent phenomena we identify are truly global in scope and intent, and not just part of a continuing but narrower process limited in its extent, purposes, and effects? After Chicago’s own utopian convergence, how do we proceed to fashion analytic tools adequate to this difficult but exciting task of basic clarification and explanation?

art, globalization, and imperialism

Anthony D. King

Having read the hundred or more pages on art and globalization, I feel I must have missed out on something. With the exception of a few intriguing, though usually curtailed, comments and footnoted references to discussions of the day before, some not included in this account of the seminars, the general impression gained from these pages is that art is being understood in its most conventional, Western sense, as an occupationally specialized practice, whether of painting, photography, or cinema (that is, image-making or “pictures”), produced or performed by designated individual “artists.” This is a notion of art that is not only separate from craft, as Shelly Errington suggests, but also separate from the social and spatial conditions in which it was produced. (I am ignoring here the issue of the origin of the concept of fine art itself in the West, on which there are some interesting comments.) Only occasionally, as when Susan Buck-Morss speaks of “visual urbanism” and, with Harry Harootunian, refers to the different temporalities found in the socialist and capitalist city, are we reminded of the essentially urban context in which art in this sense, irrespective of its different media and manifestations, is not only most frequently produced and consumed, but also of the actual city that art just as frequently takes as its subject matter. That is also the case, even if its subject is ex-urban as in the West in the nineteenth century. Yet quite apart from this question of context, the city, as others have pointed out, is itself a work of art (and also science, technology, culture, politics, among other things) and one that needs a different descriptive and theoretical vocabulary to address it. This obviously includes architecture (to which there are perhaps two or three passing references), but also a language of physical and spatial urban form, of built form and type, of spatialization, the built environment, urban design, urban culture. Discourses of “modernity” (a central and stereotypical trope in the armory of the analysis of visual culture) are inconceivable without invoking the urban fabric of the city and the part it played in the formulation of artistic as well as social and cultural concepts of the modern. Where would discourses on modernity, postmodernity, globality, and cosmopolitanism be without reference to notions of public and private space, of the iconic status of buildings, of architecture and urban form and their symbolic potential as forms of representation? The spatialities of the city formed and represented in the city’s built environment are central to any conception of visual culture, represented by the built environment. Buildings, architectural and urban form, as markers of specific places, are both objects of design and subjects of desire. They

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provide spatial mechanisms for social inclusion and exclusion. Like any clock or calendar, the built and spatial environment of the city and its continuous transformation not only signal the passage of time but, as indicators of the present, the past, and an undetermined future, act as a store of collective and personal memory. Any understanding of globalization has to recognize its earlier historical phases, including postcolonial globalization,1 as Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann implies with his reference to French, British, Dutch, Spanish imperialisms and their impact on urbanization worldwide. This necessarily includes the colonial cities created as part of that process, in Asia, Africa, the Americas. Whether or not the concept of race was invented as part of this process, as suggested, it was certainly institutionalized by the facts of “racial” and social segregation in colonial cities worldwide. Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay cites Fanon’s Black Skins, White Masks to make a powerful point about the psychological conditions of colonialism. Yet one of the most glaring holes in our contemporary knowledge concerns the present urban situation—social, spatial, ethnic, and racial—of those one-time colonial towns and cities made infamous by the well-known passage in Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, originally published in French almost half a century ago—in particular his representation of the “colonial world” as being epitomized by the racially and spatially segregated colonial city: “The colonial world is a world divided into compartments . . . of native quarters and European quarters, or schools for natives and schools for Europeans.”2 Despite a growing body of too often unrelated studies of postcolonial cities, no one has yet produced a study to demonstrate, half a century after the “independence” of these once colonial states, how far the racially and spatially segregated colonial city has been transformed, or whether the world “divided into compartments” between races has simply been transformed into one divided by classes. As for the imperial and colonial roots of contemporary globalization in the West, these are to be most visibly found in the so-called global cities, what Zhivka Valiavicharska refers to, citing the work of Saskia Sassen, as the “global spaces of exchange of information, flows of money, sites where a transnational financial capital is concentrated.” Yet, as recent literature on the global city has shown, many of these “global cities” in Europe (as well as elsewhere) developed from the one-time imperial capitals of Europe (Paris, London, Brussels, Amsterdam, Madrid), each linked into their colonial port cities and capitals in America, Asia, Africa, and elsewhere (New York, Rio de Janeiro, Calcutta, Bombay, Colombo, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Cape Town, Mombasa), which provided resources, networks, and infrastructure long before the recent concept of the “global city” was ever thought of.3 1. A. G. Hopkins, Globalization in World History (London: Pimlico, 2002). 2. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove, 1968), 37–40. 3. Anthony D. King, “World Cities: Global? Postcolonial? Postimperial? Or Just the Result

of Happenstance?” in The Global Cities Reader, edited by N. Brenner and R. Keil (London: Routledge, 2006), 315–24; King, Spaces of Global Cultures: Architecture Urbanism Identity (London: Routledge, 2004).

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Today, the globalization of the art world, irrespective of whether we are speaking about theater, music, mixed media, film, television, performance arts, artworks, art markets, architecture, sculpture, or urban design, is inseparable from these global and postcolonial connections.

narratives of belonging: on the relation of the art institution and the changing nation-state

Nina Möntmann

Several speakers in the seminar, including Keith Moxey, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, and Shelly Errington, touch upon the historical role of the first public museums in relation to the emergence of the nation-state and its colonial power. In the following, I elaborate on this role of the early museum as a showcase for the national narrative and juxtapose it with the contemporary situation, which I describe as a corporate turn in the institutional landscape. This corporate turn runs parallel with the disengagement of the nation from the state within globalized superstructures. By their very nature, institutions relate to the general value system of a society. Art institutions, as distinct from other institutions such as state authorities, parties, and trade unions, are not given any direct participation in political processes. Instead, they are given the indirect commission to produce images of realities that make those realities easier to consume, or to design parallel universes that either appear as spiritually separated or are supposed to entertain visitors.1 The fulfillment of this tacit commission is generally accompanied by the reward of simplified fund-raising. Art institutions, however, in contrast to other institutions, have a more individual, changeable profile that gives their actors a certain amount of room to maneuver. Alongside the current developments toward a managerial function of the state, one can see a corporate turn in the institutional landscape. If we look back to when the public museum was founded, there is a coherent relation of mutual legitimation between the museum and the state. One could say that at the beginning of the museum in the eighteenth century, alongside the power of the nation-state in forming the social order, the museum was a national project. The first example of the public museum was the British Museum, opened in 1759. Its mission was to create the narrative of a representative national history and heritage. In accordance with this, its ideal audience was educated in being the model citizen: patriotic, conscious, and proud of a rich history that was taken as superior to the history of other nations. Benedict Anderson’s influential book Imagined Communities refers to a museumizing imagination that translates the fictive and symbolic concept of nationalism into an environment of objects and images. Such a public institution is constitutionally open to everybody but in fact provides a limited and encoded accessibility that confirms the bourgeois and patriotic subject as the ideal citizen. It also imagines the world order from the perspective of the colonizer by show1. See my “Art and Its Institutions,” in Art and Its Institutions, edited by Nina Möntmann (London: Black Dog, 2006), 8–16.

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ing a collection of the “masterpieces” of national artifacts, plus acquired trophies from the cradles of culture and art like Egypt or Greece, which are thereby put in a direct lineage with the contemporary national culture. In contrast to this, we find an ethnicizing presentation of artifacts from the colonies, which in the context of the imperialistic narrative appears as folk art, the practical value of which in spiritual as well as everyday contexts highlights the achievement of civilization, and then gives way to the autonomous masterpiece. The initial project of the museum was accordingly “the authoritarian legitimation of the nation state . . . through the construction of a history, a patrimony, . . . and a canon.”2 the changing role of the nation-state Therefore, the fate of art institutions is closely linked to the development of the nation-state. With the first museums the ideological construct of a national unity of culture, language, and ethnicity was then concordant with the political and military boundaries of the state. Today there is no doubt the nation-state is changing rapidly, following global mechanisms of migration and economy, but to what extent and with what effects is subject to a competitive discourse. Fredric Jameson notes in the Seminars: Everybody says the nation is disappearing. On the contrary, it is dialectical: on the one hand there are places trying to be nations (the famous “failed states” that never make it); and nations that seem to be in crisis, and are weaker than others, and so forth. But then, on the other hand—and this is very important for our topic—there’s this thing that we’re in that is not really a nation . . . The United States, which is not a nation in the traditional sense, which is really central, and toward which everything moves, but which you are trying to describe not in terms of imperialism or power but in some new way. Apart from Jameson’s nostalgic misconception of the United States as the linchpin of the world, it is crucial to analyze the “new way” the Western nationstate and its institutions are undergoing globalization. Especially in relation to “failed” and weak states, globalization processes have not been able to abandon the categories of imperialism and power—but this is not my issue here. The fate of the changing nation-state has only recently entered cultural discourse. For example, Gayatri Spivak, who in 2001 still related the fundamental importance of the nation-state in geopolitics to the way letters relate to the alphabet, now sees the “decline of the nation-state” as a “result of the economic and political restructuring of the state in the interest of global capital”—or, as Jameson puts it, the reason lies in the changing scopes of competency of the state that are reduced to the role of the government taking care of the economic balance.3 2. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition (London: Verso, 1991)(1st ed. 1983).

3. Spivak and Judith Butler, Who Sings the Nation-State? Language, Politics, Belonging (London: Seagull, 2007).

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If we want to describe the new set of national and transnational structures and the institutional changes they are bringing about, it seems crucial first to have a look both at the concept of the nation as an ideological construct and the state as a political, juridical, and military entity with territorial claims. This is because the phenomenon of the declining nation-state exactly correlates with the disengagement of the two concepts of the nation and the state. the state While the apparent decline of the nation-state is a symptom of its declining power, we nevertheless have to recognize its continuing existence and describe its renewed function, which is newly defined as postsovereign in its multiple involvement in supranational contexts and those of a global society. The new globalized state is becoming part of powerful supranational structures, which appear to establish the new world order, like the wto or saarc on the economic level, nato on the military level, and the un on a political level. In these contexts the old state is taking on management functions, while its social and welfare functions are more and more thrown back onto the individual or nongovernmental organizations. In parallel to the new responsibilities of the state in its role as a “free-market global managerial state” within transnational state-collectives, the increasing impact of biennales as institutionalized regional art events becomes apparent, and the administration of museums and Kunsthallen is being privatized. In current neocapitalist societies, where managerial states are determined by the postnational character of global capital, art institutions are becoming branded spaces. The ideal audience is accordingly a mass of anonymous consumers. This corporate model of an art institution, by which we can describe not only all the major museums, including the Guggenheim, the Tate, the moma, but also more and more midsized Kunsthallen and smaller institutions, has a peer group of speculators who may feel more affiliated to the brand than to the programming, and a public audience that is evaluated by its numbers. Therefore, one could say that the corporate turn in the institutional landscape mirrors the general power relations of a late capitalist, neoliberal constitution. Alongside the privatization of budget politics, it also involves a changed profile of curators and directors, who focus increasingly on management qualities and the ability of populist politicians to promote the program of the institution. the nation These phenomena, which are taking place alongside the changes in the state, are becoming apparent not only on an administrative level in the institution but also in programming that is increasingly turning to media events. But the central question still revolves around the concept of the nation: what is happening to national ideology, and how does it appear in the institution?

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In answering this question, I would like to refer to Boris Buden, who mentions the important fact that nations, though they still exist, have lost their common narratives.4 There is, for example, the narrative of an anticolonial nationalism, which responds to Fanon’s “wretched of the earth” and aims at a common interest in liberation, with the hope of finding a common agency. Today we witness instead what Arjun Appadurai calls a “narcissism of minor differences,” which leads to every ethnic minority wanting its own nation.5 (Note the way new national identities are forming in eastern Europe after the decline of the Soviet Union and state socialism, most violently in former Yugoslavia.) So what is the new postnational narrative and legitimation of the institution, after its corporate turn? One key element of the dominant postnational narrative can be described as a global (and in this case clearly Western) competition. Global competition is most apparent in institutions that are trying to maintain a standard canon of objects, and also attempting to maintain a spectacular exhibition program following a populist consumer-oriented model that has to compete with event culture and prioritizes profit over experiment or critique. Therefore, we can say that when the museum changed its role from adjunct to the colonial nation project to global consumer mecca, its narrative changed accordingly: an educated patriotism that legitimated the nation-state was displaced by a narrative of the value of competition, event consumption, and profit that legitimates the state under global capitalism. We can find a subversive potential of art institutions only in those that are not as clearly linked to the official societal narrative as other institutions are, but rather act from a more reclusive position, enjoying periods of withdrawal and closure during which they can research and prepare before opening up to public activities. In an article in Public Culture, Charles Taylor brings out the role of the social imaginary, speaking of institutions as places where people can imagine their existence as part of a larger social structure, fashioning their social relationships and discovering what normative pressure these relationships are subject to. This is particularly true for art institutions, where the visitors’ framework for action is negotiable. belonging and participation In the current situation of unstable postnational narratives of belonging, the art institution could serve as a platform for rethinking the fundamental issues of belonging and participation. These kinds of progressive institutional practices have to make use of the institution’s participation in semipublic spheres, as well as emancipating the institution from the branded structures of the globalized state with its neoliberal agenda and management functions. Thinking an eman4. Boris Buden, “Why Not: Art and Contemporary Nationalism?” in Contemporary Art and Nationalism, edited by Minna Henriksson and Sezgin Boynik (Prishtina: Institute for Contemporary Art, 2007), 12–17.

5. See Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).

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cipatory sense of belonging has to occur in contrast to a historical belonging that lies in national identity. This is how Suzana Milevska formulates the question in the Seminars: it is a matter of “how to reconcile the historic belonging with participation that tends towards belonging without belonging.”6 In tying future perspectives to the notion of “belonging without belonging,” Milevska is recalling Jean-Luc Nancy’s inoperative community: a community that doesn’t allow itself to be exploited, because it is antiessentialist.7 Belonging to this community merely requires a being-in-the-world, or a “singularity without identity,” as Giorgio Agamben puts it.8 This definition of belonging is linked to the hope for a transnational idea of participation in democratic processes. The art institution is a space to involve particular groups, to find allies for interventions in the public domain, and to build up lasting relations with publics who have sympathy with the institution’s approach. The institution is therefore a place not only for social events where a public receives and appraises, but also for public thinking and acting that is shaped by its guests and its publics as well as its staff. Those progressive ones among art institutions are, with only a few exceptions, usually to be found among smaller or midsized institutions, which are more changeable and thus able to develop an institutional avant-garde whose potential resides in maintaining a closer proximity to artistic practice and operating more closely with a critical agenda and encouraging a close public interaction, instead of being merely the executive organ of a neoliberal government or its major companies, respectively. One must be satisfied with this opposition; it would be naÏve to believe that there could be a critical institution at the center of attention with a reliable economic basis. This is inconceivable, and perhaps even a necessary antithesis in the age of global capitalism, that produces “free-market global managerial states” led by economic interests. 6. See Section 1 of the Seminars. 7. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).

8. See Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press) 1993.

originality, universality, and other modernist myths

Ming Tiampo

In a spirited debate during the closing roundtable, James Elkins comments that modernist painters such as Jamini Roy “cannot be described in texts that will be read in western Europe and North America in such a way that the artists appear necessary to modernism. They are representable as local, but not as necessary.”1 In order to examine the contours of a canonical modernism and who defines it, I turned to the Tate Artist Timeline of the twentieth century, which I purchased on my last visit to the Tate Modern after noting with some surprise and delight that the Gutai group had been included. Not just a gift shop souvenir, perfectly priced for bringing home to friends and colleagues around the world, this timeline is inscribed on the body of the museum, a mural that runs along the concourse walls of levels 3 and 5 outside the collection galleries. Despite its claims to being an evolving road map, handwritten and open to change, it is in fact part of the museum’s architectural and intellectual structure. An update of Alfred H. Barr Jr.’s infamous genealogy of modern art, this new timeline seeks to be less deterministic, less teleological, more open, and more international, reflecting the globalism (to borrow a term from Caroline Jones) of art in the latter half of the twentieth century. It will not be a surprise to anyone that, for example, Cai Guo-Qiang, Mona Hatoum, William Kentridge, Takashi Murakami, Doris Salcedo, Rikrit Tiravanija, and Yinka Shonibare figure prominently at the end of the timeline. Between 1964, the year marked by Warhol’s Brillo Box exhibition, which prompted Danto to declare the “death of modernism,” and the explosion of the global contemporary art market, we find artists such as Ana Mendieta, Anish Kapoor, and Hiroshi Sugimoto. The most interesting part of the timeline is, however, the period from 1900 to 1964, the narrative of modernism that seems to resist internationalization, even under the pressures of a contemporary globalism seeking progenitors. In the period before 1964, we find few non-Western artists, diasporic or otherwise. Yoko Ono and Nam June Paik hover in the early 1960s with the Fluxus group, and Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark are listed as representatives of the neoconcretists. Manuel Álvarez Bravo and Frida Kahlo are included in the 1930s, Wifredo Lam and the Mexican muralists Siqueiros, Orozco, and Rivera punctuate the 1920s. In the entire period before 1920, the only non-Western artist included in the Tate Artist Timeline is Foujita Tsuguharu, who is included in the school of Paris. Gutai, Yayoi Kusama, and On Kawara, all active in the 1950s and 1960s, are curiously postdated, with Gutai and Kusama located around 1980 with performance art, and Kawara in the early 1970s under conceptual art. 1. See Section 8 of the Seminars.

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Like Barr’s diagram, this timeline raises two major issues that I would like to address: originality and universality. The first, the concept of originality, theorizes the mechanism used to determine what is necessary to that universalizing narrative. The second issue, which Zhivka Valiavicharska brought up in the final discussion of the closing roundtable, concerns the “immense universalizing drive of the discipline of art history.”2 originality In order to conceive of what is necessary to a global narrative rather than simply being “representable as local” in the context of modernism, we need to reexamine modernism’s most fundamental and persistent myth: originality. Unlike Rosalind Krauss’s famous analysis of the originality of the avantgarde, my concern here is not the construction of originality, but the consistent failure of its construction in sites of non-Western modernist production. Like the Tate Artist Timeline, the narrative constructed by Art Since 1900 (the discipline’s most important recent pedagogical canon) acknowledges the internationalization of art production at the end of the twentieth century, but leaves modernism intact. Despite modernism’s deep transnational investments, it is only the West’s consumption of other cultures that is acknowledged: primitivism, japonisme, Orientalism. Where the existence of modernism beyond the West is narrated, it is framed as proof of the West’s hegemony. Headed “the dissemination of modernist art through the media and its reinterpretation by artists outside the United States and Europe,” the only chapter on non-Western art before 1989 posits the Japanese Gutai and the Brazilian neoconcretists as evidence of the international ripple effects of Euro-American modernism. Clearly, modernism continues to be a politicized story of invention and origins at the center disseminated to the periphery. Despite their innovations in what would later be called performance art, earth art, and installation, and thus their necessity to modernism, Gutai artists are characterized as local, producing “competent yet rather provincial versions of European” art. It is not surprising, then, that discourses on modernism in Japan, and for that matter any nonWestern nation, struggle to articulate a modernism that resists being seen as derivative. As Karatani Kōjin has noted, this task is rendered nearly impossible due to the perception that “since the ‘origin’ of modernity is Western, the two cannot so easily be separated.”3 This narrative assumes two things: that modernism was a closed system, located in the West and relentlessly disseminated to its territories with no reciprocal exchange; and that once “transplanted,” modernism was replicated around the world, resulting in no contributions that were necessary to modernism. As Edward Said suggested in Culture and Imperialism, modernism needs to be reevaluated as a transnational movement that is inextricably linked to its history 2. See Section 9 of the Seminars. 3. Karatani K¯ojin, Origins of Modern Japa-

nese Literature, translated by Brett de Bary (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 192.

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of colonialism, imperialism, and war and the outcomes of travel, commerce, media, immigration, and imagination.4 In order to cope with the multidimensional art history that emerges out of that fractal view of cultural space, it will be necessary to rethink modernism’s motors of change, to move away from blunt instruments such as originality, influence, and derivation that remain embroiled in discourses of domination. How is Gutai derivative of Pollock, but Pollock not derivative of Kandinsky or Masson? What is the difference between derivation and family resemblance? Even the conservative critic Harold Bloom would agree that the concept of originality is itself flawed, and that all participants in a creative discourse have some relationship to their predecessors that they try to overcome in one way or another. Motivated by the anxiety of influence, artists from Picasso to Pollock to Gutai’s Yoshihara Jirō sought ways of negotiating the relationship between their work and that of their progenitors through creative acts of misprision. One major hurdle we need to overcome before attempting anything approaching a world art history, or even a transnational history of modernism, is a reassessment of the Manichean terms “influence,” “derivation,” and “originality.” In their place, we need to articulate new interpoetic relations to describe the variety of creative relationships that artists use to assert their own voices. universality Returning to the Tate Artist Timeline, let us examine the construction of this particular universalist narrative on the microlevel of its representation of the Gutai group. Given that the Gutai group were active from 1954 to 1972, and given that the European rediscovery of Gutai did not take place until after the 1983 Dada in Japan exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf, the Tate’s periodization begs the question: why 1980? The answer to this question is tied up in Gutai’s categorization as performance art, which began relatively late in Britain. Here, Shigemi Inaga’s comments on admissible heterogeneity and the compromise with acceptable homogeneity (enough sameness to be legible within the European canon, enough difference to avoid being derivative) are illuminating. Although Inaga cites Gutai as an example of the ideal ratio between heterogeneity and homogeneity, making them the darlings of the French art press in the 1986 Japon des Avant Gardes, we need to ask what Gutai is being embraced by modernism’s narrative, how is it represented, and why it is still peripheral. While Gutai is increasingly appearing in pedagogical, museological, and scholarly canons of art history, the period that is cited is almost always 1954 to 1957, before the group’s first encounter with the French critic Michel Tapié. This precontact period is mythologized for its experiments in art outdoors and art on the stage, and, despite its transnationality, is characterized as a period before they 4. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993).

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were “contaminated” by the West. Not just admissibly heterogeneous, with its experiments that are later “translated” into the vocabulary of installation, earth, and performance art for the consumption of Western art history, early Gutai is constructed as untouched by the West, allowing it to escape the problem of always-already lateness described by Karatani. Early Gutai predates any of the movements that it resembles, making it legible and necessary to the narrative of modern art in the West, without any risk of being derivative. Focusing on early Gutai and constructing this period as pure, however, obscures Gutai’s “actually existing global production” (as Caroline Jones puts it in her Assessment), which extends to four continents. By placing Gutai in the performance art cluster, the Tate Artist Timeline translates Gutai artistically, but also temporally, narrating it as a contemporary of artists working twenty years later. Curiously, it is not even cited as a contemporary of Happenings, which is antedated to the early 1950s. Rather, it is placed in a group that begins with the British Gilbert and George, who are located around 1975. This periodization points to the dangers of expanding the canon by inserting voices from outside the West into a Western narrative, and also to the situatedness of that canon. Although it makes claims of universality, the Tate Artist Timeline speaks from a particularly British perspective, including into this narrative the British Surrealist group, the St. Ives school, the school of London, and New British Sculpture. As Inaga notes, Gutai was “authenticated a posteriori” for the Parisian art scene.5 Similarly, Gutai is typically cited as a precursor for installation, earth, and performance art, again translating it into the timeline of metropolitan modernism. Despite the fact that the Gutai artists were the first to cross the finish line in multiple modernist races, however, Gutai remains characterized as a secondary movement, precursory to Happenings, for exampple, or derivative of Informel and abstract expressionism. For this reason, Gutai is an important test case for what it means to be necessary to modernism. With no time lag, Gutai demonstrates that chronology is not the real issue at stake. Even in this case of anteriority and transnational engagement, Gutai’s necessity to the narrative of modernism is in question. Thus, although the universality that Valiavicharska and Buck-Morss propose is seductive, possibly even emancipatory, as Ngugi wa Thiong’o has written, I think that the risks of making the claim of universality are too great. My preference is for the articulation of a sphere of discourse identifiably situated in a historical response to transnational phenomena, not unlike Mary Louise Pratt’s notion of the contact zone, but enlarged and made more complex.6 For that reason, Caroline Jones’s proposal to use the term “globalism” to refer to the cultural response to globalization is, for me, very promising. I am hopeful that over time, standards of evaluation and the language of globalism can be negotiated between 5. [See Shigemi Inaga’s remark about the Gutai 具体 group in Section 2 of the Seminars. —J.E.]

6. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 2008).

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stakeholder parties, but before that, that the discourse of globalism can at least problematize the power politics and translations at work in the specific historical conditions of globalization in the twenty-first century. As Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann points out, globalism and globalization have a history that has been obscured by the limitations of our discipline. Even if, as Frederic Jameson argues, globalization after 1980 is somehow different than the transnational contacts and international imaginings that took place before it, there is an entire history of contacts and resonances (to quote Reiko Tomii) that could be written.7 That history of interconnection, dialogue, translation, struggle, war, colonization, imperialism, trade, understanding, and hope is the emancipatory space that we increasingly call global art history, assuming its universality. It is a valuable history, but, as so many have pointed out over the course of these penetrating seminars, it is an incomplete history. Indeed, it is not in competition with the notion of world art history but a fundamental part of it—a few very large fragments of what Michael Ann Holly described as the shattered vase of world art history. shibboleth Our structures of analysis, taxonomy, and narrative are inadequate to the question of what to do with our fragments of vase. Clearly, world art history and even global art history cannot be an additive project that leaves the architecture of modernism intact. Rather, like Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth (2007), which I encountered as I descended into the bowels of the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, we need to crack open its very foundations. 7. See Reiko Tomii’s Assessment in this volume.

c o n t e m p o r a r y a r t , “ c o n t e m p o r a n e i t y ,” and world art history

Reiko Tomii

My commentary is made from the position of an art historian narrowly focused on postwar Japanese art yet keenly aware of the urgency to “globalize” our discipline itself, particularly when it comes to modern and contemporary art. Japan in the 1960s offers an intriguing point of reference from an earlier but no less complicated time when the decade’s internationalization prefigured today’s globalization. Together with some other recent studies of “prehistories” mentioned in the seminars, the close examination of 1960s Japan can serve as a corrective to “the amnesia about that prehistory on the part of contemporary art writers” (as James Elkins puts it).1 One key concept for understanding today’s contemporary art that is absent from the seminars is contemporaneity, as theorized by Terry Smith.2 Concurrently but separately from Smith, I have made a historical examination of international contemporaneity, an idea articulated in Japanese art discourse during the 1960s, when the distinct area of practice called gendai bijutsu (contemporary art) emerged, separate from the modern practices of nihonga (Japanese-style painting) and yōga (Western-style painting).3 Importantly, Japan’s prescience in articulating the sense of “international contemporaneity” was shaped by its perceived position at the periphery of modernity, vis-à-vis the putative center, Euro-America. Thus, 1960s Japan can also offer an insight into issues that are still unresolved—and sometimes compounded—in today’s globalizing world, such as center versus periphery, East versus West, original versus derivative or imitative, and Eurocentric viewpoints versus multiple viewpoints. These are at once conceptual, theoretical, and methodological issues in the attempt at world art history. Three often practiced but not always ideal options to write the history of multiple modernisms are observed by Elkins in the Seminars: (1) a “sensitive, informed, contextualized account of some non-Western modernist practice” that will “contribut[e] to the slow accumulation of mutually intelligible texts that comprise the world practice of art history or criticism”; (2) a study of “socioeconomic contexts” with “art objects as examples” by “deconstructing or deleting the apparently transhistorical categories such as value and the avant-garde, jettisoning the judgment of lag or belatedness”; and (3) an idiosyncratic writing “in some new way” that “articulate[s] the particularity of the art,” which may possibly have no “contact with other people’s narratives at all.”4 1. See the First Introduction. 2. Terry Smith, “Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity,” Critical Inquiry 32, no. 4 (2006): 681–707.

3. Reiko Tomii, “‘International Contemporaneity’ in the 1960s: Discoursing on Art in Japan and Beyond,” Japan Review, no. 21 (2009). 4. See the end of Section 5 of the Seminars.

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It is clearly not enough for individual art historians to write individual accounts of non-Western modernisms, no matter how sensitive, informed, or well contextualized, because the resulting “accumulation” often appears to have failed to engender “contacts with other people’s narratives”—the most important part of world art history. A fundamental question must then be asked: what can be done to truly “globalize” our discipline in this respect? At the same time, as slow as such an “accumulation” may have been, it has already prompted the idea of multiple or alternative modernisms. Suppose, as I will outline below, “contacts” should be made and result in a layered matrix of local stories. Would it then follow that the supposed center will eventually be provincialized, turned into just another locale in our formulation of world art history? If not, how firmly would the center hold? Let me begin with the first question. I came to realize the need to actively create “contacts with other people’s narratives” through my own work. An exemplary attempt at the first option was a multiregion survey exhibition, Global Conceptualism (Queens Museum of Art, 1999), for which I was one of the regional curators.5 It gave “sensitive, informed, contextualized accounts” of ten Western and non-Western regions. I heard some criticism that the organizers failed to show examples from different regions that would resonate with one another. Obviously, once each area’s history was understood on its own terms, that would have been the next logical step. But it was amazing to see some viewers starting to perceive and identify resonances on their own. Seeking and comparing instances of resonance methodologically creates “contacts” between different locales and accompanying narratives. Moreover, “contemporaneity” frequently manifests itself through similarity in appearance, idea, and strategy. Works that reveal a certain resonance (which I define as similarity with little or no evidence of actual connection, influence, or knowledge) can form a subset within the “slowly accumulating region-based texts,” which would otherwise be a vast unordered catalogue raisonné, if you will. It is akin to creating some sort of mapping. As there is often more than one kind of resonance, the efforts will result in a matrix of layered mappings of diverse practices, in this case practices of conceptualism. Since we cannot narrate more than one story at a time, this will help defy the linearity of the master narrative, with conceptualism serving as a unifying framework for all these mappings. Further analysis of the similarities will necessitate the articulation of differences. (For example, how did Japan’s Akasegawa Genpei and Germany’s Gerhard Richter both come up with the idea of “capitalist realism” just one year apart from one another?) This will simultaneously prompt us to examine each work more closely, and send us back to look again at the local contexts, whether they are historical, social, economic, political, cultural, or purely aesthetic. (This exploration could form an extended chain of similarities and dissimilarities, because contemporaneity may encompass a number of hidden degrees of similarity.) 5. Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s (New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999).

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Such a project, no doubt, is too enormous for a single person to undertake. To offer ten regional stories, Global Conceptualism required three project directors and eleven regional curators. More collaboration and dialogue may also be needed in the ensuing stages, because few individual scholars can be expected to know multiple aspects of disparate regions in depth, in addition to their primary areas of focus. This collaborative model of scholarship, admittedly idealistic, is predicated upon certain larger concepts or values that are transhistorical, transnational, or transcultural, and that afford common grounds. It should be noted, however, that when such unifying ideas are deployed, locally specific situations need to be taken into consideration. For example, the concept of zen’ei (avant-garde) is effective in studying 1920s Japan in reference to 1920s Europe, but another local concept, shinkō geijutsu (new art), is crucial to understanding the vanguard expansion into popular and commercial culture. In the case of 1960s Japan, the concept of the avant-garde is effective only as a way of aligning Japanese practices to similar practices outside Japan, thus creating an art-historical connection with counterparts in Euro-America. Even so, there are better concepts, such as conceptualism, performance, and dematerialization, for understanding interregional connections. Furthermore, the application of the concept of the “avant-garde” to 1960s Japan is problematic, because the idea lost relevance toward 1970, when it began to be replaced by the notion of gendai bijutsu (contemporary art). The local discourse is an important part of art-historical contextualization. However, discursive sophistication on its own right is a hallmark of 1960s Japan. The formation of gendai bijutsu was theoretically tied to the art-critical discourse on gendai (the contemporary), and the preoccupation with the modern constructs of geijutsu (which can be translated as “Art,” uppercase) and bijutsu (“art,” lowercase) has dictated the art-historical formulation of Anti-Art (Hangeijutsu) and Non-Art (Hi-geijutsu). These are aspects that mark certain 1960s practitioners as “Japanese,” while the same practitioners’ orientation toward “dematerialization,” among other characteristics, simultaneously marks them as “international.” (I wonder if, in a similar vein, what makes the work of some contemporary Chinese artists “Chinese” is their manners and strategies of engagement with what they perceive to be globalization and postmodernity.) The “judgment of lag or belatedness”—or rather, the frank acknowledgment of those properties—is also crucial. Nineteen-sixties Japan was able to articulate “international contemporaneity” precisely because of its peripheral, or latecomer, status. Unfortunately, however, the perceived belatedness has often resulted in exclusion from the art-historical narrative. The challenge today thus remains how to fully inscribe 1960s Japan in world art history.6 As we endeavor to narrate world art history, we also need to make a historical corrective to the so-called canon of modern and contemporary art, which is undeniably Eurocentric. By 6. See the discussion in Section 5 of the Seminars.

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the 1960s, the locale of Japan readily offered more than a few instances of “greatest hits.” For example, from the subset of “performative collectivism,” we may want to select Hi Red Center’s Cleaning Event, Zero Dimension’s naked rituals, The Play’s Current of Contemporary Art, and Niigata gun’s Event to Change the Image of Snow.7 Within the local contexts, the 1960s (or more generally, the period from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s) constituted a breakout moment for Japanese art, as did the 1990s (from mid-1980s onward) for Chinese art. It follows then that the presumed greatest-hit roster (which remains especially useful and necessary in pedagogy) would feature Xu Bing’s language works and Cai Guo-Qiang’s explosion events, among other contemporary Chinese works. Perhaps one benefit of globalizing contemporary art may be to offer tangible opportunities for “breakouts” to latecomers. It seems, problematically, that the discipline of art history itself is bound by the local/center binary, which is a variation of the traditional/modern binary in the Asian context. Art history is unable to clearly think through where to locate, say, 1920s Japan. Is 1920s Japan part of traditional art history or modern art history? Whereas the former is tied to the area of Japan or Asia, the later is more often than not linked with Euro-America. Neither should be a closed, fixed discipline; they both are in need of globalization, with 1920s Japan bridging the two. The need for the globalization of the discipline is more urgent for 1960s art than for 1920s art, because contemporaneity was more widespread in the 1960s. In this respect, lessons drawn from the discursive study of international contemporaneity in 1960s Japan are instructive. First, the perception of international contemporaneity at a given locale at a given time and the actual state of international contemporaneity are not always the same. Second, different locales may embrace differing perceptions of contemporaneity. A salient example is the comparison between Tokyo and New York: if Tokyo saw the international tendency of gestural abstraction as a shared experience of many regions of the world, New York saw it as a sign of American triumph. The gap between perception and fact is often historically informed. On the one hand, the American triumph was all the more triumphant because of New York’s long-perceived peripheral status. On the other hand, the similarly marginal place Japan long occupied made it highly self-conscious of its alterity and belatedness. When its path finally converged with that of the center, some Japanese critics accused Japanese artists of making imitations of EuroAmerican counterparts. Imitation is a form of learning: copying old masters or model books was long an integral part of the artist’s training, East or West. The sins of imitation nonetheless haunted the Japanese as their country underwent the stages of modernization from the late nineteenth century onward, and the matter was complicated by the modernist myth of originality. Granted, 1960s Japan was not devoid of instances of imitation that deserve the criticism of being 7. See Tomii, “After the ‘Descent to the Everyday’: Japanese Collectivism from Hi Red Center to The Play, 1964–1973,” in Collectivism

After Modernism, edited by Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 44–75.

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merely lazy, conspicuous, or mindless and unable to transcend their originals. The comparison of Claes Oldenburg’s and Sekine Nobuo’s hole-diggings in 1967 and 1968 respectively (Sekine was accused of imitating Oldenburg) illuminates more than the futility of the still-common yet often tedious discussion in art history about “Who came first?” and “Which work is original and which is derivative?” (In this respect, the value judgments of originality and derivativeness themselves needs deconstructing.) The comparison of Oldenburg and Sekine also shows that it is essential to articulate differences within similarities, because a prior example is bound to turn up somewhere in this vast world characterized by “contemporaneity” and “multiplicity.”

speaking of modern and contemporary asian art

C. J. W.-L. Wee

In a response to Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay on how the global biennial was eroding the comparative autonomy and agency that India had in producing “interesting art,” James Elkins says that while he did not disagree about the “overwhelming effect of biennial culture,” Mukhopadhyay’s “advocacy of Indian modernist painting is problematic”: key painters such as Jamini Roy “cannot be described in texts that will be read in western Europe and North America in such a way that the artists appear necessary to modernism. They are representable as local, but not as necessary.”1 Elkins’s response is part of a general question he had earlier raised as to whether the art of non-Western Others (now more noticeable because of the rise of multiculturalism in the Euro-American West) can actually be incorporated into a “global art history”—into “an art history which would treat all parts of the world as interconnected.”2 He goes on to contend that while he himself was working on “this problem,” he “knows it will take more than exhibitions and books to create a narrative of [globally inclusive] modernisms . . . It takes a foundational criticism of the terms of art, history, and the global.”3 There are two immediate responses, in turn, to Elkins. Zhivka Valiavicharska states that, in contrast to getting away from center/periphery models of “significant” cultural-artistic production, she “sides with . . . emancipatory knowledges that are emerging”—a pitch for “alternative” or, to expand upon her point, local knowledge taken positively. Suzana Milevska adds that she is “not completely convinced by the irrelevance of the issue of inclusiveness”—a pitch for the ongoing opening up of the canon.4 These varied positions taken in toto are proof of the lasting recuperative capacities of center/periphery models of both knowledge and modern cultural production, even when such dichotomies now have supposedly been shattered. Elkins unexpectedly—given his generous inclination toward opening up art criticism—repeats an old argument that the creation of modern culture came about without any cultural or other interaction with the economic periphery or the colonial-era frontier, ignoring the fact that “locality” can also be produced, say, in the “home” colonial and metropolitan society, such as when modern and urbanizing industrial England in the nineteenth century reinvented itself into a rural and traditional society. While there are also limitations to the “alternative” argument and the demand for inclusion that counter the center/periphery binarism, these remain 1. See Section 9 of the Seminars. 2. See Section 5 of the Seminars. 3. See Section 9 of the Seminars.

4. These discussions are in Section 9 of the Seminars.

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important strategic moves through which the modern and contemporary art of others can gain both self-representation and recognition in the metropolitan academy and cultural institutions. Such strategic approaches are inevitably and perhaps even unavoidably ambiguous and fraught, and the problems—but also the strengths—become apparent when we examine, even briefly, how the modern and contemporary art of a “globalizing” East Asia (taken to include Southeast Asia) struggles to gain representation. This, then, is the focus of my essay. Let me offer one indicative example of an “alternative modernity” that demanded inclusive recognition. In 1997, then-Paris-based, mainland Chinese Hou Hanru curated with Hans-Ulrich Obrist the touring exhibition extravaganza called Cities on the Move: Urban Chaos and Global Change—East Asian Art, Architecture and Film Now. They proclaimed that “a kind of mixture of liberal Capitalist market economy and Asian, post-totalitarian social control is being established as a new social order [in capitalist East Asia]. Culture, in such a context, is by nature hybrid, impure and contradictory. Accordingly, the new architectures and urban environment are being renovated and transformed into a sort of ‘Theme Park’ oriented cityscape . . . This [urban modernity] incarnates perfectly the image of the post-colonial and post-totalitarian modernization in the region: the impulsive and almost fanatical pursuit of economic and monetary power becomes the ultimate goal of development.”5 This breathless prose, with a vocabulary that indicates “critique” but with a tone that suggests “celebration,” proclaims the latest version of the new—now available in East Asia. The critical vocabulary is drawn from postcolonial theory of the 1980s and globalization cultural theory of the 1990s, and the passage evinces a hint of Asian oneupsmanship. It revives aspects of postwar modernization, but now updated to include the warm reception of the free market in more developed Third World regions. This embrace of the new oddly surprised Fredric Jameson, even though, given Euro-American economic hegemony, the reception is not unpredictable: “[Modernity] is in fact back in business all over the world, and virtually inescapable in political discussions from Latin America to China, not to mention the former Second World itself.”6 Hou’s work is both illustrative and representative of an interest in showcasing the New Asian cities and their urban cultures in relation to the more established metropolitan centers. He elsewhere claims a distinct difference amid the commonalities with the West for the dynamically creative Asian urban zones: “In different parts of the world, especially in ‘non-western’ regions like the AsiaPacific, new understanding and models of modernity, or different modernities, are being experimented with and provide the most active platform of creativity.”7 There is a claim for a culturally distinct and alternative modern-urban identity, 5. Cities on the Move: Urban Chaos and Global Change—East Asian Art, Architecture and Film Now, edited by Fiona Bradley, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, May 13–June 27, 1999 (London: Hayward Gallery, 1999). 6. Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity:

Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso, 2002), 7. 7. Hou Hanru, “Z.O.U.—Zone of Urgency,” Yishu 2, no. 2 (2003): 21. He is here writing of his independent exhibition at the 2003 Venice Biennale, Zone of Urgency.

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one that has transformed its Western colonial origins and has become significant enough to be presumably included in metropolitan art culture. The “arrival” of this other modernity has been announced in a more bluntly commercial manner in the sale by Sotheby’s in April 2008, in Hong Kong, of Zhang Xiaogang’s Bloodline: The Big Family No. 3 (1995) for U.S. $6 million, the highest amount paid thus far for a contemporary mainland Chinese artwork. We have to be careful of simply accepting celebratory representations of alternative contemporary Asian culture, even while we recognize that something called “modern East Asia” does exist in a putative sense in a way it did not, say, in 1970, given regionally shared visions on economic development. Apart from the fact that “Asia” is historically a problematic term, we need to pay attention to this “happening” New Asia’s connection to the reinvented free market (one that the Manchester School in England in the nineteenth century would have recognized), which in turn is linked to versions of the (commodified) postmodern. Problematic as some of Hou and Obrist’s positions may be, their work and the emergence of regional Asian biennales and museum exhibitions since the 1980s showcasing modern and contemporary Asian art indicate that there also exist, at the same time, self-reflexive investigations from within the region on how “the rest of the world” produced and still produces its modern culture out of related quasi- or directly colonized experiences, even if the ability to investigate such questions is still hamstrung by a lack of cultural and academic institutions and still-dominant Western-oriented intellectual frameworks for discussing modern culture. These exhibitions and biennale-type events possessed an “Asiacentric paradigm replaced Euro-American centricity,” as Thai art critic Apinan Poshyananda observes.8 They played their part in at least partially decentering a hegemonic cultural history, creating a cultural agenda that more consistently catered to regional-local concerns. This is so even though biennale culture is tied to an art market that national governments in the region use to boost their credentials as noteworthy world cities in East Asia. What might be called the East Asian exhibitionary imaginary has contributed to the way the “Them” (of the Us/Them opposition) now attempt to speak across divisive national boundaries within the region, to speak among “themselves.” The gaining of representation is an ambiguous and contradictory process. In the discussions in the Seminars, the biennialization of the world appears primarily in a negative light, and does not entirely take into account the positive opportunities for representation that accompany it. There is general agreement that Asian art—contemporary art, primarily— drew noticeable international interest from the 1990s through the increased number of international and regional biennials and exhibitions that decade saw worldwide. However, what may not be recognized enough is the significance of the founding of the Fukuoka Art Museum in 1979, and the two shows that jointly formed the first “Asian Artists Exhibition”: Modern Asian Art—India, 8. Apinan Poshyananda, “Asian Art and the New Millennium: From Glocalism to TechnoShamanism,” in International Symposium 1999:

“Asian Art: Prospects for the Future” Report, edited by Furuichi Yasuko and Hoashi Aki (Tokyo: Japan Foundation Asia Center, 2000), 165.

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China and Japan (1979) and Festival: Contemporary Asian Art Show (1980), key moments in which the regional representation of its own art was enabled.9 The founding of the museum—with the extensive programming in Asian art that developed at a time when interest in Asia was uncommon internationally—and then, in 1999, of the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum were the marks of a commitment to fostering cross-cultural dialogue within the region. The museum’s opening was itself part of the result of the complex economic empowerment of the cultural margins—or at least the cultural semiperiphery, in Japan’s case. Increased wealth has assisted the partial institutionalization of the exploration of the visual and other contemporary arts. What must be inserted into the account of the postmodern multiculturalism that arose in the 1990s is the added story of nonmetropolitan locales starting to represent their own modernist and contemporary art. The Fukuoka Museum is but one of a number of newer cultural institutions in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and, increasingly, China that participated in exhibiting Asian art by 2000. Even if an institution such as the newly created Singapore Biennale of 2006 is caught up in the government’s goals to forge a business-oriented, globalregional-local spectacle of multiculturalism, it is still good to have the institutions that can better support research and the interpretation of the work of East and Southeast Asian artists. Regional art institutions in the region have more of a stake in attending to what modernism was in Asia and to the presence of regional contemporary art than would the more “international” institutions in the metropolitan West. What matters here is that the art institutions and curators in, say, Korea or Singapore actually pay close attention to the practices of East Asian artists, rather than mainly participate in an endless round of critiques of Orientalism and Eurocentrism, which often has the negative results of continually returning art and cultural discussions to Western artists and institutions. The challenge of how to think through historical modernism also applies to the “arrival” of contemporary art. This, indeed, was thematized in a special program of the Singapore Biennale 2006, Telah Terbit (Out Now): Southeast Asian Contemporary Art Practices During the 1960s to 1980s, curated by Ahmad Mashadi and held at the Singapore Art Museum. Ahmad’s work is itself made possible by pioneering studies in Indonesian contemporary art by critic-artist-curator Jim Supangkat.10 The exhibition shows the near-simultaneous emergence of conceptual art and the return to figuration (often but not exclusively in a social-realist manner) in the 1970s to be first, a reaction to the Cold War and the authoritarian regimes that arose and were tolerated in the region by the advanced West because they were anticommunist; and second, a critique of the “formal, un-reflexive . . . repetitiveness of ‘international abstraction’ and ‘provincial lyricism’ [such 9. Kindai Ajia no bijutsu = Asian Artists Exhibition [henshu¯ Fukuoka-shi Bijutsukan] (Fukuoka City: Fukuoka Art Museum, 1979). 10. See Outlet: Yogyakarta Within the Contemporary Indonesian Art Scene, edited by

Jim Supangkat et al., translated by Landung Rusyanto Simatupang and Ruth Mackenzie (Yogyakarta: Cemeti Art Foundation; The Hague: Prince Claus Fund, 2001). [—J.E.]

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as the watercolors of Singapore’s Chinatown and the Singapore River] which had become the dominant conventions across the region.”11 Ahmad’s point is that “the re-emergence and preoccupation with the ‘figure,’ associated with the radical left, need not be seen as simple counterpoints to conceptual practices.”12 Out of a dominant U.S.-style modernist abstraction arose conceptualism and figuration as contemporary art practices in Southeast Asia, even if others may not see figuration as contemporary. Thus, by implication, the region has no need to be in sync with Western narratives of such art forms. If contemporary and postmodern art forms seem to be the basis for current global art, this in itself does not give us an understanding of global art history: we must continue to ask careful questions as to how an earlier modernism that was absorbed in complex ways into, say, modern and modernizing Japanese and Chinese art in the first half of the last century was then transformed into contemporary art practices. Such questions constitute part of the process of trying to know ourselves better. 11. Ahmad Mashadi, Telah Terbit (Out Now): Southeast Asian Contemporary Art Practices During the 1960s to 1980s (Singapore: Singapore Art Museum, 2007), 10.

12. Mashadi, Telah Terbit, 11.

a distant view

John Clark

It may be flattering to be invited to respond, but it is also frustrating. I have been asked to read 102 pages of single-spaced text, which are very short summaries of apparently complex and extended lectures and the edited versions of the transcriptions of verbal exchanges about them in 2007, followed by 111 pages of double-spaced written assessments. These are mostly about the function of art and its producers, together with some other art institutions or role players in the structures of power controlled, generated, and perpetuated by forces called variously those of globalism or globalization. There is quite a bit of reference to certain methodological approaches or dominant interpretive concepts, but these are referred to casually and come from a set that is recognized and largely held in common by many of the participants. Nearly all of these texts fail to clearly distinguish between units and levels of analysis, or types of inferential rules about causation processes between them. All are subsumed under notions of process, tendency, and degrees of hegemony. There is very little discussion of art in all this, as mentioned by a response from an artist. The general approach is anti-institutional, with the exception of mention of the museum and occasionally the archive. There is very little discussion of the artists’ friend and bête noire the mediator-curator, who is actually the figure whose analysis might have told us much more about globalization in art than top-down and often empirically controvertible assertions from theory. The structure of discourse, despite many admissions of originality or provocation, is largely phatic. This socially confirming and mirroring feature of the discussion became more prominent as I read the responses [questions posed during the Seminars] as a whole, which are highly repetitive. Most of the invited speakers and respondents seem to be working with the same discursive practices, which unthinkingly—for all the emphasis on thought or dialogism—replicate and reinforce each other. Some of the interesting exceptions come in the Assessments, some of which make claims for a radical empiricism or a refined application of previously deployed concepts such as hybridity. The non-Euramericans who were admitted to this self-privileging circle of discourse were those from, or concretely discussing, Japan, China, India, and Singapore, who knew how to argue in these modes. The subject of those who did not know how to discuss in these modes and did not use their dominant language, English, was barely indicated, even if some Japanese specialists did make valiant attempts to draw attention to them. The notion that modernity and globalism might be thought of in a large variety of ways, and from very different

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historical positions (as we were reminded by an example from Latin America), hardly came up. In short, this was another case of discussion in Euramerica which will end up being for Euramerica, and its very inconclusiveness points to an aporia that will become more apparent with time.

globalization and transnational modernism

Iftikhar Dadi

While many varieties of globalization characterize premodern eras, I confine myself to making a few broad remarks on the modern era since the late nineteenth century. To outline a few basic assumptions: “Art” (modern art in particular) cannot exist by itself as an autonomous formalist practice, but requires an elaborate set of requisite institutions to be legible—academies, galleries and museums, catalogues, criticism in journals and newspapers, collection and patronage structures, publics and audience. These institutions gathered force and acquired new valences in the West with the advent of industrial capitalism and colonialism. In the increasingly colonizing world of the nineteenth century, whose peoples were subjects rather than citizens, the colonized territories lacked the ensemble of institutions that could render a similar legibility to art. In the case of India, for example, its classical art was rendered monstrous by Hegel and Ruskin, and as recently as the early twentieth century, colonial cultural administrators were asserting that India did not possess any worthwhile tradition of high art. Ongoing “traditional” material and visual practices were made visible only as timeless, anonymous, and disappearing craft, and the artisan was subalternized, as Arindam Dutta has shown in his recent study.1 Popular prints and objects that had circulated in bazaars since the late nineteenth century were not considered art either. The non-Western world thus enters the discourse of “modern art” in the twentieth century under the sign of colonialism, Orientalism, primitivism, and institutional and historical lack. The relationship between art and globalization therefore needs to understood historically and discursively. Starting with the late nineteenth century, one can broadly schematize modern art in much of Asia, the Middle East, and Africa as marked by two overlapping phases. first phase: twentieth-century modernism The founding of art schools and academies and of salons and art societies, and writings on art in journals and newspapers mark the first phase. These processes were fitful and interrupted; nevertheless, they signify the emergence of precisely the kinds of institutions that modern art requires for its framing. In formalist terms, as is evident from recent studies, the advent of cubism was immensely liberating for art practice in much of the non-Western world, as modern art was no longer encumbered by Eurocentric post-Renaissance visual codes of perspec1. See Dutta, The Bureaucracy of Beauty: Design in the Age of its Global Reproducibility (New York: Routledge, 2007). [—J.E.]

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tive and realism. Finally, modern artists were imbricated in complex ways with the rise of nationalism and decolonization, but we need much better accounts of these artistic valences than have been provided by many nation-state-based art surveys so far. Briefly put, the concept of the nation in much of Africa and in the Muslim world does not possess an adequate referent: the persistent and multiple crises of the postcolonial nation-state in these regions only serves to underscore the epistemic violence by which the nation-state was enacted as a dominant political and social framework during the twentieth century. Many artists however, refused narrow nationalist framings in their practice: the importance of négritude and calligraphic modernism since the mid-twentieth century might be understood in this manner as transnational developments. Andreas Huyssen has recently noted that postcolonial theory and globalization studies are enabling new ways of writing histories of modernism that are transnational, rather than national or even international, and that he terms “modernism at large,” by which he refers to “cross-national cultural forms that emerge from the negotiation of the modern with the indigenous, the colonial, and the postcolonial in the ‘nonWestern’ world.”2 (The term “modernism at large” is very apt, as it sidesteps the increasingly fruitless debate on whether modernity and modernism are singular or multiple and vernacular.) I further argue that the role displacement and travel play in the construction of even a “national” or local modern art clearly requires a better understanding than has been available as yet. Canon formation, however, is linked to global power imbalances, capitalist accumulation, and institutions in complex ways that require analysis rather than tacit acceptance of its a priori status.3 Doesn’t the modernist canon, via primitivism, Orientalism, and patriarchy, appropriate for itself the collective aesthetic labor of the rest of the world, in a maneuver eerily reminiscent of the ongoing patenting by Western transnational corporations of the Third World’s cultivated commons in the arena of genomics today? Nevertheless, modernism, by fostering new imaginations globally, also offers critical and affirmative potential. (Here I parenthetically note that the artist and writer Rasheed Araeen and writings in the journal Third Text, which he edits, have addressed these issues with cogency for some time now, and at the very least, further work in this area needs to be cognizant of arguments already made.) Modern art in much of this region emerges via a complex negotiation with “tradition,” with a resonant and affirmative encounter with transnational modernism, and with the need to situate itself in relation to colonial and postcolonial impasses and possibilities. In many cases, in the absence of developed art-historical methodologies and concepts, artists developed their practice with reference to other modalities of “tradition,” such as oral and written literatures. More importantly, investigating artistic practices at the peripheries of canonical modernism (or better, of modernism at large) demands careful and patient 2. Huyssen, “Geographies of Modernism in a Globalizing World,” New German Critique 34, no. 1 (2007): 194 [—J.E.]

3. Tabish Khair, “Modernism and Modernity: The Patented Fragments,” Third Text 55 (Summer 2001): 3–13.

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work, including an awareness of social and political history, languages and literatures, and other cultural conceptions the artists engaged with—in short, a writing of artistic practice that respects the formalist properties of the art, but also situates it with reference to the intellectual history of the time and the region, and along the artists’ experiences of physical and metaphorical travel. To further demonstrate the complexity of terms such as “tradition” and “nation,” I offer a few remarks from a book-length study I am presently writing on South Asian Muslim artists. These artists are (problematically) associated with Pakistan, but my study situates them within a narrative of transnational Muslim South Asian modernism rather than viewing them within the older straitjacket of a national art history. My study looks at the emergence of modern art among Muslim South Asian artists by examining in some detail the work and intellectual concerns of a select number of artists from the 1920s to the present. The idea of tradition embraces intellectual and cultural resources of the Persianate cosmopolitan world of the Mughal Empire since the sixteenth century. It also encompasses the reformist movements allied with the rise of print culture that flourished in the wake of the Indian Mutiny of 1857, and sought to shape Muslim life in India by religious and educational reform and by modernization of Urdu language and literature. “Tradition” further included the rise of progressive cultural politics in South Asia during the 1930s, and the growth of literary journals and criticism. Urdu poetry and literature further provided many of the artists with imaginative tropes. Tradition also partially encompassed the rich iconography of Hindu and Buddhist South Asia. “Islamic art” was clearly a key facet of tradition the artists wrestled with. The term usually refers to artistic practices over a specific geographic area (primarily the Middle East) before the advent of modernity, but as scholars have observed, this definition is not indigenous to Muslim intellectual history, but is a categorization that developed in nineteenth- and twentieth-century European Orientalist art-historical scholarship. This term is clearly catachrestic, referring neither to purely religious art nor to art made exclusively by Muslims, while excluding art made by Muslims in the modern era and also in major regions such as Southeast Asia. The term therefore marks an allochronism: the artists in my study “decolonized” Islamic art via their artistic practice, by selectively reworking threads and fragments of classical Islamic art into modern formulations. “Islamic art” was available to these artists as received and lived practice in some cases, but, as a result of modern scholarship, was also furnished to them as a discursively articulated conception. Beginning in the 1920s, artists reworked fundamental categories that characterize the study of classical Islamic arts—architecture, miniature painting, ornament, and calligraphy—via the formal and procedural openings afforded by transnational modernism. It must be reiterated that international modernism itself drew upon artistic practices of the non-West, in which “Islamic art,” the decorative arts, and primitivism in general have played a foundational

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role—these crossed paths complicate questions of originality and derivativeness by defying any simple ascription of linear causality and temporality. The artists’ work also needs to be set in relation to the larger rubric of decolonization, as it made a certain type of claim to a “national” art. However, the “national” in modern Muslim South Asia since the late nineteenth century is a highly fragmented and overdetermined concept that cannot be neatly captured in a concise definition. The later nineteenth century witnessed the growing awareness by Muslim intelligentsia of their minority status in India, and led to the rise of Muslim identity in relation to wider pan-Islamic ideas. The celebrated poet Muhammad Iqbal, whose philosophy of subjectivity greatly influenced artists, was a persistent critic of territorial nationalism from the early years of the twentieth century until his death in 1938. Artistic practice therefore adopted a studied distance from Pakistani nationalism, and largely eschewed direct identification with it. Even in cases when the artist was patronized by the state, the addressee of the artwork was hardly ever the nation in a simple sense. Rather, artists availed themselves of the opening towards reflexivity and articulation of an alternative universe offered by modernism, and simultaneously also investigated transnational cosmopolitanism modalities in early modern and modern South Asian Muslim culture. The reasons for the absence of the avant-garde in much of the developing world might also be briefly mentioned here. In the absence of powerful but outdated institutional and academic codes to rebel against, the avant-garde simply cannot exist. Innovation in sites without such established values, therefore, consists in creating new institutions (rather than in attacking nonexistent ones). It is striking that all the artists I study devoted considerable effort to establishing new institutions, by publishing journals, creating exhibition spaces, teaching, and running art foundations. One needs to underscore the powerfully affirmative potential of modernism itself in fostering new imaginations during the decolonizing era, rather than conducting a futile search only for formalist experimentation or even for works that carry overt sociopolitical charge. If modernism is understood to refer to cultural production that is experimental and reflexive, inhabits new patronage arrangements, seeks new audiences and venues, and is generally concerned with exploring the predicament of the subject in modernity by drawing on a ruined tradition, the artists I examine certainly undertake that project, and they do so not primarily as national figures but as participants in a framework of a networked, cosmopolitan imagination. second phase: contemporary globalization The second phase of globalization is of course the one we now commonly refer to, which has been unfolding since about 1990 and is characterized by the incorporative trajectory of the communist world and independent nation-states into global finance and transnational capitalism, and the corresponding rise of a spec-

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tacular global installation art enacted in biennials. Here the artist is frequently seen as deterritorialized and is accused of making work that smoothly translates difference and alterity into a homogenizing globalized sameness. Even worse, the artist is said to serve as an unwitting vector for capitalist penetration into the peripheries. There is undoubtedly much disturbing truth in these observations, but are we really willing to trade the globalized art world for the pre-biennial nationalist era, if such were possible? I would argue rather that analogous to modernism, globalism possesses contradictory valences, and that newer media and intensified exchange possess possibilities for fostering new imaginations and solidarities that are not reducible to capitalist logics. It is striking to note how the negative effects of biennialization discussed in the seminars mainly impact easel-based oil painters. In Central Asia, for example, painters appear to have become more isolated. But one wonders why that medium should continue to be valorized today, especially by artists possessing Soviet-era training that shaped their artistic consciousness by bestowing upon Central Asian peoples a secularized, bureaucratized modernity while denying them mobility. If artists working in older modes have suffered isolation, important work in newer media that reimagines Central Asia as a region and a crossroad is also emerging, as the recent exhibition curated by Leeza Ahmady has demonstrated.4 Similarly, the recent assertion by a painter that “after Picasso, painting, for Africans, is impossible” flies in the face of important work African modernists such as Ibrahim El-Salahi have been creating for some fifty years.5 And given that easel-based oil painting was not an “authentic” African medium to begin with, might reversing that claim be more accurate, that “painting for Africans is possible only after Picasso” recodes painting, making it available for global appropriation? One wonders why newer media are not more capable of expressing African concerns today, especially if performative tropes that are said to mark “African aesthetics” might find better expression in new forms. Caroline Jones’s intervention in this volume has cogently addressed the affirmative possibilities engendered by contemporary globalization. Here I further suggest that the effects of biennialization on the local itself are profound, and probably incalculable in the medium and long term. Globalization and biennialization are clearly beginning to open up isolated regions to new imaginations and practices that include venturing beyond painterly modernism to create work in new media that might well possess considerable transformative potential for the local itself by enabling a more direct social address. Furthermore, it might productively reconfigure the otherwise disjunctive relationship between a seemingly local Kazakh studies and a global art history of the modern and contemporary era that cannot be decolonized without writing careful studies of the intellectual and aesthetic concerns of modernist and globalist artists at large. 4. See the review of the exhibition Parable of the Garden: New Media Art from Iran and Central Asia. Benjamin Genocchio, “Surprising Sophistication,” New York Times, March 23, 2008.

5. Reported about Garth Erasmus by Claire Pentecost, Section 9 of the Seminars.

art history and architecture’s aporia

Mark Jarzombek

I would like to pick up on the theme of nationalism, since it featured so prominently in the discussion, but draw my thoughts around something that was not addressed, namely the problem (if I can use that word for a moment) of architecture as it relates to the disciplinary formation of art history. I feel somewhat conflicted in raising this issue, since, as an architectural historian, I am already working within the grain of certain presuppositions and historical constructions. But I am speaking here not as an architectural historian, but as a historian of the discipline of art history, and it is from that point of view that I would like to insist that a discussion about art history and “the global” is changed considerably when seen from the perspective of architecture. Let me start with a point made by James Elkins. Art history, he claimed, “grew up along with the rise of the modern nation-state,” and because of this its current practices may “still be in thrall to the nationalist impulses that seem in retrospect to have driven so much earlier scholarship.” There are several ways in which one can agree and disagree with this claim, but my intention is to expand on it laterally not by looking more closely at the phenomenon of the modern nation-state, but by comparing the modern (and here I have to add what was missing in the phrase, namely the word “European”) nation-state of the nineteenth century with the modern, non-European nation-state of the twentieth century. If European nations were created with attachments to a history that could be scripted to reach back to ancient times, the situation in India, Brazil, Africa, and elsewhere was very different. There, nation-building was allied with modernization and not preeminently with a demand for art-historical continuities. The new nations of the twentieth century created any number of universities, technical institutions, and even some museums, but did not create major institutions for the study of art or architectural history. The twentieth-century modern nation-state was anticolonial and, to state it perhaps too bluntly, anti– art history. In the Seminar, much was made about the absence of art history programs in non-European countries. But it can be debated whether this is really an issue at all, or whether what Anglo-European art historians see as a crisis of discontinuity, others could see as something quite different, especially if one takes into consideration that the relationship to architecture was a powerful one and in a sense ushered in the first phase of global modernism. Think of capital cities, and all that they entailed, like Ankara (late 1920s), Chandigarh (1950s), Brasilia (late 1950s), Tel Aviv (1950s), Islamabad (1960s), Dacca (late 1970s), and Abu-

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ja (1970s). These cities can be compared with an earlier global national style, namely the beaux-arts, examples of which can be found in South American, Egypt, and Japan. Beginning in the second decade of the twentieth century, that mistake, so to speak, was not to be made again. I am not here to defend modernism, but to suggest that non-European modernism was not only a fundamental challenge to the European nation-state model, but an event in history that could not be registered—overtly at least—in the disciplinary structure of art history. Stated in simpler terms, at the very moment in time when architecture was engaging the global (for better or worse), art history was becoming ever more a fixed as a nonglobal discipline (for better or worse). Georg Friedrich Hegel promised that art was a much stronger carrier of the history of civilization than architecture, tied down as architecture was to the presumably deadening realities of economic need. But for a period of time, and one that is today hugely relevant to the question of how we frame the global, it was architecture, not art history, that dominated the national narratives in the non-European world. As a result, art history lost contact with and control over its privileged, philosophically mandated connection to the history of nationstates. It became self-foreclosing at the very moment it was set apart from history. It has never acknowledged this most fundamental of realities. Compare the Greek architect Constantinos Doxiadis with his contemporary, Erwin Panofsky. Doxiadis, who designed Islamabad, had a global practice—perhaps even the first such practice—and was a leading architectural theorist of the age, promoting what he called ekistics, a theory about landscape, resources, and design. Panofsky was equally prolific and created a theory that was to become the mainstay of art history, namely iconology, a theory that was obviously Eurocentric. Still today, a book like Methods and Theories of Art History can claim without any ambiguity that Panofsky developed “modern iconographic theory.”1 But “modern,” in this case, refers to the institutional structure of art history, which could only be pursued in the art history departments of Europe and the United States. It was very different from the “modern” as understood by Doxiadis, which was also based on expertise, but was not dependent on the conventions of historical production. One of the innovations of the Bauhaus, one must recall, was that it had no library, and still today in the non-European world, architecture is to a large extent taught without what we might consider adequate library facilities. This is not necessarily a question of resources. Certainly the school of architecture at Hong Kong, which I recently visited, could afford a library. Most of these schools were born in the modern nation-building era and still carry the imprint of their modernity. Today we see this as a deficiency, but that could be debated, and I am certainly not claiming allegiance to the implicit anti-intellectualism that attached itself to the tropes of architectural practice. The point is to see in 1. Anne d’Alleva, Methods and Theories of Art History (London: Laurence King, 2005). [—J.E.]

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what way this absence (the absence of history in the modernist project) not only ran counter to the shaping of modern art history in the Anglo-European world but was not necessarily a negative. The problem is therefore not architecture, but an art history that—despite its attempt to now think globally—still cannot see the consequences of its antiglobal, antimodern, “modern” retrenchment, even though this retrenchment is encoded, and even preserved, in its disciplinary structure. Art history’s absence in the nation-building formations of the twentieth century is registered as an absence of history itself! Just look at how many books there are on Islamic art architecture that end in the eighteenth century, supporting the image of nonEuropean modernism as not having a history worthy of the past. The otherwise magisterial book Islamic Architecture of the Indian Subcontinent ends in 1839.2 Furthermore, the last chapter is called the “The Final Phase of Mamluk Architecture,” as if this final phase was a historical predictor of the arrival of the new colonial masters who ended the flow of Islamic architectural history in India. Though this may to some degree be true, the presumption is that history ends because art history ends and that a new era begins that is basically history-less. Art history disguises its exclusion from the global other in the form of silence, but basically admits that it doesn’t know what to say. The solution is to interpret the “end” of art history as a transition to a completely different disciplinary framework, known as contemporary art and art criticism. The phrase “contemporary art” is, from this perspective, the semantic indicator of art history’s alienation from the global modernist history and its belated attempt to reconstitute its legitimacy in that arena, by making everything into an endless modernity. Art history has yet to deal with the two very different meanings of the word “modern” when discussing the “modern nation-state”: one from the nineteenth century and the other from the twentieth, one operating with art history and the other opened up—and in opposition to—the former through the medium of global modernist architecture. It is fine to critique the former, but the real work is to recognize the latter and to see the all important difference between modern architecture, which began in Europe but which received no nation-state mandate, and the global modernist architecture, which did. Historians in both art and architecture have tended to validate the former, whereas I am trying to validate the latter—not the politics, of course, but its historical reality in disciplinary historiography. Seeing this distinction will not be easy, since art history, symptomatically, lashes out at architecture without realizing why. Hal Foster, for example, who obviously speaks from a certain position as art critic, accused Frank Gehry of making bad sculpture—“regressive” is the word he uses—and of caving in to the global spectacular.3 But it is quite possible to see not architecture but art history from the 1950s onward as “regressive” (making “bad” global history). 2. Bianca Maria Alfieri, Islamic Architecture of the Indian Subcontinent (London: Laurence King, 2000).

3. Foster, “Why All the Hoopla?” London Review of Books, August 23, 2001, 24–26.

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The antagonism is particularly noticeable when Foster protests against the false “license” that Gehry ostensibly had in making his designs, by which Foster means that Gehry operates outside the bounds of art history and its presumptive avant-gardist (that is, European) iconographies. Foster also sees as postmodern what is actually architecture’s modernism. Postmodernism, a largely architectural innovation, was actually only a second global wounding of art history. The real wound happened earlier, for it was not postmodernism that freed architecture from history’s disciplinary constraints, but modernism—and not European modernism, which is still the favorite subject of art history, but non-European modernism. After a passage of time, many non-European countries, as we all know, moved into a post-nation-state phase, which championed the call for local and regional identity, a phase that is still strong today. This in turn created a need for a history that not only supported the legitimacy, retroactively, of the nation state, but that came also be seen—officially or not—as a form of resistance to both the earlier ideas of national modernism and the growing specter of globalization. Nothing has been better for the global expansion of art history than the globalized claim for a local resistance to globalization. Art history, born in the service of the European nation-states, now rises up in the service—implicitly, of course—of a latently antimodern view of the nonEuropean world. Today’s nation-state must—so the sentiment makes clear— have a civilizational history that reinforces its political legitimacy as a world nation. Global art history thus risks becoming a code word, on the flip side of the chart, for a highly questionable globalization of identity in alliance with a rapidly expanding museological culture. Just think of the huge expansion of curatorial space from 1810 to 2010, and of the expansion in the last ten years alone! What major city around the world today does not have at least one museum designed by a so-called avant-garde architect? These buildings and institutions are, however, only a very small fraction of the exponential growth of museological space. Large swaths of landscapes, replete with buildings and even towns, are being set aside by the UN as cultural preserves. In the late 1970s there were only a few so-called heritage sites as sanctioned by the United Nations, which, after the destructions of World War II, was eager to preserve culture in the name of “civilization.” Today there are over seven hundred heritage sites of different types all around the world, with countries everywhere eager to have as many as possible so as to rake in tourist revenue. And where there is no nation, one can be easily simulated. The Dogon in Africa are, for example, now a protected culture, which means that a whole array of modern bureaucratic structures will be created on their behalf and imposed upon them. Their land has become a vast anthropological zone, as if the disaster of the Indian reservations in the United States has been forgotten. Ironically, it is the landscape they inhabited that is being “protected,” their architecture being seen as little more than an extension of the natural world. The Romantic

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age lives on, but now as a major global and financial institution. According to the official text: “The Bandiagara site is an outstanding landscape of cliffs and sandy plateaux with some beautiful architecture (houses, granaries, altars, sanctuaries and Togu Na, or communal meeting-places). Several age-old social traditions live on in the region (masks, feasts, rituals, and ceremonies involving ancestor worship).” The unesco efforts, though meant to forestall the modernist eradication of history, bring into play an industrialization of cultural history that returns to the conventions of the static, “modern” nation-state. Art history has long adjudicated contemporary Dogon art as a contemporary variation of tradition, some of it high-priced, some of it kitsch. But don’t tell that to the unesco officials, who view the Dogon as still real and very much in need of our protection. Twenty-first-century Dogon society is, in fact, so valuable that we have to make it into a quasi-nation-state frozen against time to become a culture, landscape, and museum all in one. (Dogon coffee cups are sure to come.) I raise this because the operations of unesco were not mentioned in the seminar, and yet it this institution that is the globalized front of art history today, normalizing the image of static nationhood. It is important to challenge this form of globalization, but it is equally important to realize that it shares its Eurocentric origins with art history’s beginnings. One cannot but help notice, therefore, that art history—even as it tries to go global—repeatedly falls victim to the crisis of a double negative in which its Eurocentrism was inscribed, first as a nineteenth-century discipline and then again as a twentieth-century discipline, and perhaps now for the third time as a global discipline where it hopes to finish its original mandate, history and contemporary art being the two mutually orthogonal vectors by which it operates. The literalness of this was recently laid bare in the Leeum Samsung Museum of Art, which opened a few years ago. It has one building for Korean traditional art and another one some ten feet away for contemporary art. The sober art historian is paired with the tortured, postcolonial contemporary artist, a person who is fated to have no history in the presumptive historylessness of global capital unless assisted by the techniques of art curatorship. The timelessness of tradition meets the timelessness of the contemporary compared to the timefullness of the modern art history project. The difference between tradition and the contemporary, and between a global history that ends before modernism and begins again with art’s encounter with modernity, is clearly a false dichotomy, and one of the reasons why a putatively global art history has so many strikes against it. The pattern is already visible in the first generation of textbooks that follow what I call the “Euro+ model” of history writing. This approach reaffirms the familiar linear narrative for Europe and then adds—or rather includes—free-standing chapters on China, India, and Africa, as if these places have an unbroken history largely separate from global realities until their fateful encounters with modernism, which is where their history and their art history ends and magically switches to contem-

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porary history. In one textbook, Africa is divided into two time periods, “ancient,” which goes from 2500 B.C.E. to 1700 C.E., and “modern,” which goes from 1900 to today. One should not stumble over the word “modern,” since the antimodernity of the split is what is to be noticed. The consequences are bizarre. Why would the highly sophisticated architecture and engineering accomplishments of the fifteenth-century Mamluks, not to mention the twelfth-century churches of Lalibela with their complex hydroengineering, belong to ancient history? Can one really go from Saharan rock art to a thirteenth-century statue from Zimbabwe in the span of a few pages without falling prey to the everpresent suggestion that Africa is defined by the continuity of its presumptive primitiveness? The book also “disappears” the history of the colonial occupation of Africa in the late nineteenth century. This is not to say that the authors are unaware of this but to point to the fact that once again art history presumes that its history is History itself. In the Euro+ model, the burden of European (perhaps I should say non-Afro-Asian) history is its modernity (and the legitimization of history and its nation-state constructions), whereas the burden of the history of the nonEuropean world is, apart from its ostensible separation from Europe, its saturation with tradition. This two-part model remains resolutely Eurocentric while fulfilling the liberal promise for an alternative to the history of the West, the main purpose of which is to allay Western anxieties about its modernity while reserving the sanctity of the modern idea of the political border as protected by the international laws that were set in play following the Congress of Vienna in 1815. It is thus the timelessness of modernity that makes the illusion of timefullness possible. The basic rule is that nations are entitled—if not actually urged—to be not-global in their historical outlooks while being globalized in their economic outlook. The progenitor of this duality was, of course, the Romantic age, which has now, one can almost say, become both international and global. The nonEuropean world has to a large extent accepted this neo-European modern nationstate view. This was brought home to me when an Indian publishing company asked us to change the name of our textbook, A Global History of Architecture, to A History of Indian Architecture. We were also expected to thin it to emphasize the importance of India. The editors of the press saw Indian history—and perhaps the real market here was Hindu history—as a site of resistance, even though their model for history writing most obviously derived from colonial-age history. This view cannot be stopped, wrapped up as it is in the advancements of museology and the globalized bureaucratization of space, not to mention the heritage-ization, touristification, and global UN-ification of culture. Art history is now in a position that it can begin to explain—even, finally, to itself—its own aporias. Clearly, it has the obligation to reassess its disciplinary status and its attachments to Eurocentrism, but it also needs to reassess the fateful negative consequences of some of its more cherished philosophical impera-

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tives, which are twice over Eurocentric. Ultimately the problem is, of course, not about architecture, but rather about what architecture brings out of disguise in this respect. Never allowed into the inner sanctum of history, architects already in the nineteenth century were well aware that their field’s attachment to history was constructed, that history could be manipulated and its meanings made reducible to a range of simulacra. It was this that made architecture so successful in the nation-building phase of the twentieth century once its historicist skin was finally rejected. It was this aesthetics-with-no-history that finally burst through outside of Europe in the early twentieth century as an early formation of a global other to art history’s Eurocentrism—a no-history that was, however, a historical and epistemological project unto itself. In the face of this crisis, art historians may have wanted to affirm a European civilizational model of history and continuity, but they are now, perhaps, slowly waking up to the realization that even their field’s history—like that of architecture—has long been disconnected from a presumptive civilizational mandate.

so what might be solved here?

Tani Barlow

“So what might be solved here?” is a question that was raised early in the original meeting. I have cited it because the sentence is not exactly a question, and if it were, it would be an improper one. The question presupposes a split between the historical and the personal registers. It is posed in relation to some stories that Shigemi Inaga has just told. The story is that Tanizaki actually loved flush toilets and movie stars and that his infamous writing about the “sensual beauty of dark, wood-lined Japanese toilets” is just so much literary chit-chat. Some idiot at Critical Inquiry had rejected an essay Inaga submitted years ago, calling it “parochial” and “ethnographic” because it concerned Japanese art. Inaga related his shock at the racialist selection criteria for the art at a major Pompidou show on the Japanese interwar avant-garde. Yet at the end of all these illustrative stories Inaga was asked to explain his feelings. The demand for a solution is posed in such a fashion that the only possible recourse has to be more disclosures of more personal feelings. This makes what Inaga actually asked—can nonspecialist scholars learn enough about actual existing world practices and art history to ask a proper question of it—into a presumption of identity and narcissistic wounding. The problem Inaga encountered did not seem to have anything to do with either hurt feelings or “affect” (not a substitute for the word “emotion”). An interlocutor’s demand for a solution not only does not ask anything. It averts us from a focus on thinking that really matters. I received a series of primary responses to these transcripts, too. The respondents tried different strategies, but their goal seems the same as mine. Like a good historian, Caroline Jones goes right for the level of assumptions: the debates addressed an imaginary autonomous object called “art”; the conveners posed social science questions without consulting any social scientists; the conveners assumed culture and nation are isomorphism. Her sample—Oiticica’s career and art—suggests ways of sidestepping the shortcomings, as his life and art are a “solution” waiting to be noticed. (This was Inaga’s ultimate point too, of course.) Mark Jarzombek notes that the common event has already occurred and that it was global modernism. Thus, while Doxiados designed Islamabad, the discipline of art history consolidated around a méconnaissance of “world art,” and is stuck now in a timeless void of self-reference. Jarzombek calls on art history to climb out of its mummy bag and see what is front of its face. Historian Iftikhar Dadi notes that the twentieth-century interwar years had already globalized a canonical “modernism-at-large,” which, like the moment of

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“globalization” in the immediate post–Cold War 1990s, is over. Now is a moment to consider the postcolonial “affirmative possibilities” of bygone eras, or else this project of addressing unasked questions will go on forever in relation to a blank abstraction called “global capital.” Why not, Dadi says, address catachresis in art criticism, starting with “Islamic art.” C. J. Wee furthers this orientation to the historical catachresis, raising the issue of regionalism and a Hegelian politics of recognition (“this politics of recognition leading to an ultimate radiance,” in the blazing words of Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay) as a still valuable form of work. Many echoes of regionalism in our immediate post–Cold War “nonmetropolitan locales” are referred to by Rasheed Araeen, the founding editor of Third Text. In the last of the commentaries I was sent, Anthony King pokes a hole in this presumption that context or region is the royal road out of the impasse. Look, he says, the “modernity thing” is a shibboleth, a labyrinth. The point is that the physicality of the modern city is both unprecedented and tangible and that is the historical event at stake, not “capital,” because, “the city . . . is itself a work of art.” The first wave of commentators actually disposed of the half-asked nonquestion “So what might be solved here?” quite handily. They declined the offer to play that game. In Jones’s words, “already existing aesthetic strategies” are everywhere “begging to be understood.” So why do the Stone Theory Institute debates so often appear as set formula? Here is the one clear rationale. Whether “art-historical, historical, or political,” intellectual work on globalization and art needs to “struggle to put together some kind of stage or form where these kinds of discussions can be imagined.” Alas, this proffers, again, another solution. It is not an appropriate question, and if it were asked—say for instance, “Where are all the critical theorists who are providing new ways of seeing art in our time?”—then it would still be an improper question because it would ignore the actual names of contemporary critical theorists and knowledgeable art historians like Yin Jinan, Dai Jinhua, Jason Wong, Kyung Hyun Kim, and Wu Hung, just to mention a few whose work is easily available in English on Amazon.com for a few bucks. Stock social science descriptions of globalization, transnationalization, regionalism, localism do not provide a platform for better questions because they do not encourage better questions to be asked. The better, fresher questions are emerging, have emerged, are already deeply established in the tsunami of work that is sweeping formulaic debates away. Returning to the impasse over Inaga’s work, a fresher question is “Why did Tanizaki have a crush on Colleen Moore?” or “Why did Tanizaki go on about the erotics of latrines, when he knew very well that flush toilets are nicer and he preferred them himself?” So let me make my first point as unmistakable and clear as possible. Tanizaki, Oiticica, Doxiados, Lu Xun, Na Haesuk, and so on are not integers on a larger platform or project about globality or global art. They are critical and inventive actors in the historical events of modernism-at-large and most certainly in 1990s economic, neoliberal globalization as well as this as yet unnamed space

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where we find ourselves as the U.S. centrality in the global order has simply begun to collapse. This is a view literary theorists and comparativists like Haun Saussey, Emily Apter, and Gayatri Spivak had canonized as early as 2004. My second point is to inform the art historians that theirs is a false impasse. This will involve a bit of play acting, so bear with me. In the transcript we hear tell about a bleak world. It seems that the academy places such enormous political obstacles on what can and cannot be staged as art criticism that resistance is futile. The evidence presented for this view is anecdotal. Two experiences are offered; each one is a feminine impasse. First, there is the instance of a “young scholar [who] cannot get a job at a major university by explaining Renaissance altarpieces in terms of Peruvian huacas,” and, second, there is “a senior scholar who does” explain Renaissance altarpieces that way and who “is likely to be ignored because her narrative will be idiosyncratic—it won’t speak to an engaged interpretive community.”1 At stake is the effort to resist being assimilated into the stale world of contemporary art education. If I am interpreting this point correctly, it seems that neither an eccentric young woman scholar nor an eccentric old woman scholar has any hope of getting traction in the academic study of art because their work will be (or will be considered, it is not exactly clear which) frivolous, amorphous, and extraneous to the real debates. They will send their messages, but no one will receive them. Speaking bluntly, this has not been my experience at all. Third Text is not the only alternative to the art world. There are three good journals in the world of English language studies of East Asia topics, including politically engaged art, contemporary art criticism, and histories of poetics and aesthetics. (This is not even to raise the obvious problem of language access to critical projects in politicized art criticism outside the United States.) The journals are the seventeenyear-old journal Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique; Traces; and Inter-Asia Cultural Studies.2 Any of the primary discussants at the Stone Theory Institute can put down their copies of Third Text and begin reading any of these three journals if they are concerned to know about the contemporary theoretical politics of Asia-engaged intellectuals. There is no mystery here. After seventeen years of publishing a critical journal in “Asian” humanities, I see precious little danger to even the most rarefied aspirants to even the best universities if they write across disciplines. Inaga’s story about Critical Inquiry is about ignorance loitering behind the masks of reputation and anonymity. Rather than those lady professors whose oddly undisciplined speculations about Renaissance altars leave them unemployable at “leading universities,” I prefer the scary hero who arises in Zhivka Valiavicharska’s summary remarks: “You are absolutely right,” she says to Susan Buck-Morss. “You are arguing precisely for the subject’s radical displacement from the context of her own self-understanding. I would call this displacement a confrontation—and a violent one—if not violent in the ordinary sense.” I think what Valiavicharska is saying, and let me repeat 1. These are Elkins’s comments; see the close of Section 6 of the Seminars.

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that this is my second point, is that the radical disidentification of art historians from art history is a good start. I will end on a matter raised in Section 5 of the Seminars, concerning the question “Why write about art?” or the singularity of the art object as opposed to “any other cultural product that resulted in interesting socioeconomic contexts.” James Elkins says that those of us confronted with writing “historical narratives of modernism” have only three scholarly strategies: (1) contextualization, (2) economic reductionism, and, most interestingly, (3) idiosyncrasy. “In that third case, you are taking the risk that your writing does not make contact with other people’s narratives at all, that it appears outside history or criticism—that it appears as poetry.” Why demonize poetry? For me the poem is a precisely a problem in universality. I am not at all comfortable with the assumption that poetry is amorphous, gnomic, or disengaged. In his Handbook of Inaesthetics, Badiou argues precisely for the truth value of poetics and also, in the same discussion, explains why comparativity cannot rest on contextuality, similitude, regionalism, location, linguistic similarity, but must confront and take up critically discrepant and inaesthetic interpretative strategies.3 It is the ideas, he argues, that are at stake here, and not aesthetics or design or prettiness or even goodness. Once I accept the gamble on universality in poetics, the stake lies with the problem of future anteriority, “what art will have been” outside the metropolitan market. This question is never raised in the Stone Theory Institute debates. That is peculiar. After all, from the position of art makers (even “art” makers), futurity has to be recognized, because we craft into our work the expectation of the future, of readers or viewers. In any case the work will always (Irigaray shows this with her poetic language) replay, with reiterated difference, the nonsolidity of the name and the thing. This point is not congruent with Harootunian’s preoccupation with temporality, and it cannot be folded into the quotidian. Even from the critic’s position there must be attention to future anteriority because in the activity of making these objects they are calling art there is encoded evidence that value is not unitary. Again, as Inaga points out, there are admissible homogeneities and there are impermissible ones, and to grasp the impermissible is to see how calculating art has to be if it is going to be “universal standard” as defined by power holders. I would add that to grasp the dynamic of the admissible and the impermissible in the context of an art that is not familiar, not yet, perhaps even “art,” is precisely to ask begin asking a fresh question that might matter. I too seek to affirm the visibly existent in the “historical catachresis” or the linguistic neologism. I think the colleagues whose comments I extrapolated above might agree with me here. The double binds afflicting so-called global art are resistant to everything except thought. The “transformative power of cog2. Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993–); Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 2000–).

3. Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics, translated by Alberto Toscano (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).

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nition in the historical process” (which is how Apter phrases this point) is an exhilarating way to spring the trap that the nonquestion of globalization and art set. Badiou’s point is that, ethics of space aside, the poem “thinks” universality and consequently comparativity is an open invitation and not a hermeneutic problem. And he invites those concerned with generalization to begin from the thinking rather than any other place. So to ask “what is a poem” is to ask what is universal in the appreciation of this thing called art.

perspectives on scale: from the atomic to the universal

Esther Gabara

I find I must respond to these seminars on globalization and art through a meditation on Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles’s sculpture Cruzeiro do sul (Southern Cross, 1969–70), a 9 × 9 × 9 millimeter wooden cube composed of a piece of pine and a piece of oak glued together, which fits perfectly onto the tip of a finger.1 The artist asks that this work be exhibited in a space at least two hundred square meters, effectively occupying the entire space of a standard “white box” gallery with this one work. This is admittedly a perverse response to the invitation to discuss globalization, one that may stem from my sympathy with Rasheed Araeen’s polemical response to the same invitation. As I dwelt on my desire to write about Meireles’s sculpture rather than launch my own contribution to the theory of the globalization of art, I found that his little cube generated a great deal of knowledge about the debates at hand. The title Cruzeiro do sul refers both to the small sculpture and an essay by the artist written for the groundbreaking Information exhibition, held at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1970.2 While the small cubic sculpture was not exhibited in the museum, the book accompanying the show, which included Meireles’s essay, was more an additional conceptual project than an exhibition catalogue.3 Curator Kynaston McShine invited artists worldwide working in a conceptualist vein—including ten from Latin America—and created an internationalism beyond the traditional circuit between Paris and New York. Beyond this broader inclusiveness, the work shown engaged technologies of global communication, knowledge, and politics. We can thus consider the exhibition an early start on the work James Elkins proposed for these globalization seminars. The artists investigated the “historical outcomes of developing global capitalism” and “alternative modernities,” performed “critical space studies,” and explored subject formation in disparate sites experiencing globalization.4 Meireles’s brief essay and minuscule sculpture reveal that scale is a crucial means by which to understand and intervene in the processes of globalization. It was the sculpture’s scale that relentlessly inserted itself in my mind as I read the transcript of the seminars. Cruzeiro do sul uses disproportion as a philosophy 1. In addition to the sources cited below, see Jaqueline Barnitz, “Conceptual Art and Latin America: A Natural Alliance,” in Encounters/ Displacements: Luis Camnitzer, Alfredo Jaar, Cildo Meireles, exh. cat., Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery, College of Fine Arts, University of Texas, Austin (Austin: Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery, 1992), 35–48; Cildo Meireles: Geografia do Brasil, edited by Paulo Herkenhoff (Rio de Janeiro: Artviva Produção Cultural, 2001). See

the sculpture: www.artnet.com/Magazine/news/ ntm4/Images/ntm6-1-21s.jpg. 2. Cildo Meireles: Geografia do Brasil, 88. 3. Information, edited by Kynaston McShine, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, July 2–September 20, 1970 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1970). 4. See Valiavicharska’s Second Introduction to this volume.

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of space and so enacts its own form of global expansion, even as the essay of the same title critiques the violence of globalization. These works from 1970 help us to think about sculptural scale and aesthetic power as much as economies of scale under neoliberalism. In the Information catalogue, McShine describes the world as a “global village” constituted as much by the media as by the “general social, political, and economic crises that are almost universal phenomena of 1970.”5 Information brought conceptualism to the premier institution of modern art in New York, and foregrounded global politics and aesthetics rather than an international style. Describing the circulation of art through “television, films, and satellites, as well as the ‘jet,’” McShine suggests that “those far from the ‘art centers’ contribute more easily, without the often artificial protocol that at one time seemed essential for recognition.”6 What is more, the show focused on a defining violence that moved between the “center” and “periphery”: “If you are an artist in Brazil,” McShine noted, “you know of at least one friend who is being tortured; if you are one in Argentina, you probably have a neighbor who has been in jail for having long hair, or for not being ‘dressed’ properly; if you are living in the United States, you may fear that you will be shot at, either in the universities, in your bed, or more formally in Indochina.”7 Artistic strategies for taking on this violent globalization would not emerge exclusively from Europe and the United States, but rather required the presence of Latin American and Asian artists. “Cruzeiro do sul” (the essay) pinpoints global violence on a number of scales, from the local to the national and even the planetary. The titular Southern Cross is a constellation of stars visible only south of the equator; it was mapped by Amerigo Vespucci during his trip to South America in 1501. In the Northern Hemisphere, where the Information show took place, that constellation is invisible. The minute size of Meireles’s cube within the immense space required emphasizes this dynamic of visibility and invisibility. Grounded in the history of colonial expansion, it offers a kind of prototypical global positioning system that allows the viewer to know precisely where she stands depending upon what she can or cannot see. Meireles uses the most basic attributes of art or visual culture—visibility, scale, and position—to reveal that the contemporary violence of globalization does not exist in strict distinction from its colonial forms.8 These same stars of the Southern Cross also appear on the flag of Brazil, a nation under the rule of military dictatorship when Meireles made these works; they refer to the nation even as they defy the ideology of nationalism that proclaims each nation to be unique and integral. The small cube may answer Harry Harutoonian’s question about the national: “What other kinds of units might be entertained?” Its scale displays that there is no “national content” per se, for what content could this tiny cube contain?9 The size counters the monumental5. McShine, Information, 138. 6. McShine, Information, 140. 7. McShine, Information, 138. 8. Here Meireles emphasizes more Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann’s “conditions of continuity”

than Fred Jameson’s “difference between the old imperialisms” and globalization. See Sections 3 and 1 of the Seminars, respectively. 9. See Section 1 of the Seminars.

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ity of state-sponsored art, revealing how, if not scaled down, art can contribute to the very forms of violence that nations engender.10 Indeed, Meireles begins the “Cruzeiro do sul” essay by proclaiming that he is “here, in this exhibition, to defend neither a career nor any nationality.”11 He rejects both militaristic nationalism and the art-historical structure of national art schools, by which the market tracks an artist’s production as a career and assigns value to his work. That same year, Meireles made Tiradentes: Totem-Monumento ao Preso Político (Tiradentes: Totem-Monument to the Political Prisoner, 1970), in which he tied live hens to a stake with a thermometer. He doused them with gasoline and set them on fire as the audience watched. While the title protested the dictatorship’s abuse of political prisoners, it also referenced national hero Joaquim José da Silva Xavier, known as Tiradentes, who organized the first major uprising against Portugal in 1789 and was hanged and quartered as punishment.12 Meireles has called such contradictory references to Brazil “antagonistic”; in them, a national icon like Tiradentes paradoxically reveals the disproportionate power of the very state that deploys his image.13 By exercising the experience of disproportionate scale, Meireles engages particular Brazilian histories without representing what the Seminar conversations discussed as “cultural heterogeneity.” In Shigemi Inaga’s view, heterogeneity “must be represented,” and so the art market finds ways to make it acceptable. While avoiding foundational narratives of cultural heterogeneity—such as anthropophagy, postcolonial hybridity, and mestiçagem—Meireles abandons neither the symbolic register nor the indigenous peoples of Brazil. Like the stars of the Southern Cross, the wood used in Cruzeiro do sul is nonetheless highly symbolic. Meireles explains that “with the Southern Cross there is a symbolic representation, but it can also be read as a political work. My primary approach in this work is poetic,” and he continues: “the trees [used in the sculpture] were sacred [to the Tupi] because of the friction between them: by rubbing a branch of oak against one of pine, the pine would burn. What was sacred was the knowledge that fire could be produced in this way, as fire was a divine manifestation.”14 Shunning the brazilwood featured in Oswald de Andrade’s 1924 modernist manifesto celebrating national heterogeneity, he instead sculpted with materials particular to Tupi cosmology and found throughout the Eastern and Western hemispheres. Meireles demonstrates that cultural heterogeneity may not necessarily be offered to the eye. He avoids the trap that Elkins encounters: the art market’s desire both for markers of local identity and for visual art legible with10. While U.S. minimalist artists—who shared Meireles’s interest in cubes—were also deeply involved in the antiwar movement, the scale of their sculptures tended to the monumental rather than the microscopic. 11. McShine, Information, 130. 12. Interview by Gerardo Mosquera, in Cildo Meireles, edited by Paulo Herkenhoff, Gerardo Mosquera, and Dan Cameron (London: Phaidon, 1999), 6–35, quotation at 15. 13. Cildo Meireles and Paulo Herkenhoff,

Cildo Meireles: Geografia do Brasil, exh. cat. (Rio de Janeiro: Artviva, 2001), 80. The same stars of the Southern Cross emblazoned on the Brazilian flag also appear on the flags of Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, and now even MERCOSUR, the free-trade coalition of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. And despite its national references, Meireles also described Tiradentes as his personal reflection on Vietnam, napalm, and war imagery generally. 14. Cildo Meireles (1999), 29.

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out translation. The cube contains a particular and still sacred theology that is untranslatable, while its pine and oak are too common to sustain the exoticism of markers of identity such as samba and carnival. Neither marketing nor erasing the diverse social groups in Brazil, Cruzeiro do sul forces a dramatic experience of difference as the disproportion of inequality. Meireles’s sculpture displays the cosmological, economic, and geopolitical expansion of that detail of Tupi life: lighting a fire with pine and oak. Cruzeiro do sul belies the presumption that the experience of globalization, at the level of daily life, is more profound today than in earlier periods of global colonialism (see the discussion between Joyce Brodsky, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, and Keith Moxey15). Struggling against the ongoing impact of the arbitrary and violent division of the Americas into eastern and western territories by the Treaty of Tordesilhas (1494), Meireles designates Brazil as “this West.” European ownership of “Western culture” falls into doubt, and he warns further that “the jungle will go on spreading itself over the East of no matter what region.”16 As Paulo Herkenhoff affirms, Cruzeiro do sul operates like a spark in a flammable space, simultaneously providing a vital human need and threatening to burn the place down. Like an atomic bomb, it shrinks down to the nuclear and explodes into the planetary, sparking globalization from this place “west of Tordesilhas.” The works Meireles exhibited in the MOMA in 1970, both part of the series Insertions in Ideological Circuits, developed this philosophy of scale and directly engaged the economics of globalization in their reintroduction of altered objects back into the circulation of the market. Coca-Cola Project consisted of glass Coke bottles stenciled with political messages in white, such as “Yankee go home,” which appeared only when these bottles were recycled, refilled with the darkbrown drink, and redistributed in stores, as is done throughout Latin America. Cédula Project was made up of Brazilian bills stamped with messages demanding answers, for instance, to questions regarding the death of imprisoned journalist Wladimir Herzog. Small, almost invisible communiques engaged global financial circuits, such that the drink that represents U.S. cultural and economic power carried contestatory messages, and a bill worth just one cruzeiro directly addressed dictatorial might.17 Meireles considered the series’ political impact successful, explaining that “it is practically impossible to achieve anything on an individual scale through this work. The contribution of each individual insertion is minor in comparison with the potential scale of the work. At the time I felt great about the project, because it was at least feasible, even if it raised this issue of disproportion.”18 I suggest that its political and conceptual impact was made precisely through its disproportion. Meireles concludes that scale drives both the political and symbolic functions of Cruzeiro do sul: “As well as dealing with symbolism, it addresses issues 15. This occurs mainly in Section 3 of the Seminars. 16. McShine, Information, 85. 17. As in Argentina and Chile, the dictatorship in Brazil originated today’s neoliberal eco-

nomic strategies. The direct address to the dictatorship on the one-cruzeiro bill in the Cédula project makes this connection quite clear. 18. Cildo Meireles (1999), 12.

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of scale in the art object. By simply being there, it introduces an inevitable comparison with the space in which it is displayed . . . Its ‘insignificance’ opens a dialogue with the cultural hierarchies which position art in the world.”19 Not surprisingly, the sculpture remains in the artist’s collection, although it would be easy to sell. Imagine the news of the highest price for the smallest work of art. Meireles’s implicit refusal to allow the work to enter the art market acts as a point of tension similar to the contrast with the two-hundred-square-meter space that ideally holds the piece. One senses the vast pressure of the market reaching for this small work, eager to consume it, value it, insert it into the global economic circuit. Meireles’s restraint cannot be ascribed to a moral purity that keeps him outside the art market; to the contrary, he successfully sells work internationally. However, that this particular piece remains in his collection is part and parcel of how the work reveals and intervenes in the operations of globalization at stake in the seminars: in politics (nation-state and otherwise), the market (artistic and otherwise), and knowledge. The sculpture Cruzeiro do sul, like the work Claire Pentecost discussed, is a form of theorizing that presents scholars with serious challenges. How do we confront the scale of globalization today? How can we measure the scope and depth of its impact? Might we too deploy philosophical disproportion strategically, to explode its logic from the particular to the planetary? Can we measure scale within globalization theory, such that it addresses the inequities of the current global condition without operating as a form of epistemological omnipotence? In other words, can we spark globalization theory from some other “west”? Here I have tried to start small, in hopes of paying attention to those minute details of art and life that have formed a continuous presence, politically, aesthetically, conceptually, even as they threaten to inflame institutions, states, and philosophies. 19. Cildo Meireles (1999), 29.

a remark on globalization in (east) central europe

Ján Bakoš

It is a truism to say that there are three main kinds of globalization: global communication as a consequence of new electronic media; global economic integration; and world mobility including cultural tourism. All three kinds also refer to art and art history. New electronic media result not only in new forms and genres of art but also in the international community of artists and the globalized art world.1 Irrespective of the legitimacy of skepticism concerning the scope and quality of global intellectual discourse (and according to Hans Belting, a common discourse is a fiction2), electronic communication combined with personal initiatives and direct contacts helps to establish a cosmopolitan “republic of letters” in art history: The Art Seminar, organized by James Elkins, may serve as one of the best examples.3 As far as economic globalization in the field of art is concerned, economic integration also opens the door to establishing an international (and possibly a global) art market. Nevertheless, the intensified transnational artistic communication as materialized by international exhibitions is not in agreement with the situation of the art market. While global communication within the art world is expanding and has became gradually more polyphonic, both a monopoly and a hegemony seem to govern the globalized art market supported by art criticism. According to statistics published by Kunst Kompass dealing with the most successful contemporary artists, at the beginning of this century the world art scene was dominated by American artists (Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Cindy Sherman, and Donald Judd; Louise Bourgeois, Joseph Beuys, and Christian Boltanski are therefore only exceptions), and since the middle of the first decade of this century American hegemony seems to have been replaced by German dominance (for example, Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, and Georg Baselitz), even though that dominance is still shared by American artists (Bruce Nauman, Cindy Sherman, Louise Bourgeois, Donald Judd, Mike Kelley).4 According to Alain Quemin, “both the art market and the recognition accorded by art institutions remain the preserve of . . . the United States and Germany . . . it is the artists from 1. See Noel Carroll, “Art and Globalization: Then and Now,” in “Global Theories of the Arts and Aesthetics,” special issue, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65, no. 1 (2007): 131–43. 2. Belting, “Eine globale Kunstszene? Marco Polo und die anderen Kulturen,” in Belting, Szenarien der Moderne: Kunst und ihre offenen Grenzen (Hamburg, 2005), 108. 3. The Art Seminar, in 7 vols. (New York: Routledge, 2005–8).

4. See Alain Quemin, “The Illusion of the Elimination of Borders in the Contemporary Art World: The Role of Different Countries in the ‘Era of Globalization and Métissage,’” in Artwork Through The Market: The Past and the Present, edited by Ján Bakos˘ (Bratislava: VEDA, 2004), 275–301; and see further www.de.wikipedia.org./ wiki/Kunstkompass.

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these top countries which occupy the dominant positions in the international contemporary art scene.” Quemin also observes that “the current globalisation does not present any challenge whatsoever to the US–European and US–German duopoly, or even to the US hegemony in the international contemporary art world.”5 That is why, in Hans Belting’s words, “von einer globalen Kunstszene sind wir einstweilen noch weit entfernt” and “der westliche Kunstmarkt ist das einzige Szenarium, über das wir reden können.”6 In art history, something similar can be observed in the frequency with which art historians are quoted. In the 1950s and most of the 1960s the most frequently cited art historian was probably Erwin Panofsky, and he was probably replaced by E. H. Gombrich in the 1970s. Since the 1980s, T. J. Clark, Michael Baxandall, and later also David Freedberg have been cited alongside Gombrich. And from the 1990s to the present, citations in art history seem to be dominated by Michael Baxandall and Hans Belting. Belting’s strong influence on contemporary art-historical discourse can be regarded not only as a consequence of the historization of the identity of art7 and the questioning of the identity of art history,8 but also as the outcome of the fact that he was among the first who responded to globalization. In order to adjust his theory to the new situation, he replaced his former contextual sociohistorical approach with an attempt to formulate the anthropological art history in his book on the anthropology of image.9 Nevertheless, at the moment the mainstream of Central European art history does not seem to be focused on the problems of globalization at all. The last attempt by Central European art historians to initiate a world art history project was probably the multivolume series Propyläen der Kunstgeschichte, the first volumes of which were published forty years ago.10 Since the end of the 1990s most efforts in (east) central European art history have been concentrated on overcoming the nationalist model of the history of art that had dominated central European art history since the 1930s. Simultaneously with the recent expansion of the European Union and the process of the political and economic unification of Europe, an art-historical project has been launched that conceives of the history of art in central Europe as a polyphonic multinational organism, and of the

5. Quemin, “Illusion,” 297. 6. Belting, “Eine globale Kunstszene?” 119. “We are still far away from a global art world” and “the Western art market is the only one that we can speak of.” The reason, according to Belting, is that “Der Universalismus . . . möge unter Kontrolle bleiben, weil sonst die Kurse fallen.” [—J.E.] 7. Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image Before the Era of Art, translated by Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); originally published as Bild und Kult: Eine Geschichte des Bildes vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1990). 8. Belting, Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte? (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1984), trans-

lated as by Christopher Wood as The End of the History of Art? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); and Belting, Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte? Eine Revision nach zehn Jahren (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1995), translated by Caroline Saltzwedel and Mitch Cohen with additional translation by Kenneth Northcott as Art History After Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 9. Belting, Bild-Anthropologie: Entwürfe für eine Bildwissenschaft (Munich: W. Fink, 2001); a translation is forthcoming from Columbia University Press. [—J.E.] 10. Propyläen Kunstgeschichte, 18 vols., edited by Kurt Bittel et al. (Berlin: Propyläen Verlag, 1966–77).

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countries themselves as a cultural and artistic megaregion. Models are available in the transnational empire of the late medieval and early modern Jagellonian dynasty, and later the Luxembourg dynasty and its empire. To formulate such a model, a Jagellonian project initiated by Robert Suckale and carried out by an international team of central European art historians at GWZO (Geisteswissenschaftliches Zentrum Osteuropas) in Leipzig is an example of such an attempt.11 The aim was to replace the nationalistic model of the history of art, as well as the statist patriotic paradigm of the history of art conceived as the history of nation-states, with the idea of the history of art considered as the history of dynasties. The rejection of the bourgeois idea of the nation as an artificial and abstract construct, and the restoration of premodern and precapitalist historical structures (such as international courts, cloisters or multinational cities, and metropolises) as the proper art-historical entities, can be regarded as a radical revision of chauvinist nationalism and associated conceptions of history. But at the same time history is seen here through the matrix of a former global age, that is, by projecting characteristics and structures symptomatic of late globalized capitalism dominated by global communication and transnational commercial corporations into the past.12 The latest national art-historical project published during the time of globalization, the volumes of the series History of Art in Germany,13 seems to confirm east-central European art history’s limitation to regional European problems by art historians. Nevertheless, the volume dealing with Gothic art attempts to transcend national and nation-state frames by means of the international team of art historians participating in the “national project.” Moreover, the editor of the volume, Bruno Klein, conceives of the history of art in Germany as the history of “international exchange and communication” on the one hand, and as the story of inventing and developing new media of communication on the other.14 No doubt that cannot be conceived of as a direct and explicit contribution to the globalization of art history. Nevertheless, it can be regarded as a projection of topical problems of the age of globalization into the past, and consequently, as their implicit affirmation. Thus, we have to distinguish two paths into the new global art history: the explicit project of the new world history of art and plural-

11. See Die Jagiellonen: Kunst und Kultur einer europäischen Dynastie an der Wende zur Neuzeit, Beiträge des internationalen wissenschaftlichen Symposiums im Germanischen Nationalmuseum Nürnberg 1999, edited by Dietmar Popp and Robert Suckale (Nuremberg: Germanisches Nationalmuseum, 2002); Karl IV., Kaiser von Gottes Gnaden: Kunst und Repräsentation des Hauses Luxemburg 1310—1437, edited by Jir˘í Fajt (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2006); Sigismund von Luxemburg: Ein Kaiser in Europa, edited by Michel Pauly (Mainz am Rhein: Philipp von Zabern, 2006); and Sigismundus Rex et Imperator: Kunst und Kultur zur Zeit Sigismunds von Luxemburg 1387–1437, edited by Imre Takács (Mainz am Rhein: Philipp von Zabern, 2006).

12. More about this is available in Bakos˘, “From National to Dynastic History of Art,” a paper read at the international conference “Praha a velká kulturní centra Evropy v dobe˘ lucemburské 1310–1437” (Prague and Large Cultural Centers of Europe in the Age of the Luxembourgs, 1310–1437), Prague, March 31– April 5, 2008. 13. Geschichte der bildenden Kunst in Deutschland, 8 vols. (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2006–). 14. Gotik, edited by Bruno Klein, vol. 3 of Geschichte der bildenden Kunst in Deutschland (Munich: Beck, 2007), 8–33.

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ist, global art history as attempted by American and British art historians, and the implicitly globalist approach to the regional or national history of art. The possibility of a response—or rather a resistance?—to the challenges of globalization mounted by a local art-historical community is another story.

globalization and

(contemporary)

art

T. J. Demos

The Seminars present, in my view, a very provocative and timely series of discussions around key cultural, historical, geographical, and temporal aspects of globalization. Most fundamentally, they enjoin us to consider globalization as bearing not only an extended history of international trade and imperial conquest stretching back hundreds of years to the beginnings of modernity—from the sixteenth century onwards, contends Thomas Kaufmann1—but also a complex formation that is specific to the contemporary period, particularly since 1980, as Fredric Jameson argues: “I would want to insist on the difference between the old imperialisms, which involve colonies, armies, and so forth, and whatever you want to call these forms of influence that take place after decolonization.” Jameson continues: “‘Cultural imperialism’ is not enough; I think we need wholly new words. ‘Globalization’ replaced ‘cultural imperialism’ and other terms, and I think that’s very welcome, because it suggests not only different power and economic relations but also a different politics.”2 This seems to me essentially correct, and more, the danger of avoiding this contemporary definition is to blind ourselves to the singularity of recent developments, which we must consider without losing sight of their historicity. To this end, the Seminars propose several useful ways to comprehend the specificity of such “power and economic relations.” Zhivka Valiavicharska, for example, argues that globalization encompasses new sets of operations between power and life, which she explains have been so usefully theorized by Foucault in relation to what he terms biopolitics and emergent forms of governmentality.3 One could add here that with his conceptualization of the “state of exception” and “bare life,” Giorgio Agamben has provocatively extended Foucault’s insights, bringing them to bear on the growing conditions of migration, statelessness, and new forms of sovereignty that, according to him, define our globalized present.4 Other sections of the discussion consider various innovative methodological proposals for thinking and writing about globalization. Exemplary in my view are the framing texts for two of the seminars, particularly Jameson’s “Globalization as a Philosophical Issue,” which addresses globalization as an ongoing economic and cultural conflict between identity and difference;5 and Susan Buck1. See Section 3 of the Seminars. 2. Section 1 of the Seminars. 3. Section 7 of the Seminars. 4. Agamben, Homo sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, translated by Daniel Heller-Roaz-

en (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). [—J.E.] 5. Cited at the beginning of Section 1 of the Seminars.

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Morss’s “Hegel and Haiti,” which develops a comparative historical analysis that treats the contradictions between the Enlightenment’s revolutionary discourse of freedom and its simultaneous practice of colonial slavery (namely that of Haiti and the early nineteenth-century slave rebellion in Saint Dominique).6 BuckMorss’s essay strikes me as a model elaboration of the comparative methodology advanced in Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism, which called for a “contrapuntal” approach—at once aesthetically sensitive and politically engaged—that would place culture in relation to imperialism.7 As Buck-Morss shows, Said’s proposal has lost none of its urgency or promise. In addition, the Seminars present intriguing ways to challenge one frequently feared effect of globalization: the homogenizing force of cultural imperialism. I found especially noteworthy Pedro Erber’s suggestion that we retrieve the “anthropophagic” tradition from the Brazilian context, where local practictioners would “cannibalize” foreign cultural forms, thereby assuming an active role in the creative negotiation and reinvention of imported commodities and representations; as well, the closing roundtable’s discussion of the case of the Slovenian artistic group IRWIN offers a compelling—if inevitably incomplete—account of how one model collective has based itself in a “peripheral” geographical location (although globalization disrupts precisely such clear oppositions between centers and margins), and has thereby been able to generate an exceptional historicization of eastern European artists that contests Western genealogies of modern and contemporary art.8 These discussions—and several others—represent sparks of thought that may have never been fully developed, problematized, or elaborated; however, such spontaneity, incompleteness, and fragmentation is the inevitable fate of seminars, which provoke for precisely these reasons. That said, for a book on art and globalization, and particularly for one that makes a case for globalization as a periodizing term, the text was sorely lacking in its treatment of the relation between contemporary art and globalization, largely because contemporary art came up so infrequently with any degree of specificity and extended treatment. Several possible reasons for this oversight come to mind. One reason might be that the Faculty included no specialists in the field of contemporary art, such as critics, curators, or artists. Among the Fellows, of course, there were participants such as Darby English, Pamela Lee, and Suzana Milevska, who do possess such expertise, but they appeared to be in no position to direct the course of conversation. Another reason may owe to the fact that certain contributors (Kaufmann in particular) appear insistent on contesting the strictly contemporary definition of globalization in favor of its four-hundred-year-long history; consequently, the conversation ended up giving recent developments short shrift. Reading the transcript, I frequently felt as if the discussants mostly accepted the fact that there’s nothing particular or discrete about contemporary forms of art, media, and technology, or about 6. Cited at the beginning of Section 6 of the Seminars. 7. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993).

8. At the end of Section 9 of the Seminars.

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art’s current exhibition and distribution systems—in relation to which one could make a case for contemporary art’s global definition. Similarly, there appeared to be nothing historically specific and unprecedented about the circulation of representations and peoples that for many define globalization—what Arjun Appardurai calls “mass media and mass migration”; or, again, about the contemporary world system of economy and power—what Jameson terms the “difference” of globalization since 1980. The result is a series of seminars that addresses a variety of largely abstract, theoretical aspects of globalization— Jameson’s on globalization as a philosophical issue; Kaufmann’s on past globalisms; Elkins’s on the problem of global art history; Shigemi Inaga’s on crosscultural interaction; Buck-Morss’s on postcolonial theory; and Valiavicharska’s on the transnational creative economy—but that fails to engage contemporary art and its institutions. What about questions specific to contemporary art? How does artistic practice, for example, define, negotiate, and challenge the cultural, economic, and political forms of globalization? What new structures of media have been initiated in the last few years—such as digital imaging and video techniques, or spectacular forms of architecture—that increasingly seem to define our now globally dominant modes of representation? What role do the institutions of contemporary art, such as megaexhibitions and international biennials (and particularly cases like Documenta 10 and 11) play in the expression, critical analysis, and contestation of globalization? How has the Middle East exerted a recent and growing impact on global expressions of contemporary art—for example, via the massive investment in and developments of cultural institutions in the Gulf states, including the construction of new outposts for the Guggenheim and the Louvre in Abu Dhabi, and of art auction houses Christie’s and Sotheby’s in Dubai, as well as the inauguration of new biennials in the region, such as the one in Sharjah? How has geopolitical conflict—such as that between Western powers and Middle Eastern states—defined new global forms of the image, reinvented documentary genres, and provoked innovative strategies of resistance, particularly in response to globalization as the now prevalent mode of cultural and economic imperialism? How have artists responded to political and military crises and wars, the growth of refugees, environmental destruction, all of which are key to our growing understanding of globalization? I would like to hear discussion of these pressing concerns. Of course, all cannot be said within the limited scope and time frame of a weeklong seminar—particularly when considering a subject as vast as that of globalization—and moreover, the transcripts, I understand, represent a fraction of the doubtlessly expansive discussion. Still, if the topic is dedicated to globalization and art, then perhaps more representatives of contemporary art would have helped develop that important aspect of the conversation. When questions about contemporary art did come up, moreover, they were met, for the most part, with untenable generalizations: artists are merely the

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instruments of capital, we are told; biennials and the art market are simply the affirmative expressions of neoliberalism; and whatever critical potential an artwork might be said to possess in the global environment of biennials and commercial institutions is merely wishful thinking, or worse, a naïve expression that is unwittingly in league with the very marketing of subversive avant-gardism as consumerist product. For example, take Isla Leaver-Yap’s comment that “a key question to think about would be how biennales such as Documenta [sic] and Venice, but also the ones that are founded in cities in decline or in economic crisis, or in cities that want to establish themselves as international hubs such as Johannesburg—how they all begin to feed into a kind of political-economic order that Hardt and Negri have termed Empire.”9 This is indeed a very relevant topic to examine; but to raise it only to leave it at that—as it was, seemingly with murmurs of affirmation from the other participants—suggests that this reading is not contentious. Consequently, artists, exhibitions, and art are all tacitly reduced to being the mere effects of the political-economic order of Empire. In a similar train of thought, Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay complains about the ramifications of cultural globalization on India: “As the biennial culture comes in, we are confronted with works which are Indian in name only. I am not being judgmental. I am merely recounting where the force of global capitalism takes us. The indigenous, ‘small’ tradition has been completely obliterated by the globalization of Indian contemporary art. Yet nothing has come up to compensate for the loss of our autonomy and agency.”10 But while this view may be partly accurate, what about the practices of the Raqs Media Collective, Subodh Gupta, Shilpa Gupta, Sonia Khurana, and Amar Kanwar, and a host of others, which remain committed to the exploration of Indian histories, regional urban contexts and conflicts, and conditions of local identity? What of Appadurai’s notion of cultural indigenization, which posits an inevitable differentiation and localization of global forms and practices? What about the cultural heterogeneity discussed by Jameson as one of the potential outcomes of the conflicted processes that define globalization? Rather than opening up the complexity of cultural globalization, which contemporary art at its most ambitious moments demands, the discussion tends to reduce artists to “businesspeople with managers, agents, and high-tech labs” and “commercial performers rather than cultural resisters”; similarly, their audiences are consigned to “a well-heeled, global jet set, who practice deterritorialized belonging on the basis of exclusive access to what has value.” Why do these comments not meet with some critical response, such as: Are there no potential forms of resistance possible even in the most commercial of contexts? Are all artists who are represented by commercial galleries merely sell-outs, devoid of any resistant agency? Is the market really so monolithic in its forces and effects? It appears so, for, as Buck-Morss argues, “Together artists and their publics are unwitting collaborators in shutting down possibilities for escape from neoliberalism’s self-proclaimed freedom, which is in fact highly regulated—all the while 9. Section 7 of the Seminars.

10. Section 9 of the Seminars.

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they are supposed to be having fun.”11 What I find objectionable here is the totalizing tendency that reduces all culture to economic reason. In my view, there is a pressing need—and one that exists beyond this single text—to develop a more complex recognition of the art market and its institutions, one that makes it clear that all participants within the realm of global contemporary art inevitably face a contradictory field. Institutions and markets are not homogeneous forces, and neither are the agents that act within them. To participate in the art world—or rather, the multiple worlds of art—means to operate within and between commercial forces; but that doesn’t mean that one must surrender to them, nor that critical and creative forces can’t carve out places within even the most spectacular of biennials. Indeed, even the word “spectacle” needs to be challenged and rescued from its reified definition as a Situationist term of derision, as if it isn’t capable of alternately designating an unstable field of visibility that is at once a space of the commercial image as well as a zone of contestation and battling representations, as Jacques Rancière compellingly argues. Even an artist such as Paul Chan—whom Buck-Morss mentions in a positive light, referring to his video Baghdad in No Particular Order—has been known to participate in biennials. It is true that Keith Moxey, in a much needed intervention, counters the general current of discussion by insisting on the significance of the notion of “imagination” to contemporary culture, notably as developed by Appadurai, for whom it plays a key role in relation to struggles for “liberation.” Moxey explains that even commodities “are clearly products of the imagination, and what we do with them is way more complex than a Marxist analysis of production allows us to imagine.”12 The point is difficult to argue with, though few would acknowledge it. Buck-Morss, appropriately, credits the idea: “Keith’s optimism has merit—if somehow the entire apparatus of the art world can be turned inside out. It is hard to imagine . . . but that is just the point. Imagination freed from the cynicism and defeatism of neoliberal hegemony is precisely what is at stake in this discussion.” Yet this train of thought is unfortunately never developed in relation to contemporary art, and instead marks the conclusion to Buck-Morss’s otherwise engaging seminar. However, can we not say that the first step to liberate ourselves from this position, which finds it so difficult to dissociate imagination from economic determination, is both to challenge the notion that there is a single “art world apparatus” and to demonstrate that the imagination is never solely located within “the cynicism and defeatism of neoliberal hegemony”? 11. These comments are Buck-Morss’s; see the end of Section 7 of the Seminars.

12. End of Section 7 of the Seminars.

thinking through shards of china

Chris Berry

I have been carrying the transcripts from this fascinating series of seminars around with me for several months now. I have had them with me at home in London, but also in Hong Kong and Helsinki, Beijing and Marrakesh, and now in Mexico City. Along the way, they have come to form an ironic counterpoint to my own global wanderings, or perhaps it is the other way around. This response is probably best considered as fragments—or maybe even shards. (In my mind, that famous vase, urn, or whatever sort of jug it was, is being dashed across the floor in slow motion again, and again, and again.) First, the problem of a discipline grounded in Eurocentric blind spots, unable to respond adequately to the global reconfiguration of the objects it studies and the discipline itself, is a problem that is by no means confined to art history. In June of 2008, the University of London Screen Studies Group held a twoday conference called “Geographies of Film Theory.” This was initiated as an appropriate event to mark the group’s new administrative home at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies in the School for Advanced Study. But it soon became clear that focusing on how and when the work of Balazs, Kracauer, Epstein, Pudovkin, and all the other usual suspects was translated into different languages and how it was taken up in various parts of the world was not going to satisfy the expectations raised by an idea like “Geographies of Theory” in the age of globalization and its vicissitudes. It was a remarkable first day of new insights into the origins, circulation, and uptake of European film theory within Europe, but the second day did not follow the spread of those theories around the world. Instead, it turned into a more reflexive and challenging event in which the presumptions propping up the discipline were challenged. Why, we asked, have the journalistic writings of Europeans been canonized as “early film theory,” whereas the equally copious journalistic writings from the rest of the world that attempt to think through the new medium in its relationship to modernity, colonialism, and more have remained just that—journalistic writings? Once we found out in our conversations that, for example, Pudovkin had been translated into Chinese before his work was translated in other European languages, we also began to feel the question of just whose modernity was really belated. So, I believe in the project that the Seminars undertook and interrogated, and I believe it is part of a larger topographical reconfiguration that is underway and will continue—problems notwithstanding. Having said that, we should not underestimate the obstacles. At a party a couple of weeks before the event, some-

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body involved in the organization was overheard extolling the prospect of the papers that were due to be delivered the second day at great length but confessing that it was something they “did not give a shit about, really.” I suspect this grudging accommodation of the troublesome demands of the rest of the world, coupled with a refusal to see that it is of any real importance, still dominates thinking in the West. It’s an emerging question how much longer the rest will care what the West thinks. This seems like a good moment to turn to China. I am an outsider to the art scene. In Beijing this year, I went to Caochangdi and Songzhuang for the first time. Caochangdi is not only where to find Ai Weiwei, but also Wu Wenguang, the man sometimes called the “father” of independent documentary in China since he made Bumming in Beijing (Liulang Beijing) in 1990. He has what he calls a “station” at Caochangdi, where he pursues an amateur aesthetic, holding workshops for young documentarians from all over the country, and encouraging them to work as a sideline activity, in a low-budget manner, on the basis of mutual agreements rather than contracts. One of the anxieties haunting the institute’s discussions seems to have been about the value of art—in every sense from pecuniary to aesthetic and political—and a yearning for some sort of autonomous, resistant, critical art in the modernist mode. (Of course, I noted James Elkins’s repeated reminders that resistant art was far from being the only kind that does not circulate in the global markets, and that many of the other kinds that do not are both not resistant and worthy of attention. But the fact that he had to keep returning to this point seems to underline the persistence of that nostalgia for critical and resistant art that I noticed running through the Seminars. And here I agree with Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay’s inability to accept Susan Buck-Morss’s interventions.) Out at Caochangdi with Wu Wenguang, I could not help thinking that it is much easier to resist being taken up by the markets if your very mode and genre resist it. DV documentaries can be cheaply made and easily reproduced at minimal cost, making them unlikely to be collector’s items for the neoliberal elites with literally more money than they know what to do with. I do not mean to idealize Wu Wenguang—he has had enough of that already—nor do I want to pretend that he operates in a world totally untouched by the market. But he and his colleagues are producing work that by its very nature is not easily taken to market. Songzhuang (literally, Song Village) is on the outskirts of Beijing. I went there to visit another friend from the world of documentary film, Zhu Rikun. So far, when the Financial Times does a piece on Chinese contemporary art (perhaps for its shamelessly named magazine How to Spend It), the 798 district is always the focus, perhaps with a side trip to Caochangdi as the cutting edge. They rarely make it to Songzhuang. But that will probably have changed by the time you read this. I was told there are five thousand artists out at Songzhuang now, not to mention a museum and various galleries. The village is being transformed under the aegis of the artist and critic Li Xianting. One of the early Chinese

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modern artists in the 1980s, and still much admired, Li is also helping Zhu Rikun through Li Xianting’s Film Fund. While I was there, we made a quick visit to Li Xianting himself, during which I began to wonder about our assumption that art should be resistant to commodification, even or maybe especially in the era when everything down to our DNA is being commodified. As we walked up to the house, I noticed there was a silver Jag parked outside. I know Li Xianting is not a poor man now, but somehow I imagine that even if he did decide to buy a Jag, he would not leave it parked outside for all to see. Sure enough, a wealthy couple were also visiting Li and discussing art projects. The most important change in the Chinese contemporary art scene in recent years has been the entry of newly rich Chinese into the cultural marketplace. Before, they were only interested in antiques. Partly, this is the problem of having so much money that some of them do not know what to do with it. As always, there are artists on hand to help them out. But why would they want to go along with those schemes? Friends suggested two reasons. First, I was told, contemporary art has become the cutting-edge bribe—sorry, gift—in China today. At a time when money is too traceable, it is convenient to buy a nice painting for a government office; no one knows the value of it, and it can disappear a few months later without anyone really caring or noticing. Second, and perhaps more important, art elevates suzhi. Roughly translated as “quality,” suzhi has emerged as an important discourse in an age of social upheaval. Money and connections alone cannot be guaranteed as reliable proof of a person’s suzhi. The ability to appreciate contemporary art has become one of the signs that one has suzhi. And the more radical, seemingly offensive, and certainly incomprehensible, the better. I mention this because it seems to me that it captures something new and something very old about art. Art has always been produced to satisfy patrons and the rich. In some sense, art is the ultimate commodity. In the age of mass production, of course, its much vaunted uniqueness (no matter how radically questioned by artists) can make it priceless, in every sense of the word. But that has not stopped artists from producing works that do more than flatter their patrons, and indeed many patrons expect and want them to exceed those limits. In an age when commodification is so all-pervasive in our world, perhaps we should not be looking to art as a way out of that, but as a way to discover what more we can do within commodification. And for that, we might also turn to worlds outside Europe, where there might not be so much anxiety about purity. Finally, I would like to say something about translation. Throughout the discussions, a continuing theme was translation and mistranslation as a problem, or maybe as something hopeful in its incommensurability. I particularly enjoyed the discussion about Xu Bing’s resistance to being called a hybrid artist. I suspect this is because “hybrid” translates in such a way that it suggests “bastard” to many in China.

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However, what interests me even more than tracing these complicated itineraries of translation is the question of power. Who gets to decide if the translation is correct or not? Earlier this year I was at a large conference that brought together speakers from the Chinese art world with European counterparts in a nonacademic context. The papers and speakers spent much of the day at crosspurposes, speaking past each other because they were using the same theoretical concepts (hybridity, postmodernity, postcoloniality) but with totally different and often contradictory meanings. I am still wondering why the Europeans did not “correct” the misunderstandings that had occurred as so many of these concepts have traveled into Chinese discourse. Was it because they held their Chinese colleagues in contempt, because they “did not give a shit about it, really”? Or was it because they knew that there were so many deals, so many opportunities, and so much new Eastern promise in contemporary China today that they did not want to risk it? Is the current interest in Chinese contemporary art a passing phase? Or is power reconfiguring the determination of meaning in such a way that soon Westerners will be straining to understand what things mean in their Chinese context, and where authority lies? I guess only time will tell.

in and out of the local

Hyungmin Pai

As I waded through the pages of sometimes perceptive, sometimes confusing statements about the issue of globalization and art, the central problem for me was that of knowledge, and, as Rasheed Aereen bluntly put it, that of ignorance: so much that is seemingly known, so much to know, and so much that is clearly not known. At a sheer quantitative level, we seem to be confronted with an unprecedented range and diversity of work, languages, and cultures. It would seem that we (and this is a very problematic “we”) are now obliged to learn the languages, respect the local and the mundane, and understand the issues of translation. We are to know of artists working on cruise lines and all corners of the world. We are to transform the unknown into the known. At the same time, as already noted in discussions of historical precedent, this is not a wholly new situation. It was similarly so in earlier periods of expansion, colonialism, and imperialism. A key problem in Western intellectual production since the eighteenth century has been the sheer abundance and the excess of things that were gathered, stolen, and recorded. Much of what we understand as modern science (including art history, archeology, anthropology, and museology) was based on attempts to organize excess into knowledge. A recent 780-page anthology on the idea of the museum edited by Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago is appropriately titled Grasping the World.1 For communities on the other side of the spectrum, the modern often presents the problem of lack and absence. No matter how much money institutions and nations have spent to buy back and conjure up a lost history, this absence cannot be ignored for it is fundamentally different from what Mark Jarzombek characterizes as the “absence of history in the modernist project.” Hence the different historical projects of the different historical and imagined communities. Is the theoretical project, then, of the most influential centers of intellectual work—and I would include the Stone Theory Institute and the academic institutions of many of its participants—to grasp the globalized world, to produce knowledge that will encompass these vast phenomena? Is this a search for a global theory in a globalized world? With these questions, one must emphasize that there are centers and peripheries; divergent communities defined through language, ideology, nationhood, financial interests, wealth, and connectedness to a global world. These are not the only lines of division, and with globalization they are in a state of flux. And perhaps that is why we are talking about them. 1. Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago, eds., Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2004).

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Quantity and density are of course not the only characteristics of the global condition. The issue of the global is also one of relative position. If the central terms in thinking about position are the global and the local, perhaps the most important idea is that knowledge is a function of place. In simplified terms, the global and local involve a tension between the objective and universal, on the one hand, and the situated and particular, on the other. For example, Zhivka Valiavicharska asks, “How can we think of possibilities to write art history through events, through alternative experiences of time, and through the ambiguities of the everyday?” But isn’t the everyday, even in its varied uses, defined as something that is practiced rather than thought? Valiavicharska’s question is couched, on the one hand, in general theoretical terms—“to think of possibilities”—and on the other, the particularity of events, experiences, and the everyday. There is always the pull between the force of a consistent theoretical structure and the specific realities of place. In this context, I would like to bring into the discussion an essay by Mark Wigley temptingly titled “Local Knowledge.” The essay, brought to my attention because of its inclusion in FOA’s Phylogenesis, is a short and perceptive outlook on the issue of globalized practice in contemporary architecture and provides the following definition of how to reconcile an objective sense of knowledge and place-bound conditions. Wigley writes: “The local is nothing more than a way of defining the outside and negotiating with it. The local is not to be found in a particular place. Rather it is a way of finding things, a way of seeing the world. Places are never isolated, they never simply exist on a certain spot. The local can never be pointed to. It is always embedded in a complex ever-shifting array of networks that ultimately envelope the globe.”2 The local, as the title of Wigley’s article indicates, is a kind of knowledge. An important task in the globalized practices of architecture would then be to understand the relation between local and global knowledges of architecture. Later in the essay, however, Wigley generalizes the local architect as the agent of “the outside”: “Architecture will always be invasive in the end. It’s a clumsy art. Architects inevitably import ideas from afar. Think of the metaphysical discourse that underwrites architectural theory and without which there would be not be a discipline. Generic formal ideas are seen to be imbedded into specific material situations. The very idea of form is the idea of the material world reaching outside itself to be touched by an abstract order.”3 Despite his perceptive insights into the nature of the local, Wigley assumes a universal perception of what architectural knowledge can and has been. He places “metaphysical discourse” and the abstract notion of form at the foundation of the theory and discipline of architecture. The foreign architect seamlessly exchanges identity with the international architect, the possessor of a universal encompassing knowledge. If the local is a form of knowledge, why is architectural knowledge deemed always foreign or generic? Though the localforeign encounter provides Wigley with the opportunity to expose the ultimately 2. Phylogenesis: Foa’s Ark (Barcelona: Actar, 2004), 1096.

3. Phylogenesis, 109.

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invasive nature of Western knowledge, he has little interest in local knowledge, or perhaps he is not in a position to produce it. To be foreign is to be outside the local, to be international is to be universal, to be everywhere. But is the local still part of the universal? The regions of the unknown are unacknowledged in the universal, for how can one acknowledge what one does not know? This is what happens when one is outside of a concept, when a concept (such as the local) is something to think about and write about, rather than something that is practiced. In this essay, Wigley never assumes himself to be local to a community or a place. It is mostly disappointing when brilliant writers who deal with the global never assume themselves to be local. In the context of the seminar this was particularly so with Fredric Jameson. His offhand observations lack the sophistication of the dialectics, the rigor of reading that he brought to such early topics as Adorno and Sartre. The statement that a Wong Kar-wai film may be considered a work of resistance because it was not meant for an American audience is egregiously revealing. While he places much importance on the issue of ethnicity and nationhood in its production and reception, the fact that he is himself American, as Caroline Jones notes, is apparently irrelevant to his observation. In other words, he does not believe that ethnicity conditions his own understanding of it. He is outside of the concept. To apply Keith Moxey’s distinction between production and reception (in the discussion of the debate between Jameson and Canclini), Jameson is outside of both the condition of its production and its reception. In his appraisal of Wong’s movie and the Chinese reception of Rauschenberg, where is Jameson? Is it because in the postmodern, global condition everything is so thinly spread out that one is outside it, looking at it with a Marxist purview? Now that we are in the vast region of lesser-known artists of the world, do rigor and quality no longer apply? It is easier to criticize nationalism (or any concept) when you think you are writing outside of it. It is quite another matter when you acknowledge that it swarms around you, when you understand yourself to be part of its pervasive historical fabric. One must at once acknowledge its objectified structure and its different historicities as it unfolds within specific places and communities. Hence, I am myself a firm advocate of knowledge. Despite the controlling nature of libraries, archives, and museums, if I had a choice (and I sometimes do), I would rather have more of them. Absence is not the enemy, but neither is it a friend. Looking at the tragic instances in which knowledge has been erased (the Chinese Cultural Revolution and Cambodia’s killing fields, to mention two extreme cases), one cannot be a fan of loss. In practice, I believe it is up to local communities to produce work that is relevant to divergent intellectual communities. The possibility of knowledge is based on the meeting of different communities, and it is at the level of shared knowledge (and emotions) that I would agree with Homi Bhabha’s sense of the linkage between difference

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and community. The point is how writing changes when one is immanent to the concepts that one uses. The everyday impinges on the concept, and writing inevitably becomes an experiment. In the practice of writing, concepts can be contaminated to a point where the text may lose its logical consistency and become a hybrid. As discussed in the Seminars, hybridity, to be a viable concept in practice, cannot be another universal that battles the universal. As with Bhabha’s differentiation of cultural diversity and cultural difference, we must recognize not only the diversity of knowledge but, more importantly, the gaps, the regions of ignorance that are made evident in the encounters between the local and the foreign. Hybridity assumes knowledge but should also reveal ignorance.

what’s wrong with global art?

Partha Mitter

I am grateful to James Elkins for inviting to me to respond to a riveting series of seminars entitled Art and Globalization. Because of the range and quality of the discussions, they are destined to become an essential source material for future debates on the subject. Since I did not attend the sessions in person, my comments are based on the ideas refracted through the Seminar transcripts, and I apologize for any misrepresentations of the participants’ statements. Of the two keywords here, art and global, let me first take the concept global (or globalism or globalization). Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann rightly points out that in a sense globalization is as old as the time of the biblical Methuselah. We can trace it back to the Greco-Roman period, with its extensive international trade and cultural contacts that were inaugurated with the Persian invasion of Greece. However, as Frederic Jameson remarks, the post-1980s globalization is something entirely different. I would contend that it cannot be fully understood within the framework of a Marxian analysis of the world capitalist order. Labor and capital, which used to govern relations between nation-states and between the First and Third Worlds, are increasingly challenged by a series of developments, the outcome of an information and communication revolution. We need to ask ourselves: can we continue to use old categories in the age of hedge funds, circulating finance capital and outsourcing, feverish population movements, the Internet, and the World Wide Web? On the one hand, these developments appear to empower a vast swathe of the global population that doesn’t necessarily enjoy political or economic primacy. On the other hand, surely Jameson is correct to describe globalization as the homogenizing drive of the capitalist system, as represented by the United States, towards global uniformity through economic, ideological, and cultural goals—democracy, the free market, and the Western culture industry broadly defined, embracing both “low” culture such as blue jeans, McDonald’s, and Coca-Cola, and high culture, particularly modernist art. It’s against this West-determined global village driven by international finance, which affects even those in remote regions who cannot resist, that we may interpret the rise of the countertendency of identity politics and cultural resistance (with its extreme form of religious fundamentalism). Globalization has paradoxically reinforced the nation-state, particularity, difference, fragmentation, and economic disparity rather than creating a brave new world. If we take art itself, its global implications have moved significantly beyond what until now has rested on existing Western categories and is thus in urgent need of radical rethinking on the part of art historians. The transnational flow

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of finance capital, in the form of art investments of large multinational corporations, including the hedge fund, as part of the new digital economy, has had a transformative effect on the global art market, as represented by the plethora of biennales and international art fairs. Artworks appear to offer a more stable investment against the background of the financial system meltdown and looming recession. This fact was foregrounded at a recent Damien Hirst auction at Sotheby’s.1 Secondly, the art market is being transfigured by the appearance of new players from Asia, notably China and India, who are tipping the balance in the share of the market. Indian artists recently exceeded the million-dollar mark at international auctions, a dominant position already enjoyed by Chinese artists.2 An art czar, Charles Saatchi, has decided that Indian artists are a good investment and plans to showcase them in his London gallery. So far so good. But before we get carried away, let us ask: what does the greatly inflated sale of Asian artists mean globally? I shall propose an imaginary scenario here, but based on my recent experience, which I believe is representative: a reputable art gallery in London representing the artist X from Ruritania in inner Asia plans a grand retrospective of his work. Accordingly, it hires the spacious and lofty exhibition halls of the venerable Royal Society of Oil Painters, which is now routinely let out for such purposes. On the evening of the private viewing, a large contingent of prominent local Ruritanians is invited to grace the occasion along with a smattering of European Ruritania aficionados. Speeches are made, champagne flows, and canapés freely circulate on what is generally agreed to be a memorable evening. The sales of the artist’s work, almost exclusively to the Ruritanian residents, are impressive. Next morning you open the national newspapers and are shocked to find that reviewers are conspicuously silent on the artist X while rounding up major art events in the city. To understand this, one needs to look beyond the art market to actual art history itself. Even though economically successful, Asian artists are, with a few notable exceptions, bracketed within certain well-defined boundaries. Hans Belting regrets the breakdown of previously reassuring art-historical certainties, faced with the global mix of myriad art forms and practices; center and periphery become blurred and the metropolis is seen to lose its position as a point of reference.3 Art history appears to suffer from an inbuilt obsolescence, its responses lagging behind the rapidly changing global situation. Let me take 1. This was September 15, 2008; it was Sotheby’s first auction of a living artist and netted $206,000,000. [—J.E.] 2. Subodh Gupta’s Steal 2 sold for $1,600,000 at an auction held by Christie’s New York, September 15–16, 2008. Other records were realized by Riyas Komu and Jyothi Basu, Mohammed Zeeshan, a Bangladeshi artist, and Zainul Abedin, a Pakistani artist. [—J.E.] 3. Stuart Hall, for one, celebrates the fact that there are now major artists outside the West. This of course is absolutely true, but how

often do they get noticed by critics who are considered to matter, unless these artists happen to fall within the modernist canon? What we need to think is not merely inclusion within the canon but also dissolution of the concept of the canon. See Hall’s keynote address, “Museums of Modern Art and the End of History,” conference at the Tate Gallery, May 1999; Iniva Archives, www.iniva.org (accessed May 2009); and Hans Belting, The End of the History of Art? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

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Elkins’s assessment of the Indian avant-garde painter Jamini Roy (1887–1972) as a convenient entry point. In response to Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay, Elkins comments: “Your advocacy of Indian modernist painting is problematic. I wish it were so simple. The painters you admire, Jamini Roy among them, cannot be described in texts that will be read in western Europe and North America in such a way that the artists appear necessary to modernism. They are representable as local, but not necessary.” Elkins, of course, is not alone in echoing certain constants of the avant-garde canon that are increasingly problematic: its dependence on Hegelian teleology and its concept of center and periphery, which automatically characterizes the so-called periphery as suffering from “time lag” and derivativeness. First, let me correct some of the quite understandable misconceptions regarding Roy, for which Elkins cannot be personally faulted since they arise from the general lack of knowledge of artists from outside the Euro-American orbit. In the absence of any major critical work on the artist, the impression of the artist in the West is formed largely by stray comments and poor reproductions of his works, giving rise to his reputation as a “primitive” artist.4 To summarize my recent work on Roy: a remarkable dialogue between the global and the local is powerfully articulated in his work. The artist insisted on “locality” as the site of anticolonial resistance, which had been disavowed by pan-Indian nationalists. His deployment of primitivism as a form of “critical modernity” has unexpected structural affinities with the work and ideas of German primitivists, such as Wilhelm Hausenstein, Carl Einstein, and Oskar Schlemmer, although Roy and the Germans were complete strangers to one another and did not share aesthetic or formal notions about art. What matters here is that they were part of a global critique of colonial and capitalist urban modernity. One of the important issues Elkins raises is the derivativeness of Asian artists in comparison with European modernism. I do not doubt Elkins’s assessment of the particular Japanese artist’s works as inferior imitations of Van Gogh, and it may be preferable in this case to make a socioeconomic study of these works, as conducted by John Clark. However, I am somewhat uncomfortable with taking that as a blanket category for all non-Western artists, which stands the danger of reinforcing the standard art-historical argument about borrowing and colonial dependency. In contrast to the European artist’s use of Japanese prints in the nineteenth century or of African art in the twentieth, the non-Western artist’s appropriations are generally dismissed as derivative. But the wider theoretical question that affects the perception of artists of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Australasia is the notion of “local practice,” put succinctly by Elkins, which exposes the limitations of the modernist canon and its inability to accommodate heterogeneity and difference. The avant-garde discourse embraces a great deal more than a simple matter of influence, as its 4. Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism: India’s Artists and the Avant-garde, 1922–1947 (London: Reaktion, 2007). In that work, which is to my knowledge the first critical account of early modernism in India, I seek to place Indian

avant-garde artists, including Roy, in their cultural context. I have given here the bare bones of my section on Jamini Roy, which discusses the artist evolving radical primitivism as a form of critical modernity in his art.

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powerful teleology constructs a whole world of belongings and exclusions, the epicenter and its outlying regions. The center-periphery issue in art history, which has profoundly affected the reception of artists since Giorgio Vasari, now colors the reception of artists from outside the metropolitan West. Set against the metropolis, other modernisms are always seen to be trying to catch up with the center. In short, the center-periphery relationship is one not only of geography but of power and authority, affecting race, gender and sexual orientation.5 A range of strategies have been offered to counter this imbalance, the most celebrated of which is hybridity, theorized by Homi Bhabha and Néstor García Canclini, which challenges as much the essentialism of cultural difference as the monolithic discourse of the avant-garde. While hybridity gives a much needed voice to the minorities of multiple heritage marginalized by “insiders,” I think we require a different strategy with regard to Asian, African, and Latin American artists, where national identity has served as a counternarrative to the dominant colonial language of art. To reiterate, global art is always approached from the perspective of the center, so that local practices must accommodate the center, which decides what art ought to be. (I must acknowledge here our debt to visual studies, which seeks to redress this situation by redefining the whole notion of what art is). Yet the problem remains, for with so much sedimentation that has accumulated over the centuries with regard to what art is and must be, we have come to take the canonical prescriptions to be self-evident truth. Therefore, without some drastic rethinking of the underlying assumptions of art history, this asymmetrical relationship in so-called global art will continue to be perpetuated. What I am proposing here is a radical decentering of the avant-garde canon, the first essential step to which has to be a far-reaching critique of the teleological categories of modernism, a task I attempt in my forthcoming essay in the Art Bulletin.6 5. See Giancarla Periti, Emilia e Marche nel Renascimento: L’identità visiva della “periferia” (Azzano San Paolo: Bolis, 2005), especially the introduction by Pierluigi De Vecchi and Giancarla Periti, 7–11; and Enrico Castelnuovo and Carlo Ginsberg, “Centro e periferia,” in Storia dell’arte italiana, pt. 1 (Turin: G. Einaudi, 1979): 285–354. On Vasari’s role in the construction of the center, see Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, “National Stereotypes, Prejudice, and Aesthetic Judgments in the Historiography of Art,” in Art History, Aes-

thetics, Visual Studies, edited by Michael Holly and Keith Moxey (Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2002), 73–79; this essay gives a scholarly account of the national prejudices of art historians and attempts to overcome them. 6. For my proposals for a revision of the art-historical canon, see “Decentering Modernism: Art History and Avant-garde Art from the Periphery,” Art Bulletin (December 2008).

global art history and transcultural studies

Carolyn Loeb

All of the seminar discussions and earlier assessments in this volume are stimulating and provocative, but I am going to concentrate my comments on Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann’s contributions. The themes touched on there resonate strongly with issues I have been grappling with in a new teaching project. Rather than take a visual studies approach, in the arts and humanities residential college in which I teach art and architectural history, we are pursuing what we call “transcultural studies.” It is a “larger structural model” of the sort referred to by Michele Greet. Since the term “transcultural studies” is not well defined, many of the questions addressed in the seminars are similar to ones with which we have grappled as well. It is to a couple of these questions that I will address my remarks, after some brief comments about our program. To emphasize transculturation is to work with an idea of a global art history very close to the one that Kaufmann describes as “an art history which would treat all parts of the globe as interconnected.”1 I say “work with” to suggest the somewhat improvisational nature of our project, because, from its inception, we confronted some of the practical constraints of the discipline of art history that many seminar participants have noted, including narrow specialization, limited (but growing) scholarly resources, and few viable options for student readings. These constraints exert subtle pressure to maintain the intellectual, academic, and pedagogical status quo. Only in an environment that encourages experimentation, flexibility, and openness can an exploratory endeavor such as a transcultural studies program be undertaken. Dependent on preexisting work, the methodological approach that we take is necessarily eclectic and draws on visual studies, material culture studies, traditional disciplinary tools, and social history, among other recent critical perspectives. It seems to me that Michael Holly’s reference to the familiar notion that “narratives speak us” serves as a metaphor for the pursuit of a global art history at this moment (though she was using this phrase to ask why the global arises as an issue just now). These seminars, the ways many of us are posing our scholarly inquiries, the new structures and content we are designing for courses—all of these address questions that increasingly have become both fascinating and urgent. The impetus for these inquiries derives from intellectual, historical, and political imperatives that have arisen both within and outside the discipline, including internal critiques by scholars of narrow definitions and ethical and political challenges posed by new audiences often reflecting social movements. As Kaufmann observes, however, the results to date of these inquiries are neither unified nor 1. Section 3 of the Seminars, note 3.

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clarified by any well-articulated theory. While they are fragmentary, it is possible that greater coherence will emerge from continuing engagement with pressing issues that encourage dialogue between the discipline and the wider world. The fact that the wider society contributes to the shape of the discipline is implicit in the kinds of questions about art history that Kaufmann and others in his seminar address. Insights gained through transcultural studies can bring to light connections between the circumstances surrounding the production of art, on the one hand, and reflection on art in Western culture, on the other. For example, recent discussions of art of the early Renaissance in Italy and in Northern Europe have emphasized and explored in new depth and detail geoeconomic contexts that promoted new forms of art and new attitudes toward art. These contexts, which are themselves interrelated, include the reconceptualization of collections of material objects that evolved into the development of curiosity cabinets; an intensified focus on the accumulation of material objects in general daily life; and the expanding array of far-flung trading relationships.2 Studies that explicate the connections between these developments and new tendencies in works of art deepen the sense of the tensions underlying the Western definition of art, which include its profound ties to commodity relations on the one hand, and its claims to and struggles to achieve autonomy on the other. At virtually the same moment that the latter received a decisive new formulation during the Enlightenment, industrial capitalism transformed the former. The discipline of art history inherited this set of contradictions. As a result, its practices are both responsive to the needs of wealth and power—connoisseurs, collectors, nations, institutions—and supportive of efforts by artists to critique and challenge these forms of social power. This suggests that, as art historians continue to work within these contradictions, a greater self-consciousness about them is an ongoing project—one to which these seminars and the work of many of its participants contribute. Transcultural studies may contribute to this awareness, too. As I conceive it, this means looking at how art (visual images and objects) embodies or manifests interactions among cultures, whether these take the form of trade relations, political alliances, immigration, colonization, conquest, or any other type of encounter. The impact of interaction can be registered by cultural objects and practices in varieties of ways, shaping or reshaping the production of visual expression in terms of materials, techniques, kinds and uses of objects, formal devices, imagery, subject matter, and meanings, as well as altering institutional arrangements in specific historical, economic, and social contexts. Looking beyond representations of transcultural relations to the (re)construction of art through cultural encounters shifts the valence of traditional art-historical 2. Works that are useful in this regard include Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998); Rosamond E. Mack, Bazaar to Piazza: Islamic Trade and Italian Art, 1300–1600 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002);

Caroline Campbell and Alan Chong, eds., Bellini and the East (London: National Gallery Company, 2005); and Stefano Carboni, ed., Venice and the Islamic World, 828–1797 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).

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periodization and its geographical hierarchy (in varying degrees depending on the given focus). Relegation of periods of cultural isolation or independence to a less central position problematizes conventional frameworks in relation to the more normative—in this conceptual context—situation of cultural interaction. Toward the end of Kaufmann’s seminar, Simon Baier directed our attention to modernism, a theme addressed by others in succeeding seminars and assessments. I agree that many of the issues raised by the idea of a global art history can be concentrated in considerations of modernism. With modernism, the claim to autonomy that I referred to earlier has itself been commodified (in blockbuster shows, coffee-table books, keychains, and auction sales). But this is just one latter-day respect in which modernist artists placed themselves at the core of their epoch and mined its contradictions. There is more, too, to be learned about and from their international and, in some cases, universalistic scope, especially in light of its deep dependence on colonial and Orientalist perspectives. And as several seminar participants noted, the transcultural reach of modernism can be a useful basis for examining contemporary globalism. As scholars continue to explore the ways that modernism created what Iftikhar Dadi, in his assessment, calls a “networked, cosmopolitan imagination,” the concept of modernity itself becomes more complex, taking in not only Baron Haussmann’s boulevards but streets from Kampala to Kyoto. Today, transcultural encounters proliferate, always within the grip of the contradictions sketched earlier, but also complicating the concepts of “border” and “margin” and the associated traditional vocabulary that refers to interminglings. When we look at the variegated array of contemporary visual production that encompasses, for example, modernist Sudanese and diasporic painter Ibrahim el-Salahi, Darfurian women’s woven basketry that records recent upheavals they have experienced,3 international biennial culture, and tourist art, it seems that only a transcultural perspective that critically contextualizes each one can begin to chart the complexity of art’s globalism today. 3. Baqie Badawi Muhammad, “Famine, Women, Creative Acts, and Gender Dynamics in Manawashi, Darfur, Western Sudan,” Jenda 2, no. 1 (2002): 2–18.

looking for something

Suman Gupta

What follows is actually less a contribution to the rich range of ideas that were mooted and debated in the Seminar than an attempt to shoulder in with a tangentially relevant thought—one that might have a bearing on the discussion and was elided in the course of it. I use the term “elided” advisedly. The kind of thing I have in mind was elided, it seems to me, in somewhat the same way as the four points Elkins raised in the last session. And this point was elided too in the sense of being almost marked by, so to speak, slight blurs in the conversation which suggested its imminent exposure but without its actually surfacing. I have in mind moments in the conversation such as the following: 1. Shigemi Inaga: I was invited to submit [my paper] to Critical Inquiry, but it was rejected with the interesting note that it was “too ethnographic.” I wanted it to be theoretical, but it was regarded as ethnographic— Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay: It did not appear to be universal in scope, that’s what the judgment meant.1 2. Shelly Errington: . . . instead of talking about globalization as an event or a stream of events that either did or did not happen, or when “it” began, or whether “it” is continuous or ruptured, as if it were a thing that could be pointed to in the world like a table or a chair, Joyce is asking what it means to a person or a collection of associated people in a particular place and time that people are connected in certain material ways instead of others, or that images are flowing around us constantly, or whatever? That’s a different way to ask the question than asking what the phases of capitalism are and when they started.2 Here are two separate passages, both in the context of trying to come up with phrases or terms which are akin to or closer to what is being designated as “hybridity”: 3. James Elkins: All the choices of words are likely to come up short, because they are symptoms of a conceptual structure. That is why I thought it might be best to begin with abstract terms. 4. James Elkins: I think the question Why write a global art history? is misleading, because it implies people set out to do such a thing—Is Art History Global? showed, I think, that almost no one does. What everyone tries to do is write in a way that is sensitive to local meanings, but 1. Section 2 of the Seminars.

2. Section 3 of the Seminars.

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what results is a massive, worldwide literature-in-the-making, in which practices are described in such a way that each is legible to the others: they comprise a slowly accumulating, global art history. The first and third quotations seem to me to gesture toward a certain kind of rhetorical circularity. The exchange between Inaga and Mukhopadhyay (and the Critical Inquiry assessor) attempts unsuccessfully to find a counterpoint between three terms: “ethnographic,” “theoretical,” and “universal.” If no clarification follows from this attempt, it is probably because all the terms are at a similar level of obfuscating abstraction, and any attempt to clarify one with reference to the others is likely to work at cross purposes. In a similar way, Elkins’s observation on the ineffectiveness of trying to clarify “hybridity” with reference to like terms also folds in rather mystifyingly on itself. Why Elkins feels that beginning with “abstract terms” might resolve the impasse—rather than exacerbating it—is unclear. Arguably, it is precisely the abstraction involved in “hybridity” and the other terms proposed that causes the impasse to begin with, and precisely because abstract terms are generally “symptoms of a conceptual structure.” Both these incidental, almost trivial, moments in the conversation seem to me to resistantly note a quality of slipperiness and circularity in the use of terms in, in the register of, the seminar as a whole. The various strands of the seminar revolve around the identification of abstract terms—in binary oppositions like “global”/“local,” “global”/“national,” “universal”/“particular,” “capitalist”/“socialist,” “neoliberal”/“Marxist,” “center”/“margin,” “authentic”/“hybrid,” “postcolonial”/ “imperial,” “Western”/“Eastern,” and so on, or in mediating terms like “identity,” “location,” “market,” of course “art” itself, and so on—followed by a kind of autoperpetuating discussion delving into the connotation of the chosen abstractions. To a large extent, in other words, it appears to me that the lexicon and syntax of the critical discourse provided the impetus of the discussion. To pose these abstractions (equally abstract at both poles of binary opposites) is also to reify their presumptive meaningfulness, and the discussion is largely an interrogation of the reifications that have already been enacted: so that to enunciate abstractions like, say, “globalization” and “nationalism” always begs the question What do you mean? and that always leads to a discussion of presumptions in proposing the abstraction itself and the vagaries therein. The unfolding of the transcribed seminar text, in a way, seems to recall Baudrillard’s reading of Foucault: “Foucault’s discourse is a mirror of the powers it describes”—where no “truth index” gives it strength, “where seduction feeds analytical force and where language itself gives birth to the operations of new powers.”3 Something similar, I feel, happens here: the seminar displays and seduces by the exercise of the power of critical discourse through its self-perpetuating performance—and ends by confirming the power of critical discourse itself. Ultimately this has the effect of consolidating the power of an institutional register, however that institutional 3. Baudrillard, Forget Foucault (New York: Semiotext(e), 1987), 10.

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centering is designated—whether within the precincts of the Stone Theory Institute or more broadly within the porous boundaries of the institutional discipline of art history. The second and fourth quotations, I feel, are moments where the autoperpetuating tenor of the conversation could have been interrogated and wasn’t. Errington seems in the second to resist the uncritical acceptance of an abstraction, “globalization,” as something that is already, so to speak, out there and meaningful as such. Instead she proposes (or feels Brodsky is proposing) trying to infer its nuances from something more specific: “what it means to a person or a collection of associated people in a particular time and place.” Perhaps “specific” is not quite the right word—perhaps it is the concreteness or familiarity of the everyday that she has in mind. But there is an idea of something there—something that is not an abstraction in itself, but with regard to which an abstraction like “globalization” (or any abstraction really) may become immanent. From a somewhat different direction, in the fourth quotation Elkins’s perception of “global art history”—the abstraction most pressingly at stake in the seminar—as emerging somewhere between what art historians do (be intentionally sensitive to “local meanings”) and what results (a spontaneous “worldwide literature-inthe-making” that is “global art history,” spontaneous in the sense of not being the product of a specific agency). The direction marked in this observation is not so much (as it ostensibly seems) from the “local” nuance to the “global” scale: though conceptually the global contains the local, equally conceptually both are mutually defined abstractions of equal rarity. The direction Elkins marks makes sense because he connects that containment of local within global in a process from “doing” to “resulting” art history. The effect is of rendering the idea of “global art history” as an agency-free, acontextual pure abstraction, which is put into perspective against something that is more than an abstraction or more grounded in praxis and materiality: doing with regard to the local. It is implied that the latter actuates the former, and the latter is more basic. These hints of a something in art history, in art theory and criticism, in thinking about art—which is not after the fact of abstractions but lies beneath them and brings them together—interests me. There is no easy way of expressing this something more precisely than in the quotations from Errington or Elkins above, but perhaps it can be homed in on more emphatically. It needs more emphasis to put the seminar discussions and their lack of conclusions into perspective. This something is not as simple as citing empirical evidence or referring to a particular producer, product, or environment, though those are implicated. One way of coming to grips with it might be to try to trim away the generalities or containments of abstractions so that both the application of abstractions and the something they abstract from and upon can be brought to view. But that is itself a debilitatingly abstract exercise. Nevertheless, it might make some sense to think of a process like “the particular time T when a specific person/group P of such-and-such background/qualifications/experiences encountered art object

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A by artist X of such-and-such background/qualifications/experiences in space S which has such-and-such dispositions/ends-orientations/features,” and so on. Such an absurdly regressive process of delineating a bottom line that is arguably not abstract in itself is obviously inconclusive too, but the very effort at positing such could provide locus standi for abstractions: a notion of what abstractions are abstractions from. Besides, it is not such an absolute bottom line that needs to be discerned, any more than an absolute abstraction that has to be engaged; even a somewhat less rigorous and pragmatic marking of a bottom line—such as when “her gaze encountered this art object in that space on this date”—that feeds into and derives from abstractions could be useful for seminar discussions, the conceptualization of art history, the task of the intellectual vocation or the academic profession. Another way of thinking about the something—that is, not in terms of a regressive charting of specificity—might be in terms of frames. I have in mind the kind of juxtaposing of a conceptual apprehension of frames with the materiality of frames of art that Derrida performs: Parerga have a thickness, a surface which separates them not only (as Kant would have it) from the integral inside, from the body proper of the ergon, but also from the outside, from the wall on which the painting is hung, from the space in which statue or column is erected, then, step by step, from the whole field of historical, economic, political inscription in which the drive to signature is produced . . . No “theory,” no “practice,” no “theoretical practice” can intervene effectively in this field if it does not weigh up and bear on the frame, which is the decisive structure of what is at stake, the invisible limit to (between) the interiority of meaning (put under shelter by the whole hermeneuticist, semioticist, phenomenologicalist, and formalist tradition) and (to) all the empiricism of the extrinsic which, incapable of either seeing or reading, miss the question completely.4 Derrida’s conceptual-material frame of art is a shifting space, a negotiable signifier itself, and all systems of abstraction—whether of “theory” or “practice,” whether “hermeneuticist, semioticist, phenomenologicalist, and formalist”—are arraigned around its prefiguration. The frame has to be grasped first; perhaps the frame is the something. It seems to me that unless such a something—with regard to which abstraction occurs, which becomes subsumed in abstraction—is grasped and foregrounded somehow, much of the discussion in the Seminar appears irrelevant as a discussion of art and seems no more than a performance of an institutional discourse and its power, allure, self-regard, self-confirmation. 4. Jacques Derrida, Truth in Painting, translated by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 63.

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At any rate, almost all the prodigious number of strands of the seminar discussion appeared productive to me because they could be—were inevitably— implicated in and inflected by an arbitrary something to which I had anchored my reading. I participated and disputed in the Seminar at third hand, as a reader, accordingly. This is how that came about. In April 2005 I was in the old town of Plovdiv in Bulgaria as a tourist, and came across—as a tourist must there—the permanent exhibition and museum of the painter Zlatyu Boyadzhiev (1903–1976). I hadn’t heard of him before this visit. The exhibition was heartily recommended by the Bulgarian colleague who was with me, and in my guidebook. The exhibition appears on the central thoroughfare of the old town, which is largely Bulgarian Revival of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and was carefully restored in the 1970s and 1980s. Boyadzhiev’s paintings, of which seventy-six are displayed in the permanent exhibition, were recommended for two ostensible reasons: they represent vividly a certain local environment (the Plovdiv region) and its inhabitants, and more generally a Bulgarian national ethos; and they are evidence of an extraordinary artistic effort. The latter is because, I was told, about halfway through his career (in 1951), the painter suffered a stroke that left his right hand, his painting hand, paralyzed, and he thereafter taught himself to paint with his left hand; most of his more highly regarded paintings were executed with his left hand, and his career and paintings are consequently considered as belonging to two separate phases. Boyadzhiev’s paintings seemed to resonate with the old-town tourist experience and accentuate my view of Plovdiv itself in various ways. In the following couple of years, I viewed them in Plovdiv several times, and other Boyadzhiev paintings in other collections around Bulgaria, including Sofia, Blagoevgrad, Smolyan, and Pleven. A little exploration brought home further aspects of these paintings to me: for instance, that though they are firmly placed in Plovdiv (a city that is recognized as a center of art with a distinctive artistic tradition in Bulgaria) and the Bulgarian national canon, they have received indifferent critical attention even within Bulgaria (predominantly along the lines of the locational and the biographical), negligible attention beyond, and are relatively modestly priced in the art market. And relevant here is the fact that my cursory exploration and repeated visits to the Boyadzhiev exhibition were undertaken because, from the first visit, I perceived in the paintings certain qualities that did not subscribe to the locational and biographical (the disabled but driven artist), lenses through which they were recommended and made available. Briefly, I felt I could discern in them a self-reflexive preoccupation with the form and performance of painting itself that superseded their often stereotyped or archetypal themes and motifs—I felt that these are, in fact, not so much paintings that simply represent something but paintings about painting itself. This is not the place to justify this perception; I note this as the factor that underlines my encounter with Boyadzhiev’s work.

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The point of this preamble is that my encounters with Boyadzhiev’s paintings aroused a curiosity about the receptive fields through which they have traveled and to which they are offered now. It was in terms of this encounter and subsequent curiosity that my reading of the Seminar transcript, which fortuitously appeared as I was contemplating the matter, was structured. And it occurred to me that my reading of the transcript was fruitful because I inadvertently anchored it to my present something, this curiosity about the receptive fields for Boyadzhiev’s paintings. Almost every strand of the Seminar discussions seemed implicated in possible further contemplation of Boyadzhiev’s receptive fields, and the implications from Boyadzhiev’s paintings seemed to render the different strands of the discussion relevant and coherent to my reading. The slippage between my perception of the paintings and the recommended locational and biographical frames—frames, that is, in the Derridean sense—encourages interrogation of both those frames and my own perceptual associations and tourist sensibility (my framing). The slippage is in the fact that the given frames and my framing pull in contrary directions: the former tend to provincialize, or at best contain in a national sphere, and personalize, while the latter tends to dislocate from both. It is evident that the former has been the basis on which Boyadzhiev’s paintings are available at all; but, speculatively, if the latter perception had been more widely shared and cultivated, that might have enabled those paintings to travel more widely (outside the regional and national). The placement of Boyadzhiev’s paintings in the circuit of art criticism and the art market has, arguably, been constrained by an overdetermination of the regional or the national, and the biographical. This is actually a considerably more complex argument than that bald statement suggests, and implicates all the main topics covered in the Seminar. To begin with, my tourist encounter with Boyadzhiev’s paintings is undoubtedly engineered by a heritage industry, in which both state and corporate agents play their roles, that focuses on images and sites to confirm a national and regional narrative and satisfy consumer desires and lifestyles at different levels. Equally, my tourist encounter is also mediated by my extrinsic background and range of interests and experiences (including the academic), and involves a constant set of translations and reassessments, none of which are necessarily contained by the heritage industry’s proffered frames. The negotiations between global, national, and local are conducted, in the first place, through my tourist gaze. In this context, it occurs to me that this is not simply a matter of how things are within the arena of the encounter, but of how they have come to be so that this encounter is possible. The locational and biographical frames are available because they have evolved through a process, just as I bring a history—personal, experiential, institutional—with my gaze. That Boyadzhiev’s paintings are framed by the old town of Plovdiv effectively directs attention to that locale. The old town as it appears now was, as I observed, largely reconstructed in the 1970s and 1980s through the efforts of Atanas Krustev, who was appointed an inspector in Plovdiv Municipality’s Department of Science,

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Art, and Culture in 1954 and took a personal interest in having Boyadzhiev’s work centered in the reconstruction. At the time this wasn’t a reconstruction that was likely to have been designed with an international heritage industry in mind (though the results were peculiarly amenable for this industry), but it was certainly designed to concretize a regional and national historical narrative and Plovdiv’s claim as a cultural and particularly artistic center. To some extent, the reconstruction could be regarded as a branding exercise that subsumed Boyadzhiev’s art. The history of this reconstruction therefore calls for further attention. The historical narrative at the level of nation itself had diverse, and often contrary, pulls that were focused or neglected (both equally telling) in the reconstruction: a claim to authenticity (thus highlighting the Thracian, Roman, medieval, and Revival/Liberation periods) that is simultaneously also a claim to diversity and hybridity; and together with that a postcolonial sensibility that tends to underplay both the five hundred years of Ottoman rule and the dominant influences, such as Russian. Obviously the frame of the reconstruction itself, and Boyadzhiev’s place within it, is superseded by the considerably more complex frame of national history and historicizing. Insofar as this actuates the receptive fields relevant to Boyadzhiev, it is a matter of charting several phases of ideologically determined culture and art policy. Of particular importance are the different phases of communist culture policy in Bulgaria from 1944 to 1989, which were far from homogeneous and which contained much of Boyadzhiev’s most productive period as an artist. Then there’s the postsocialist transitional phase of Bulgaria’s adaptation as a liberal capitalist democratic state, and reactive rejection of communist heritage, particularly from 1990 to 2007. This included both setting up a corporate capitalist infrastructure and efforts toward accession into the European Union. The run-up to and accession into the EU in 2007 entailed a kind of self-performance and construction of cultural heritage that was meant to consolidate a transnational status. In brief, the receptive fields through which Boyadzhiev’s paintings traveled and arrived to the present involved comprehensive changes both in the construction of nationality and in the construction of transnational or international positioning. The locational and biographical frames that are on offer now were negotiated through these shifts, and very possibly the slippage of my framing has to do with how those frames were put in place—or how, perhaps, something akin to my framing may have been suppressed or neglected. Alongside those, implicated both in the self-constructions of the nation and in the ideological shifts, are the extrinsic political, economic, and cultural categories that have prevailed at different times: whether in locating Bulgaria as on the eastern fringe of Europe, as partner in the Axis, as a Stalinist state, as a Soviet satellite, as an underdeveloped postsocialist country, as a Balkan country, as a newly opened property market, as a newly accessible tourist destination, as an aspirant to EU membership, as a source of large-scale emigration, as a boundary of Fortress Europe, and so on. Each of these designations is within overlapping grids of global geopolitics. And in a variety of ways all these play

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into the manner in which Bulgarian culture and identity—and consequently Boyadzhiev’s paintings—are located or dislocated, are framed and reframed, are attended to or neglected. It seems to me fairly self-evident how reading the Seminar transcript—the discussion of globalization, nationality, hybridity, capitalism, postcolonialism, translation, and so on in the context of art history—may be inflected by and implicated in a preoccupation with the framings and receptive fields of Boyadzhiev’s paintings. And reading the Seminar discussions worked for me in that fashion. Boyadzhiev’s paintings may seem a counterintuitive anchor for a discussion that is as wide-ranging and globe-embracing as this one, but it is as relevant a something as any other I could think of. The question is whether these Seminar discussions are productive without such a something to anchor the strands to, and whether the need for such a something shouldn’t be registered within the discourse of such discussions. What does it read like without that? That question takes me back to the first half of this response.

nomadic territories and times

Saskia Sassen

Reading the texts and the discussions of the Seminar, I was struck by their potential to make legible critical aspects of the current moment. But I was also struck by the extent to which we remain captives of a period, of a particular modernity. There are rumblings in these Seminar discussions that signal there is much happening beneath the surface of that modernity. Yet the discussions were excessively anchored in a particular type of narrative when it comes to subjects such as globalization, one I have been working on for a long time. And yet I think it is artists who can detect, see, in ways that those of us shaped or confined by prose cannot. Here then some thoughts as a way of disentangling some issues about globalization, the national, and the character of the transformation. The hope is that this advances the discussions launched in the Seminar around these subjects. I want to pull out a couple of aspects that are bubbling in the discussions but that somehow remain slippery: I want to grab this slippery intimation of something that is part of the transformation we are living, but that remains opaque. The deep transformation afoot today is well beyond the usual language of weakening national states and powerful global regulators, which is a putative combat of titans, where what the national loses and the global wins. In my reading, at its deepest this transformation is the unshackling of foundational categories of social existence (time, subjectivity, territory, authority, rights) from their national encasing. We lack the language to capture the thousands of little changes and unsettlements that are worming themselves into the established cages for these foundational elements. These are the cages produced by the project of building the nation-state and the work of rendering all building blocks of social existence as national, albeit never fully achieved. Today, territory and time, subjectivity and identity, are beginning to seep out of these national cages. This easily gets experienced as disorder and crisis, because it contrasts with the standardizing, bureaucratizing, and nationalizing of time, territory, identity that is part of the nation-state-building project. An interesting instance of grappling with these experiences of crisis is is the 2009 Transmediale, dedicated to the Deep North. As Steven Kovats, the TM’s new director, puts it, Deep North is “not a fixed location, but a paradigm transforming loss into a complex state of being and cultural development—an indicator of fusing location with global introspection.”1 1. Deep North, Transmediale ’09, Festival for Art and Digital Culture, Berlin, January 27–February 1, 2009.

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Although it never completely succeeded, the nation-state-building project constituted the organizational formats, the notions of justice and ethics, and the subjectivities of belonging and identity that have dominated the last century. A synthetic way of saying this is that when the national state is the dominant format, the overarching dynamic is centripetal: the center grasps most of what there is to be had. And what happened outside the borders of territorial states— whether the impoverished terrains of former empires or the earth’s poles—was written out of history. Today’s catastrophic conditions—the melting of the glaciers, the radicalness of today’s poverty, the violence of extreme economic inequality, the genocidal character of more and more wars—are often seen as part of today’s major change. But it seems to me they are not. They developed over centuries but were “exported” to that supposed no-man’s-land that absorbed the costs of the making of nation-states and capitalism. They are floating signifiers, speech acts that narrate the current condition in a far more encompassing manner than standard narratives about nation-states and globalization. While these conditions have existed for a long time, today they are crossing new thresholds and, crucially, they become legible as the cages of the national begin to fall apart and reveal the landscapes of devastation on which they were built. “Our over-cantilevered bridge cannot cope with the warming waters below.”2 We are seeing a proliferation of partial, often highly specialized, assemblages of bits of territory, authority, and rights once firmly ensconced in national institutional frames, assemblages that begin to escape the cages of the national. These assemblages cut across the binary of “national versus global,” and in this process they take us beyond this binary, which has become the usual way of attempting to understand what is new today. These emergent assemblages inhabit both national and global institutional and territorial settings and amount to a far deeper transformation than the global-versus-national type of analysis captures. They can be localized, and in that localness have the (powerful) effect of denationalizing bits of national territory. Or they can span the globe in the form of translocal geographies connecting multiple, often thick, subnational spaces—institutional, territorial, subjective. One aspect that matters here is that these often thick, subnational settings are building blocks for new global geographies. They do not run through the more familiar global and supranational institutions, which take out that thickness and generalize across differences. These assemblages resonate with Nicolas Bourriaud’s notion of an altermodernity that “arises out of planetary negotiations, discussions between agents from different cultures.”3 Elsewhere I have developed the notion of denationalization as a category for analysis that aims at capturing a specific set of components in today’s major global transformations, for which the typical terms in use—globalization, postnationalism, and transnationalism—are inadequate. These three terms all 2. Hilary Koob-Sassen, Serpentine Manifesto, London, October 2008, www.artreview.com/ profiles/blog/show?id=1474022%3ABlogPost% 3A534986 (accessed May 2009).

3. See the catalogue of the Tate Britain 2009 Triennale, London.

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point to locations for change that lie outside the nation-state. The effort behind developing a fourth category—denationalization—arises out of an as yet small but growing body of research showing that critical components of today’s major transformations actually take place inside the nation-state. The processes that constitute the transformation in this case have the effect of denationalizing what has historically been constructed as national. These processes are partial, often highly specialized and obscure. Further, they frequently continue to be coded, represented, and experienced in the vocabulary of the national, and hence can remain unrecognized and undetected. Thus, this new category for analysis opens up a vast research and theorization agenda connected to global trends but focused on the nation-state. (And the no-man’s land of devastations is actually also a product of nation-state building, but in the form of the shadowy zone for exporting toxicities.) Globalization has brought with it an incipient unbundling of the exclusive authority over territory, people, and identity we have long associated directly and indirectly with the national state. One way of conceptualizing this unbundling is to posit that it entails a dynamic of denationalizing what had been constructed as the “national” over the last century and more. This construction of the national was in many, though not all, parts of the world a political, economic, legal, and culturally thick process. Thus, current dynamics of globalization need to be understood in the context of this thickly constructed national. What I am arguing is that today’s transformation does not simply refer to that which transcends the national, as is commonly asserted. There is a far more complex and ambiguous negotiation that happens largely inside multiple instances of the national. Such a conceptualization relocates the analytic task from the macrolevel of interdependences and cross-border flows to what are mostly microsites that may well remain coded as the national. It is an analytic inversion of the usual strategy used to address or study or represent transnationalism and also globalization. There are sites where these dynamics of denationalization take on thick and consequential forms. Among these sites are, from the perspective of my own research experience, global cities. The global city is a border zone where the old spatialities and temporalities of the national and the new ones of the global digital age get engaged in complex, multisite, and multilevel ways. Out of their juxtaposition comes the possibility of a whole series of new economic and cultural projects. Conceivably there are other sites, including microsites, where the juxtapositions of different spatialities and temporalities are likely to be thick, charged. If this lens is used to look at some current, often minor and barely visible, developments, it opens up some interesting vistas.4 For instance, this way of narrating the current period allows us to reposition immobility, at a time when the focus is on mobility as an indicator of globality. If globalities are constituted inside the national, then the immobile can be global actors, if they care to—their 4. See “Women on the Move,” Frieze 105 (March 2007).

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bodies do not cross the borders of national states, but that does not preclude their being part of global subjectivities and politics. And while the immobile are likely to be among the disadvantaged, the condition is less absolute and less oppressive than the emphasis on mobility suggests. Their powerlessness can become complex and thereby contain the possibility of politics, of making the political. Localized struggles by actors who are not globally mobile are nonetheless critical for the organizational infrastructure of a globally networked politics: it is precisely the combination of localized practices and global networks that makes possible a new type of power for actors who would be seen as powerless in terms of older, more conventional variables. While geographically immobile, these localized actors and their practices are also inflected by their participation and constitutive role in global civil society. Even if contained within an administrative unit of a national state, they are not simply local. The proliferation of these novel assemblages of bits of territory, authority, rights, identities, once ensconced in the national, does not represent the end of national states, but it does begin to disassemble bits and pieces of the national. Nor does it represent simply the expansion of the global. It produces a kind of “third space” for a growing range of operations, from economic to cultural to political. If you see through the eye of the national state, these assemblages look inchoate, disorderly, arbitrary, a no-man’s-land. But they are actually the bits of a new reality that is coming into being.

dead parrot society

Charles Green

The welcome significance of the Chicago Seminars is twofold. First, it is disciplinary: the Seminars are part of the inevitable, epochal, and rapidly emerging reform of a North Atlantic–centered canon of art history that remains entrenched despite repeated, incantatory acknowledgments of its inadequacy. Many of us insist instead on a global narrative of major contributions to art made by artists around the world. The narrative that results will redress the disciplinary imbalances that are becoming obvious to anyone with any degree of attentiveness to facts. But this calls for a set of criteria and a quality of simple empirical observation that is able to ignore the canonical lists of names in books such as Art Since 1900 that seem so self-evident. The Chicago Seminars and responses would make a great corrective start to an art history Wikipedia. This aim remains relatively incomprehensible and opaque to most powerful scholars in North America and western Europe, and to many younger scholars as well. I am a little more shocked than I should be at this, for, as an Australianbased scholar who spends a considerable amount of time in Asia and the United States, I admire and have learnt from many New Yorkers. Chris Berry’s and Rasheed Araeen’s frustration rings loud, true, and clear across continents. If the North Atlantic image of itself through past art can no longer be sustained by the Atlas of contemporary art, then a future, post-Obama North Atlantic will have to define itself in relation to others in a very different way, as will North Atlantic–based art historians. The question of deciding what it is necessary to art history is, and always was, circular. The anxiety of textual indeterminacy implied by the absence of “necessity” has haunted the exchanges, and may be extrapolated onto art history’s predicament when it eventually confronts the modifications that will be required to the art history of North America and Europe. To demonstrate a degree of inclusiveness, let alone attentiveness, is still a long, long way off. The alternative to the North Atlantic’s global art history can be understood by thoroughly reimaging the North Atlantic as provincial, and then comparing that provincialism to “smaller” centers. In my own relatively small but artistically hyperactive society there are two art practices: the national and regional (an art world that values fairly conservative and backward-looking, exclusively local reputations such as painters Charles Blackman and Arthur Boyd as timely, and that is incapable of recognizing timeliness and untimeliness except in the most fuzzy ways); and younger artists, for whom the issue of nation versus globalization is irrelevant compared with access. This is irrelevant, as has been convincingly

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argued, to the rest: to indigenous artists, for instance, who have other definitions of nation, and to artists outside Melbourne and Sydney, for whom Australian art is Melbourne-Sydney art (both are by far Australia’s biggest cities, and they tend to myopia regarding other, smaller centers such as Perth, let alone tiny desert indigenous settlements such as Papunya). The same double economy is mirrored across the planet in differing proportions, as Jim Elkins points out, but this includes New York’s twin nature itself, where the naturalization of imperial ideology is most convincing to the inhabitants themselves. Smaller cultures like Australia have—as several participants pointed out—been driven by the need to construct a national narrative of art. It is doubtful whether a global art alternative would have been much better (especially since so many of these national narratives, including those of Australia, India, and the United States, were thoroughly structured by the Cold War). A fascinating and vast recent exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia, Picture Paradise: Asia-Pacific Photography, 1840s–1940s (July 11–September 28, 2008), juxtaposed immensely ambitious photographs across the whole Pacific Rim, placing contemporaneous works from Java to Yokohama to San Francisco. Another way of imagining history outside of the national provincial is to write this Pacific Rim history of interaction, exchange, and innovation in which enormous photographic panoramas of a late nineteenth-century Sydney rival and illuminate Muybridge’s equally enormous, virtuoso San Francisco views. Understanding the genuine but forgotten patterns of causation and influence, as well as the synchronicities and counterintuitive primacies of innovation, requires a lot more encyclopedic knowledge than art historians are used to. This is one of Reiko Tomii’s key points about North Atlantic art historians’ repeated anxiety about timeliness, which occludes the chronological primacy of innovations outside the North Atlantic and by immigrant artists who arrived and worked in North Atlantic centers. It is possible to start to conceptualize these shifts more easily if you do not live in the United States or Europe. Imagine that many places have seen analogous modernities, and many of the artists are of equivalent value. The canon depends on where you live, and depends on the ability to imagine that you are not at the center of the world and that there are many potential places of greatness. For example, one of the greatest painters of the twentieth century was a New Zealander, Colin McCahon. One could potentially argue that his importance is comparable to, perhaps greater than, for example, that of Jasper Johns. Or else, more interesting, that Colin McCahon occupies a position of transition similar in character to Philip Guston, though more radical. All the resources to study his work are out there already: there are great Web sites that catalogue his paintings; the large Stedjelik retrospective a few years back should have burned his name into the discourse, but not as a national or peripheral exemplar. For all its chaotic failings, Documenta 12 attempted such revisions. The ability to conceptualize a different history that

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does not relegate by “untimely” comparison also depends on one’s ability to widen the field of cultural production to include other fields of images than the privileged medium of oil painting. This is not even to argue for a cultural studies approach, nor to blur the high–low divide. If we insist that oil painting is the crucial site of modernism, then obviously Paris is a key site and a necessary center, but if architecture is brought into play, then Brazilian art suddenly comes into focus, or if illustrated books, then Indian miniature painters loom as large as Raphael. It is possible to write histories that fully acknowledge a more complex and multiple direction of knowledge production that is not at all radial in nature. We still have to face other core questions. If art history’s terms of value and the reasons for valuing painting have been formulated across the North Atlantic, then attempts to think of other centers as equal—as Asianist John Clark does, for example—might seem to risk cutting off the reasons for valuing painting as painting. Do such attempts risk tending to change the conversation from the value and quality of the painting to the socioeconomic contexts that make different art unique in different places? As Elkins acknowledges, even when other seminar participants do not, this is to display vast ignorance of the presence of non–North Atlantic artists within west European and East Coast centers, and the reverse, the continual movement of forgotten but genuinely major artists outwards to other centers, such as German émigré painter Eugen von Guerard to Gold Rush Melbourne in the mid-nineteenth century. And this further begs the question of the place of artists of North Atlantic racial and cultural heritage living in the South, close to Asia, in Australia, Chile, Argentina, New Zealand, and South Africa. In reality, if one bothers to look, the problem melts away. Tani Barlow and Mark Jarzombek are right: the so-called impasse of art historians is a false impasse, one born of incuriousness. And in any case, no matter what identity theory’s early 1990s lingo held, a large proportion of artists have never been bound, nor felt they wished to be bound, as exemplars of racial and cultural self-definition. John Cage is as good a cosmopolitan example as McCahon or Xu Bing. The discipline should face up to the sense of cultural omnipotence that afflicts everyone, everywhere, at great metropolitan centers. The seminar’s second significance is more slow-burning, though later responses (particularly that of T. J. Demos) and Jim Elkins’s summations, spell it out clearly: neither the Seminar participants nor art historians in general deal with the explosion of contemporary art with the specificity or knowledge of on-the-ground facts that is now required, retreating instead into a level of theoretical abstraction that may, in fact, be inapplicable. Several discussions lean into a soixante-huitard correct-mindedness that, attractive though it might be, has little connection with art or artists, assuming that resistance to the commodity form is a determinant of importance. Art history has little if any effect in the ecosystem of contemporary art (as it has flourished up to right

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now, as we move into the financial meltdown’s tornado path; from this point all bets are off). Contemporary art is doing swimmingly, museums are doing fine with contemporary art, curators have substantially displaced art historians from the activity of in-depth research, shuffling art historians into marginal positions even within art criticism (where, despite the conflicts of interest, curators even there dominate). Art historians are, in effect, well-preserved grandmother figures wheeled out for display and ritual Sunday obeisances, permitted to demand a sentimental moralism from artists that is both otherworldly and ignored, though historians themselves have enough sinecures from foundations and endowments to perpetuate the discipline’s historic access to palazzo (or chateau) long-term stays on a sustainable but not expansionary scale. In the light of this, we might ask—as do several participants—not what is or should be art history, but how likely it is that art historians will ever genuinely wish to move beyond an increasingly ill-fitting, North Atlantic perspective.

geoaesthetic hierarchies: geography, geopolitics, global art, and coloniality

Joaquín Barriendos

The Seminar addressed a welter of interesting issues and confronted a series of pertinent questions related to the way in which globality has modified traditional understandings of art production, art writing, and transcultural aesthetics worldwide. In spite of its more often than not digressive structure, the Seminar elaborated on what I consider one of the most controversial aspects of the world art studies: the inclusion of non-Western “geographies” into the Western canon of art. There can be no doubt that the material assembled by James Elkins is useful for expanding and diversifying research on the transnational study of global art. However, having read the many pages of the manuscript and having contrasted the proposals posited by the authors of the assessments, it seems to me that two important issues were denied during the discussions, or at least only timidly mentioned: the colonial matrix of the modern geography of art on the one hand, and the “coloniality” of the current global art-system on the other. Because I agree with Rasheed Araeen that there is no common ground for criticizing the way in which art and globalization were interwoven during the seminar, I do not pretend to offer here an all-embracing comment on the gathered texts. Rather, I feel moved to introduce a different point of departure for the analysis of the geopolitics of global art: the interplays between the modern geopolitical imagination, coloniality, and Western aesthetic discourses when they come to operate as a geographic hierarchicized system. In my view, the geopolitical dimension of global art and of world art studies deserves an extensive and more radical critique. As I will try to argue in this assessment, there are several reasons to believe that a westernizing process of some of the canonical aesthetic and geopolitical categories hides behind the claims to rewrite the mutual interdependencies and blur the geopolitical debts between Western and non-Western regions through a sort of new kind of progressive global art history. However, before deepening our explanation of the decolonial dilemmas the concept of global art is facing today, I would like first to briefly summarize the way in which a series of geographical issues and geopolitical matters were referred to during the Seminar. a global critique of the art’s geographies of power Despite the fact that neither geography nor geopolitics was explicitly proposed by the conveners as topics for the analysis of art and globalization, the vast majority of the speakers alluded to them in more ways than one. For instance, Zhivka

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Valiavicharska provides a view on the tactical uses of critical geography. In her introduction she mentions the close relation geography keeps with transnational capitalism, on the one hand, and with some global phenomena such as the art market or the exhibition systems, on the other. In Valiavicharska’s view, the analysis of these global issues requires an interdisciplinary understanding of the “geographies of power.” Harry Harootunian perceives a close relation between an imperial cognitive impulse of the social sciences and Western cultural and aesthetic strategies of translation. Similarly, the seventh Seminar, “Neoliberalism,” describes the usefulness of critical geography for the ethnographic analysis of development and the study of spatialized power relations of modernity. Another example of explicit references to geographical matters appears in the third Seminar, sharply called “The Prehistory of Globalization,” in which Shelly Errington and Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann quote Immanuel Wallerstein in order to emphasize the long historical and geographical structure of current globalization. In describing the geopolitical situation of the Istanbul Biennial, Susan Buck-Morss provides a critical view on the symbolic rise of the West, using a premodern and precapitalist historical example, “the geographical area of the Silk Road.” We may also point out the way in which Andrzej Szczerski alludes to the concept “geopolitics of knowledge” in order to question the geographical division between the global level and the local. At the end of the ninth Seminar, “Universality,” James Elkins points out the relevance of the “cultural geography of art writing.” In the same way, several authors of the assessments also allude to geographical or geopolitical issues. We find a clear example of this in Carolyn Loeb’s contribution: instead of taking “chronological surveys” or “thematic approaches” for teaching art history, Loeb prefers a “geographical emphasis” on specific cultural areas as the point of departure for a cross-cultural understanding of the art world. In contrast, by examining the Orientalist and Eurocentric background of the concept “Islamic Art,” Iftikhar Dadi criticizes the westernized identification of certain art practices with a sole geographic and symbolic area: the Middle East. As we can see, the geography and geopolitics of art were extensively discussed during the Seminar. Generally speaking, both concepts were perceived as useful tools for questioning the center/periphery schema; moreover, the vast majority of the participants considered them as renewed disciplines for contesting the capitalist production of westernized global space, on the one hand, and postcolonial global imaginaries, on the other. However, eliminating the Eurocentric split between our Western aesthetics and the other’s belated and displaced modernity is not enough. In my opinion, the historical geography of the Western canon of art needs to be contested by taking into consideration the whole colonial dimension of modernity as well as the current coloniality of the global art system.

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In order to elaborate on these issues, I would now like to briefly describe the current geopolitical revisionism of art museums; that is to say, their impulse to adapting their collections, expanding their acquisition policies, and realigning their discourses so as to engage with art production worldwide. By introducing the concept of emerging geoaesthetic regions, which I have used elsewhere with the intention of criticizing the rise of what is called new internationalism in the visual arts, I will categorize these museographic impulses as a sort of postcolonial westernizing attitude.1 As I will try to show in the following paragraphs, such museographic revisionism seems committed to the design of a new geopolitical universal language: global art as a postcolonial lingua franca offered up by the West to the world. “emerging geoaesthetic regions” and the critique of the geopolitical revisionism of western museums Under the influence of the postcolonial trend, some museums have been claiming to rewrite the geopolitical debts between Western and non-Western regions. The aim of their museographic imaginaries is to dissolve the hierarchical regime of what Immanuel Wallerstein described as the modern world-system, via an all-encompassing program of exhibition. From the point of view of the cultural interplay dictated by the global knowledge economy, these museums subscribe to the inclusion of what I call the emerging geoaesthetic regions into the historical geography of the Western canon of art.2 In a nutshell, these museums argue in favor of reaccommodating those cultural areas situated at the margins of the hierarchical architecture of the modern geopolitical imagination into the new map of the global-led inclusivity. In spite of promoting cultural diversity and claiming to acknowledge multiple modernities, this sort of museographic revisionism appears to fail due to its Eurocentric geo-epistemological point of departure, a 1. The history of the new internationalism is, regardless of its recent emergence, too complex to attempt to grasp here. In a manner that was, in itself, to a certain extent inaugural, it was the “Expanding Internationalism” meeting that gave new internationalism its global exposure as a new geopolitical paradigm of contemporary art. Held in 1990 in the context of the Forty-fourth Venice Biennale, this meeting saw the confrontation of two contradictory readings of the international and the global: one progressive and affirmative, believing in the translation of the postcolonial in the internationalist representational politics of contemporary art; the other a skeptical reading, doubting the generosities of the new internationalism as a paradigm for the decolonization of geoaesthetic thinking. Without a doubt, the internationalist character of the Venice Biennale functioned as the legitimizing framework for the more affirmative readings and promoted the idea that the international system of contemporary art was entering a less hierar-

chical phase, one more encompassing of global geography. From that moment it can be said that new internationalism entered a consolidation processes as a new global-led museographic imaginary. See my “Global Art and Politics of Mobility: Transcultural Shifts in the International Contemporary Art-System,” in Art and Visibility in Migratory Culture: Enacting Conflict and Resistance, Aesthetically, edited by Mieke Bal and Miguel Á. Hernández-Navarro (forthcoming); Khaled D. Ramadan, Peripheral Insider: Perspectives on Contemporary Internationalism in Visual Culture (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2007); and Jean Fisher, ed., Global Visions: Towards a New Internationalism in the Visual Arts (London: Kala Press, 1994). 2. See my “Geopolitics of Global Art: The Reinvention of Latin America as a Geoaesthetic Region,” in The Global Art World: Audiences, Markets, and Museums, edited by Hans Belting and Andrea Buddensieg (Amsterdam: Hatje Cantz, 2009), 98–115.

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universalistic understanding of what global art and world art history should be after postcolonialism, and, finally, the belief that cultural geography will directly rectify the biased accounts produced by modern and colonial Western museums. Once we have accepted this failure, then the concept of emerging geoaesthetic regions becomes useful for the following three goals.3 First, to establish a direct connection between the recent reinforcement of regional imaginaries within global-knowledge capitalism (what may be called new regionalism), the transnational corporatization of the emerging and exotic economies (emerging peripheral cultural markets), and the appearance of the new internationalism in the contemporary art system during the early 1990s; second, to emphasize the mutual debts between the historical geography of contemporary art drawn by the geopolitical imaginaries after the Second World War and the spreading of diverse westernizing economic theories, such as developmentalism (the denial of the coeval), the Prebisch-cepal school (the systemic underdevelopment of the Third World), dependency theories (what may be called revisionist dependentistas) or problems of uneven cultural economic growth (unequal immaterial exchange); and finally, to focus on the influence area studies has exerted on the asymmetric geopolitical configurations and new hierarchized aesthetic designs of the current international contemporary art-system, and on the rewesternization of some “revisionist” fields of expertise, such as world art studies, transnational postcolonial studies, transcultural and intercultural aesthetics, comparative art history, and cross-cultural art studies.4 the rewesternization of global art As Tony Bennett has noted, one of the characteristic traits of the modern and colonial museum is its self-perception as the sole institution authorized for, 3. For more on these three themes, see my Geoestètica i transculturalitat: Polítiques de representació, globalització de la diversitat cultural i internacionalització de l’art contemporani [Geoaesthetics and Transculturality: Global Cultural Diversity, Politics of Representation, and the New Internationalism in Contemporary Art] (Girona: Fundació Espais d’Art Contemporani, 2006); Is Art History Global? edited by James Elkins (New York: Routledge, 2007); Eric Venbrux and Pamela C. Rosi, “Conceptualizing World Art Studies: An Introduction,” International Journal of Anthropology 18, no. 4 (2003): 191–200; John Peffer, “The Burden of Global Art,” Rethinking Marxism 15, no. 3 (2003): 334–38; Peter Weibel and Andrea Buddensieg, eds., Contemporary Art and the Museum: A Global Perspective (Amsterdam: Hatje Cantz, 2007); Clare Harris, “The Buddha Goes Global: Some Thoughts Towards a Transnational Art History,” Art History 29, no. 4 (2006): 689–720; Intercultural Aesthetics: A Worldview Perspective, edited by Antoon van den Braembussche, Heinz Kimmerle, and Nicole Note (Amsterdam: Springer, 2009); and Frontiers

of Transculturality in Contemporary Aesthetics, edited by Grazia Marchiano and Raffaele Milani (Turin: Trauben, 2001). 4. On the connections between critical regionalism, area studies, and cultural economy see Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001); Regions, Globalization, and the Knowledge-Based Economy, edited by John H. Dunning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Immanuel Wallerstein, Open the Social Sciences: Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996); Wallerstein, “Contemporary Capitalism Dilemmas: The Social Sciences and the Geopolitics of the Twenty-First Century,”Canadian Journal of Sociology 23 (1998): 2–3; Vicente L. Rafael, “Regionalism, Area Studies, and the Accidents of Agency (Bringing Regionalism Back to History),” American Historical Review 104, no. 4 (1999): 1208–20; and Harry Harootunian, “Postcoloniality’s Unconscious/Area Studies’ Desire,” Postcolonial Studies 2, no. 2 (1999): 127–47.

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devoted to, and equipped for the production of narratives and representations concerning the civilizing hierarchies and the historical or geopolitical value of culture (understood here as Western culture).5 It can therefore be said that the modern colonial museum consolidated itself historically through a procedure of discrimination of what is and what isn’t culture, of what is and what isn’t civilization, of what is and what isn’t art, of what is and what isn’t universal. Likewise, but guided by a stronger desire for global legitimacy, art museums claim in turn to posses the epistemological tools to define of what is and isn’t contemporary art, and the geopolitical arguments to establish what the temporal and geographical limits of Western modernity are and what modern art is. As can be deduced, contemporary art museums’ self-perception as the sole repositories of the global production of recent art leads into a number of questions that go beyond issues merely related to exhibitions, archives, collections, or curatorial discourses. The concept of global art is not an aesthetic, historiographic, or chronological category, but a geopolitical, or better yet, a geoaesthetic one, which implies the paradox of refounding westernizing thinking initiated by modernity and coloniality. Consequently, global art isn’t a kind of artistic production that can be acquired, collected, and exhibited in art museums, but rather a kind of symbolic capital or geoaesthetic asset that museums employ to produce or reproduce discourses and imaginaries related to Western modernity. Thus, the apparent corrective gesture supported by the global-led museographic imaginaries, seen from the standpoint of what is called decolonial theory, reveals itself as a new geoaesthetic expression of Western hegemonic pattern.6 Therefore, behind the geopolitical revisionism of art museums two profoundly westernizing pretences are concealed: first, that a specific cultural region has a right to redirect the historical evolution of modernity through the strategic universalistic management of the concept of global art; and second, that Western institutions can rightfully command the new geopolitical designs of the international contemporary art system, given the fact that it is supposedly in the West that the genealogies and the museographic critical traditions are founded. The moment in which contemporary art museums legitimate their new global imaginaries from the West, they take as a starting point the Western geo-epistemological crisis that James Clifford refers to as “the postcolonial crisis 5. Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995); Bennett, Pasts Beyond Memory: Evolution, Museums, Colonialism (London: Routledge, 2004). 6. On decolonial theory see Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate, edited by Mabel Moraña, Enrique Dussel, and Carlos A. Jáuregui (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); El giro decolonial: Reflexiones para una diversidad epistémica más allá del capitalismo global, edited by Santiago CastroGómez and Ramón Grosfoguel (Bogotá: Instituto Pensar-Siglo del Hombre Editores-IESCO, 2007);

and Ramón Grosfoguel, “The Epistemic Decolonial Turn,” Cultural Studies 21 (2007): 211–23. The records of the following symposia are also pertinent: “From the Left Turn to the Decolonial Option: Conceptualising Current Latin America,” Copenhagen, Denmark, International Development Studies and Intercultural Studies, Roskilde University, May 20–23, 2008, convened by Lars Jensen; “Decolonial Turn/Western Universalisms: Debates on Border Thinking,” Barcelona, March 25–31, 2008, CIDOB-Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, convened by Ramón Grosfoguel, Joaquín Barriendos, Víctor Hernández, and Liliana Vargas.

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of ethnographic authority.”7 Even in the best cases, influenced by postcolonial theories, the locus of enunciation does little else but refound the Western historical geography of modernity and coloniality. Expressed in the concepts of decolonial theory, the blind spot of geopolitical revisionism in contemporary art museums is the fact that the epistemic site from which they articulate their geoaesthetic discourses is still a westernizing locus of enunciation. We may conclude that the inclusion of emerging geoaesthetic regions into the historical geography of the Western art canon is still very far from being capable of breaking the hegemonic matrix of Western modernity and coloniality; on the contrary, such an inclusion seems to lead to nothing other than the reinforcement of a kind of expansionist geographic knowledge derived from the West.8 What persists in these new museographic global narratives, then, is the coloniality of the power of representation of other modernities, other cultures, and other geoaesthetic regions. 7. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). 8. Barriendos, “The Decolonization of Geographical Thinking: Global Art, Transculturality, and Politics of Mobility,” in Art Critics in the Age

of Global Mobility (Barcelona: ACCA-AICA, 2007), 1–11, available at www.accacritics.org/downloads/ sympo_07_10.pdf (accessed May 2009); compare this with Sanjay Seth, “Historiography and Non-Western Pasts,” Postcolonial Studies 11, no. 2 (2008): 139–44.

afterword

James Elkins

This is such a difficult topic. We designed the inaugural Stone Summer Theory Institute as a convergence of people who do not always read one another’s work: political and social theorists, art historians, curators, artists, postcolonial theorists, and art critics. As we had hoped, we got a week of unpredictable conversations. As my co-organizer Zhivka Valiavicharska says in her closing comments (Section 9 in the Seminars), the conversations “produced serious uncertainty.” Yet the Assessments point to complexities even beyond the ones we encountered. I imagine the thirty-five participants in the Seminars will be surprised to see how negative some of the Assessments are: for some people, we produced no uncertainty at all. But for most, the Seminars provided at least a sounding for the most pressing issues around global art production. Several of the Assessments develop particular concerns of the Seminars. Carolyn Loeb explores a theme that is related to Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann’s interests, and so does Karl Eric Leitzel. Ján Bakoš, who works in Bratislava, says that central European historians are unconcerned with globalization in the sense it is discussed in this book; he reports instead on a truly remarkable attempt in central European art history to revive a former age of globalism under the fifteenth-century Jagiellonian dynasty, as a way of countering the usual narratives of east central European art history.1 I imagine that idea is off the map of most of our participants, except Tom Kaufmann. Other Assessments are not negative, exactly, but they decline to engage in theoretical debates. Several focus on case studies, which we didn’t explore in the Seminars, and there was a sense among some contributors that without case studies, talk about globalism will not have purchase.2 T. J. Demos begins with a useful summary of the Seminar’s principal points, but mainly he finds the conversations lacking in references to contemporary art. Esther Gabara offers a discussion of an artwork’s scale as an allegory for the book’s preoccupations. She says her text is given in lieu of theorizing, although it strikes me that the artwork she mentions is a theory that declines to identify itself as such. Suman Gupta wrote a two-part Assessment: 1. “East central European” is Bakos˘’s formula. See his intervention in Is Art History Global? and also Minulost’v Prítomnosti: Súcasné umenie a umeleckohistorcké myty/The Past in the Present: Contemporary Art and Art History’s Myths, edited by Bakos˘ (Bratislava: Nadácia–Centrum Súcasného Umenia, 2003). 2. As preparation for the Seminars, the participants read ten dossiers on individual artists, some of which are mentioned in the notes; those dossiers, prepared by graduate

students, contained everything that had been published about the artists that had a bearing on globalization. We had originally planned to include the dossiers in this book, but most were a hundred pages long, and one was over three hundred pages. Most significantly, even though some dossiers were presented in the Seminars, our conversation seldom returned to them. I take that as a sign of the pleasure in theorizing, which went largely unremarked.

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first he doubts that all the abstract thinking in the Seminars is useful;3 and then he describes a case study, the strange and wonderful Bulgarian painter Zlatyu Boyadzhiev.4 Demos, Gabara, Gupta, and several others imply, or claim, that headway can’t be made without case studies, so it is helpful to have some detailed examples in the Assessments.5 Aside from those reservations about the level of abstraction, the majority of Assessments are more or less strongly critical. A number, like Rasheed Araeen’s, John Clark’s, Tani Barlow’s, Iftikhar Dadi’s, and Anthony King’s, are consistently critical and even polemical. Araeen’s and Clark’s Assessments are, I would say, not only irritated but sad, as if our conversations in the Seminars were so deeply misguided that they could not usefully be repaired.6 I thought it might be helpful to assemble an list of ideas raised in the Seminars. Afterward, I will develop the question that I find most pressing: how to best write about the art of the last hundred years.7 the seminars 8 1. Nationalism Section 1 of the Seminars came mostly from a session led by Fredric Jameson. Several assessors thought that Jameson’s comments on the nation and nation3. In particular, he doubts the categories, dichotomies, and oppositions that structure the conversations in the Assessments, because they reproduce the modalities of power that they evoke. “Abstraction,” in my reading, is more a rhetorical covering term for such structures than a conceptualization of them. It would be good, ideally, to have an account of the full range of categories and other structures, and their relation to what is proposed as abstraction. 4. In preparing this Afterword, I had hoped to add a footnote to images of Boyadzhiev’s paintings, but there are almost none. I find it delightful that a painter as interesting as Boyadzhiev has almost no Web presence, so I can only recommend adding Plovdiv to your travel itinerary. (I was introduced to Plovdiv and Boyadzhiev by Zhivka Valiavicharska.) And I thank Gupta for sharing his unpublished MS on Boyadzhiev, which includes a very welcome and unusual reception history of a “marginal” artist. 5. Gupta objects to the Seminars’ level of abstraction, and mentions unproductive dualities (some of which were certainly in play); he notes the self-affirming nature of the discussion (a point made more directly by John Clark); and he criticizes the lack of specific examples (as several Assessments do). But aside from those objections it isn’t clear to me that conceptual analysis, even done at a consistent level of abstraction, is unproductive. (I am also puzzled because Gupta concludes by noting that the Seminars resonated with his current research.) My sense of things

is more or less the opposite of Gupta’s: I find that an absence of abstract, analytic discussions about global art permits unexamined assumptions, received ideas, and inconsistently deployed concepts to remain intact. 6. It could be argued that some of the Assessments achieve their polemical perspectives by offering homogenized readings of points that were actually articulated in the Seminars; but such an argument would have to posit an ideal level of reading or discourse. I prefer to take the Assessments as they are: each speaks in its own register, for its own purposes. The divergence in readings, and in reading itself, is a significant property of the current state of discourse on art and globalization. As in the Art Seminar series, we hope these Assessments provide a sense of the full range of critical participation in the subject. 7. This is my own interest, and it was not the preeminent concern of a majority of participants in the Seminars. Zhivka Valiavicharska read a draft of this Afterword extremely closely, comparing it with all the Assessments and Seminars, and she sent me extensive comments. As a result, many of the descriptions I offer are due to her careful readings, and some turns of phrase are, in fact, hers. That is not to say she agrees with either the framing or the content of this Afterword, and in particular the project I outline in the second half of the essay is entirely my own. 8. In this list, shorter entries are not meant to imply that the themes of those Seminars are less important; but if the material is well

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state were brilliant; others found them old-fashioned or unhelpful. Nina Möntmann’s Assessment focuses on the distinction between the nation and the state, a division largely bypassed in our discussions. Saskia Sassen takes many of these concepts further, by developing her concept of denationalization in contrast to existing concepts of globalization, postnationalism, or transnationalism.9 She is interested in particular in the subnational pockets, “localities,” and fixed populations produced by the mobility and transnationalization, and how they actively participate in global constellations. Most contributors do not develop specific concepts to do with nationalism, but instead focus on whatever might be an alternate or opposite to the increasingly uniform globalized economy, whether that global economy is conceived as empire (as in Hardt and Negri10), as transnationalism (as in Arjun Appadurai and others11), or as remnants or revenants of nationalism. For most writers, including Sassen, the subnational is an optimal concept, and the challenge is to elaborate it so that it can fit the problematics of contemporary art. I will return to this later. Hungmin Pai, Blake Gopnik, Suman Gupta, and Caroline Jones all criticize Jameson for thinking that he can stand outside the conditions of production and reception of Wong Kar-wai’s film,12 and several others fault Jameson for imagining that the film is as bound by its temporality and its place as he imagines: an idea that is only possible for someone who speaks from the global to the local. It is interesting to note that Gopnik, the principal art critic for the Washington Post, is the only one of the assessors to say that the game of contemporary art—he thinks of it as a game, like chess—is Western. I agree, but it’s not a position that is common in academic discussions. 2. Translation Translation is a trope, a traditional subject when it comes to globalization. Translation studies came up again in the following year’s seminars, and were criticized for being an unhelpful accompaniment to more pertinent discussions.13 It would be possible to develop a rhetorical analysis of the ways translation is brought into developed in the Seminars, I only mention it briefly here. 9. See for example Sassen, Cities in a World Economy (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 2006). 10. An interesting assessment of the Englishlanguage reception of Negri’s works through 2008 is in the January 2009 Bookforum: Scott McLemee, “Empire Burlesque,” online at www. bookforum.com/inprint/015_04/2973. See also Gopal Balakrishnan, ed., Debating Empire (London: Verso, 2003). 11. Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997); also Elliot R. Barkan, ed., Immigration, Incorporation and Transnationalism (Somerset, NJ: Transaction, 2003).

12. It is pertinent that the film literature assumes Wong Kar-wai’s assimilation into global concerns. See, for example, Paolo Magagnin, “Lecture, relecture, réécriture: La littérarité des films de Wong Kar-wai,” Actes de la Journée Doctorale “Autour du cinéma, réflexions et études de cas,” Université de Provence, Aixen-Provence (France), June 12, 2008, available in the online journal Lignes de Fuite (2008), www.lignes-de-fuite.net/article.php3?id_ article=108&var_recherche=magagnin (accessed December 2008). My thanks to Paolo Magagnin for the full reference. 13. What Is an Image? coedited with Maja Naef, vol. 2 of the Stone Theory Seminars (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, forthcoming).

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conversations on art. Initially translation is said to be difficult and imperfectable, or, more provocatively, it is said to be impossible. Sometimes, too, it is said that translation’s impossibility is built into language. Occasionally it is noted that mistranslations can be enabling. Those and other observations circulate, ending up as hedges to claims about the meaning of art that otherwise may appear too direct or universalizing. Translation, as a trope in art conversations, may function more as an acknowledgment of contingency and uncertainty than as an explanatory model. We were lucky in this book to have the seminar on translation run by Shigemi Inaga, whose theory of translation is one of the most epistemologically radical. In effect his interventions and examples were aimed to deflect any optimism that conversations like the ones in this book, which are about practices that bridge different languages, can ever make sense. That is a theory—really, a practice—that calls for a strong answer, but we answered it mainly with our own guarded and unfounded optimism that visual meanings can be understood across cultures. In the opening of Section 9 of the Seminars, Zhivka Valiavicharska took this discussion forward by mentioning the possibilities that translation opens—its possibilities for communication, even if that communication is always imperfect and open to revision. 3. The Prehistory of Globalization We had very little agreement on this, but I am glad it was discussed at length, and taken up by several people in the Assessments. It is important that there is no agreement over whether contemporary globalization has a pertinent history: that indecision indicates how much work needs to be done on relevant intellectual and economic histories, and how little of that sort of work is done in the art world. Jameson’s stand and Kaufmann’s counterstand have exemplary clarity, which should be helpful as conversations on the subject go forward. It is also here, in a discussion of globalization’s history, that most of us—aside from Harry Harootunian—missed an opportunity to go in the direction Anthony King suggests: not toward art as “an occupationally specialized practice . . . produced or performed by designated individual artists” but as a matter of urban—that is, lived and inevitably material—contexts throughout the world. 4. Hybridity Néstor García Canclini’s informative Assessment revisits the concept of hybridity, bringing in recent research not mentioned in the Seminars. García Canclini is open about his own work and the need to consider different meanings of hybridity as just “a chapter of the multiple forms of intercultural studies.” He seconds Darby English’s prescient abstraction of the Seminar conversation (I will not paraphrase it: it is at the end of Section 4). Whatever hybridity will continue

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to mean after its canonical formulations by García Canclini and Homi Bhabha, it will probably be helpful to consider it under several registers. My own interest in that conversation was to see whether hybridity functions as the principal word for the interest so many of us share in whatever is mixed, impure, in process, variably present, and otherwise detached from an unmediated sense of identity.14 My sense of the Seminars and the Assessments is that hybridity does in fact often stand for the properties that interest us in art, and that it is therefore more important than ever to be careful about what it means—as García Canclini is. Partha Mitter’s Assessment also points to the fundamental nature of the concept, and calls for new concepts to fit different Asian, African, and Latin American practices. Mitter’s idea is in harmony with García Canclini’s reservations about how widely hybridity can be applied: both their texts are an invitation to new work on historically and geographically specific concepts that could be alternates to hybridity. It would be wonderful to have such concepts, which would enrich the current discussion and also maintain its drive to specificity. 5. Temporality For some people in the Seminars—and I am one of them—temporality is one of the most interesting ways to rethink certain problems in art history’s representation of modern and postmodern art. The difficulty is knowing what senses of temporality are apposite. It was generally understood that certain senses of time can be associated with the global art market: Hegelian meliorist time, for example—what Dipesh Chakrabarty calls developmental time, the time of the “not yet.”15 The difficulty is in defining what should count as alternative forms of temporality. Chakrabarty’s answer, the horizon of the “now,” was not taken up in the Seminar, but its influence could be felt, perhaps most strongly in Seminar 6. For some people, the conceptualization of temporality in the art world involves concepts of the everyday. Hyungmin Pai makes this connection, and quotes Zhivka Valiavicharska’s question: “How can we think of possibilities to write art history through events, through alternative experiences of time, and through the ambiguities of the everyday?” (More on the everyday below, because it is associated with concepts of the local.) There are also “alternative experiences of time.” The Seminar participants debated the idea that a study of temporalities might reopen discussions about marginal and “canonical” art that have either reached stalemates or been shuttled aside in favor of a euphoric pan-national art market. Before the Seminars, I was unsure of the utility of temporality as a way to reconceive modernist problems of the sort I will describe in the second half of this essay. I thought that the theorization of temporalities was too abstract to 14. As Hans Belting puts it, “We therefore call anything in non-Western contemporary art that cannot be classified by Western notions ‘hybrid.’” Belting, “Art in the TV Age: On Global Art and Local Art History,” in Transmission Image: Visual Translation and Cultural Agency, edited by Birgit Mersmann and Alexandra

Schneider (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009), 169–83, quotation at 176. Belting calls hybridity a “magic formula” (179). 15. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), especially the Introduction.

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be able to guide research on, say, Indonesian modernist painting or Estonian expressionism.16 But the discussion was tremendously suggestive, and now it seems to me temporalities are a very promising way around the roadblocks of universalizing modernist descriptions. (More on this later, also.) The principal alternative temporality in this book is a mixture of several sources, including de Certeau, together with art-world appropriations of his work, Harry Harootunian’s senses of urban temporalities, Benedict Anderson’s development of differential temporalities, phenomenological accounts of lived experience, and echoes of Chakrabarty’s analysis. Perhaps an understanding that comes out of these discourses effectively is the temporality we would want to put against Hegelian and other totalizing temporalities.17 6. Postcolonial Narratives The original title of Susan Buck-Morss’s seminar was “What Comes After Postcolonial Theory?” Inevitably, the conversation went in other directions, and the parts transcribed here do not directly address that question. (The year following our Seminar, this theme was also taken up by the Third Guangzhou Triennial.18 Postcolonial theory is often put to one side when the political context is not itself postcolonial; that point is made in this book, for example, by Néstor García Canclini. An analogous argument is made by Gao Shiming in relation to the Guanghzhou Triennial.19 Sarat Maharaj has enumer16. Here I also want to acknowledge Jim Supangkat’s very articulate “‘Seni’ [Art] Manifesto,” which addresses marginalization and temporality in Indonesian modernism (personal communication, July 2009); and Lee Weng Choy’s meditation on temporality, modernism, and Singapore, “Authenticity, Reflexivity and Spectacle: or, the Rise of New Asia Is not the End of the World,” in “Inhabiting the Intersection: New Issues in Contemporary Asian Visual Art,” edited by Joan Kee, special issue, Positions 12, no. 3 (2004): 643–66. (I thank Nora Taylor for drawing my attention to Lee Weng Choy’s texts.) 17. The Seminar conversations tended not to include speculation on “the contemporary” or “contemporaneity.” In winter 2009, October announced a questionnaire on the subject, which will serve to collect various senses of that subject in and around art history. There are exceptions, including Okwui Enwezor, Donald Kuspit, and Terry Smith. See Smith, “Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity,” Critical Inquiry 32, no. 4 (2006): 681–707 (also on Documenta Magazines online journal, magazines.documenta.de), an argument for three senses of contemporaneity, related to one another less as dialectics than as antinomies. 18. See “‘Farewell to Post-colonialism’: Querying the Guangzhou Triennial 2008,” edited by Sarat Maharaj, Printed Project 11 (2009), published by Visual Arts Ireland. The Third Guangzhou Triennial was held September 6 to

November 16, 2008, and was curated by Gao Shiming, Sarat Maharaj, and Chang Tsong-zung. Their opening objection was that postcolonial theory has become “increasingly institutionalized as an ideological concept” (from their statement). Maharaj’s essay in Printed Project makes a number of claims about postcolonial theory as an object of other people’s interest, by way of placing it in the recent past. But the characterizations of contemporary discourse that he then goes on to sketch are not answers to postcolonial theory’s special interests: he means them to function as provocations or invitations. It seems to me that Maharaj’s approach is too hopeful, too impressionistic, and too sanguine about the ongoing unresolved interests of the majority of people working in and around postcolonial theory. It is not difficult to sketch the future, but it is difficult to enable that future by critiquing the present. 19. Gao Shiming’s essays, such as one presented at the Global Art Museums Platform III conference at the Goethe-Institut Hong Kong, May 21, 2009, raise the objection that postcolonial studies is, prima facie, inapplicable to political situations such as China. Gao goes on to argue that “the concepts of identity, hybridity, and diversity have gradually evolved into highsounding political statements” without critical purchase. The general position in this book is that such concepts have developed multiple uses and that what is needed is slow dissection

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ated other reasons to be skeptical of postcolonial theory, including its institutionalization in academic discourse.20 But it is an open question whether postcolonial theory’s shortcomings have been effectively addressed; postcolonial theory appears throughout the texts associated with the Guangzhou Triennial.) Buck-Morss’s project on Hegel and Haiti, and her amazingly energetic description of it in her seminar, were examples of what cultural scholarship could look like. We talked around a number of questions that would be fundamental to any future practice: the quality of attention to the local, the nature of interdisciplinarity, affect in historical writing, and the place of images. A problem, for some people present in the Seminar, was that Buck-Morss’s writing is unique: it is not available as a model. In the Assessments, it is García Canclini who says the most about what might follow postcolonial theory. He is careful and exact about the inappropriateness of postcolonial theory in parts of Latin America. “Understandably,” he writes, “postcolonial thinking is more useful when analyzing countries that attained their independence fifty years ago, while for Latin Americans the main question is how to reorient modernity.” As in the case of hybridity, García Canclini’s intervention leaves an open door for regionally specific alternatives to postcolonial theory. The final assessment, by Joaqín Barriendos, considers decolonial theory and “the decolonial turn” in the light of what Barriendos calls “geoaesthetic thinking.” These are initiatives that aim to rethink postcolonial theory for Latin American and other contexts by emphasizing regional differences, especially as those are expressed in the “imaginary” of museums.21 (These branching terminologies also suggest that it might be promising to begin from a discourse analysis of postcolonial theory and its descendants. Patrick Flores suggests as much with a tripartite division of the literature into “chronicles of emergence,”22 “modalities of transfer,”23 and “theories of art.”24 Perhaps in future the diverging lines of postcolonial discourse will become clearer.) of their individual uses, rather than the formulation of new contexts or an overall critique of the theory that supports the concepts. If postcolonial imagination seems to be “just . . . introspective” or “another form of dominant power discourse,” that may be less from lack of new material or what the organizers of the Triennial call “new modes of thinking and fresh analytical tools for today’s world” than it is from lack of careful analytic studies of the particular uses of individual concepts. I thank Gao Shiming for sharing the Triennial position paper and his own unpublished papers, “The Forthcoming History: On the Deconstruction and Reconstruction of the ‘Local,’” which is forthcoming in the GAM series; and “Observations and Presentiments: ‘After Postcolonialism.’” The previous two quotations are from these two papers, respectively. 20. In addition to noting that postcolonial theory’s “blanket application [is] questionable,” Maharaj says postcolonial theory’s “academiccultural institutionalization [has] dulled its investigative tackle”; that “the postcolonial kit” of concepts such as “center/periphery, N/S

divisions, migrant/citizen, colonizer/colonized, authentic/derivative, authority subordination, self/other” is “bogged down in new versions of the original deadlock”; and that it is “more a reactive than [an] affirmative stance.” Maharaj, “Counter Creed: Quizzing the Guangzhou Triennial 2008 According to James Joyce’s ‘Catechetical Interrogation,’” in “‘Farewell to Post-colonialism,’” 5–11, quotations at 5. 21. In addition to the sources cited by Barriendos, see Enrique Dussel, “World-System and ‘Transmodernity,’” Nepantla 3, no. 2 (2002): 221–44; and Barriendos, “Global Art and the Politics of Mobility: Transcultural Shifts in the International Contemporary Art System,” in Art and Visibility in Migratory Culture: Enacting Conflict and Resistance, Aesthetically, edited by Mieke Bal and Miguel Á. Hernández-Navarro (forthcoming). 22. Flores defines this as “art history within an interdisciplinary frame,” and names John Clark; Nora Taylor, “Why Have There Been No Great Vietnamese Artists?” Michigan Quarterly Review 44, no. 1 (2005): 149–65; Ahmad

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7. Neoliberalism This Seminar was led by Zhivka Valiavicharska, who has presciently focused her own scholarship on the way depoliticized contemporary cultural production participates in neoliberal development in Bulgaria and other Southeast European countries. the limitations of neoliberal discourse. She finds that the relatively sudden prohibition of Marxist discourse following the decline of Soviet influence—it was expelled from academia and intellectual discourse, and suppressed in progressive politics—enabled an influx of neoliberal discourses, which these countries adopted on the road to joining the European Union. In the Seminars, discussion turned to the ways that the contemporary art world can be understood as an integral part of neoliberal processes, and the way neoliberalism serves as a precondition for the art world’s sense of nationalism, democracy, and other foundational concepts. Here we were touched on the material dimensions of globally functioning institutions, for example how they may be participating in newly emerging inequalities and geographies of power—as in Valiavicharska’s and Milevska’s comments. We also raised questions about how globally positioned contemporary art practices bring into being new kinds of subjects through new mechanisms of power. If there was a limitation to our very interesting exchanges on neoliberalism, it was the point T.  J. Demos productively developed in his critique—that we certainly did not give satisfying and rigorous analyses of how actual contemporary institutions, biennials, and art practices take part in these processes. And while exploring questions of subjectivity and power, we did not leave any time to ask how these various institutionalizations, while being integral to neoliberal development, also delineate radically conditioned terrains of agency. 8. Four Failures of the Seminars This was from the five-hour closing public roundtable, at which I tried to arrange a discussion of things we had not managed to analyze. I won’t enlarge on the first three points.25 The fourth was the fact that most of the week had been Mashadi, “Moments of Regionality: Negotiating Southeast Asia,” in Crossings: Philippine Works from the Singapore Art Museum (Singapore: Singapore Art Museum and Ayala Museum, 2004); and T. K. Sabapathy, “Trimurti: Thoughts on Contexts,” in Trimurti and Ten Years After (Singapore: Singapore Art Museum, 1998). I thank Flores for sharing a copy of his “Field Notes on an Art World: Interest and Impasse,” forthcoming in Global Art Museums 3. 23. These are “specific ways in which techniques of making art are received and transformed,” and include Apinan Poshyananda, “‘Con Art’ Seen from the Edge: The Meaning of Conceptual Art in South and Southeast Asia”, in Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s (New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999); and Julie Ewington, “Five Elements: An

Abbreviated Account of Installation Art in SouthEast Asia,” Art and Asia Pacific 2, no. 1 (1995): 109–15. 24. These are texts “that offer an alternative to ‘aesthetics’ and ‘art’”; for Flores they include Stanley J. O’Connor’s pathbreaking essay “Art Critics, Connoisseurs, and Collectors in the Southeast Asian Rain Forest: A Study in CrossCultural Art Theory,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 14, no. 2 (1983): 400–408; and Jim Supangkat, “The Emergence of Indonesian Modern Art,” in The Birth of Modern Art in Southeast Asia: Artists and Movements (Fukuoka: Fukuoka Art Museum, 1997). 25. From the introduction to Section 8: (1) the slightly suspicious ease we experienced in talking about contemporary art, as opposed to the difficulty of talking about history and our

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devoted to finding oppositional concepts and practices, instead of understanding the current shape of the market.26 C. J. W.-L. Wee notes that in the Seminars, “the biennialization of the world appears primarily in a negative light, and does not entirely take into account the positive opportunities for representation that accompany it.” I was surprised, throughout the event, at the lack of interest in modernist and contemporary art that does not do appreciable work of political resistance. This is a constant in the Assessments also, from Nina Möntmann’s concern about an “institutional avant-garde” that can intervene in the logic of the national representation, to Rasheed Araeen’s complaint that we had not done enough to avoid complicity with the usual self-regarding self-description of the art market. Yet most work in biennales, the majority of work in art fairs, and the overwhelming majority of work in commercial galleries throughout the world is not about resisting capitalism or nationalism. It seems to me that if we are to understand globalized contemporary art, we need to take this seriously. In the Seminars, I proposed—following an idea of Benjamin Buchloh’s—that uncritical celebratory art is the obverse of politicized, avant-garde art, so that they are two sides of the same phenomenon. In that case—although Buchloh does not draw this conclusion—our work is incomplete because it gravitates to just one side of the dialectic of resistance and complicity.27 It could even be argued that biennale and art fair culture are primarily composed of uncritical work, so that from a sociological point of view it makes sense to take that art seriously.28 This theme also occurs in Caroline Jones’s lead-off Assessment (first in the book because it was first received). Jones opens with a distinction between the words “globalism” and “globalization.” She proposes the former as a good name place in it; (2) contemporary art practices that are excluded by the international art market; (3) whether or not there are emergent histories of art that are structurally different from the one developed in North America and Western Europe. 26. An important source, omitted in the discussion, is Hal Foster’s discussion in Art Theory, edited by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 1037. Foster makes a similar distinction between complicit and resistant postmodern art. A recent text that also sees contemporary art as “a critical answer to globalism” is Hans Belting’s “Art in the TV Age,” 172. 27. Speaking of the world art market since the 1990s, and in reference to my mention of Central Asian painters, Iftikhar Dadi writes: “In Central Asia . . . painters appear to have become more isolated. But one wonders why that medium should continue to be valorized today; especially by artists possessing Soviet-era training that shaped their artistic consciousness accordingly (by bestowing upon Central Asian peoples a secularized, bureaucratized modernity, while denying them mobility). If artists working in older modes have suffered isolation, important work in newer media that reimagines

Central Asia as a region and a crossroad is also emerging.” This, I think, mistakes the cause of painting’s decline. It implies painting has been marginalized by cultural and political conditions. But painting has also been marginalized by the very international art market that privileges new media, and therefore by arguments like Dadi’s. The different values placed on painting and new media are not intrinsic to those media, but to the discourse that supports or critiques them. All the more reason to consider both old and new media: some work in new media takes an optimistic, internationalist look at Central Asia, and some painting reflects a more isolated culture, but that does not mean that a critic interested in political realities should care which is valorized. 28. Caroline Jones misunderstands my idea of “statistical” work: I don’t mean we should adopt the methods of social scientists; I mean we should consider our obligation to be interested in work that is uncritical and unchallenging. She also misconstrues my interest in Kazakh artists: I don’t want to rediscover them for art history—I want to point to their difference without marking it as some new peripheral radicalism.

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for the condition in which an artist can react to the state of the world, “mining . . . widely shared references, against which he or she might pose the strangeness, wonder, resistance or irritation of local residues.” The latter “suggests the artwork’s helplessness, its inability to avoid translations, transactions, transportation and transformation by pervasive processes of globalization.” “Globalism” in this sense harbors emancipatory potentials, and “globalization” a sad fact of the current art market.29 She is right that the conversation veered between those alternatives, although I think that was recognized in the Seminars. Most of her Assessment is to do with Hélio Oiticica as an example of an artist who negotiated between the two. Her conclusion is that “unless the art historian can use the objects under study to explore modes of subjectivity we are experiencing under globalization, then they are of no use to our study of the global.” Art objects that can’t be used to study subjectivities under globalization “will lay the groundwork for Kazakh studies, or the basis of sociologies of kitsch, but they will not have bearing on our histories from the present.” For me, this raises the question of who “we” are. Jones is interested in whatever impinges on “our study of the global” and “our histories from the present.” But when I encounter an older Central Asian artist who is making Sufi paintings on suf (Arabic wool), I consider him very much part of “our histories from the present” if not “our study of the global.” His work speaks in exactly the way I wish history to speak: not mirroring my own concerns, and not presenting itself as an instance of a pressing and therefore familiar current interest. The suf painting is not a space of resistance—and in fact it is not concerned with either resistance or celebration. Nor is it kitsch (or more accurately, camp), except outside its contexts of production and reception.30 And it is not, in any simple art-world sense, either belated or avant-garde. It is, in short, a genuine problem—a historical problem, a problem for history. I love Mark Jarzombek’s formulation: “Nothing has been better for the global expansion of art history than the globalized claim for a local resistance to globalization.” That is wonderfully put, and it’s so true: resistance has become a trope in art writing. The converse is that local acquiescence to globalization has become wholly invisible. And I especially like T. J. Demos’s objections. He says that questions about contemporary art rarely come up in the Seminars, and 29. It is helpful to add two more terms here: “world art” and “global art.” Hans Belting’s essay “Contemporary Art as Global Art” uses “global art” to denote a new kind of institutional art that has developed from the worldwide practice of art; he opposes it to “world art,” which involves a universalizing claim and is a traditional subject of the discipline of art history. Because Belting is not primarily concerned with critical or resistant practices, his “global art” includes both Jones’s “globalism” and “globalization.” For Belting, “world art” entails ideas of heritage and nationalism, as in UNESCO World Art Heritage sites and internationally visible national museums such as the British Museum. Belting, “Contemporary Art as Global Art,” in

The Global Art World: Audiences, Markets, and Museums, edited by Hans Belting and Andrea Buddensieg (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2009), 38–73. 30. The normative judgments and presumptions about history and geography that are involved in the judgment of a work as kitsch are powerless when it comes to understanding what the work communicates in its context. “Camp” instead of “kitsch,” because the latter is a historical category of mass-produced art together with its projected values, and the former is a judgment—as Susan Sontag famously elaborated—rendered against kitsch and other practices, which sees them as ironic and therefore entertaining.

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when they do they are “met, for the most part, with untenable generalizations: artists are merely the instruments of capital, we are told; biennials and the art market are simply the affirmative expressions of neoliberalism.” Chris Berry is also concerned about the lack of attention to resistant practices. But Demos’s and Berry’s point is that biennale culture does permit local practices, those that are “indigenized,” in Arjun Appadurai’s expression. I wouldn’t ask whether artists who are represented by commercial galleries are “merely sell-outs, devoid of any resistant agency,” because most commercial galleries don’t look for “resistant agency.” Demos is right that our conversations minimized those possibilities in a wash of pessimism—but it’s also the case that resistant work is a tiny fraction of the art market. Beyond the few successful interventions, and the many less successful attempts at opposition, is the uncharted ocean of “ordinary” art: unresisting, belated, complicit, celebratory, oblivious, confused, undecided. 9. Universality This was also from the closing roundtable. Universality was a concept chosen by Valiavicharska. After a great deal of thought—all week she and I had been wondering how to structure the closing roundtable—she decided that universality had emerged in our discussions as a crucial concept for understanding the globalization of art. Here again it was especially interesting to have Susan BuckMorss on the panel, because she was working on a radical sense of universality, one that could articulate some of the hopes of art-world discourse. It was a fitting last topic, because the exact nature of “universal” communication in art, and the difference between that “universal” and the “particular” that art continues to call upon, are deftly avoided in contemporary writing. Several people who wrote Assessments responded to Valiavicharska’s exposition. Ming Tiampo, for example, refers to Valiavicharska’s citing Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s skepticism about universality; Tiampo prefers a historically specific response to transnational phenomena. Yet this tension between the two universalities—the imperial one and its radical reformulations—persists relentlessly throughout the Assessments as well. four options Those are the leading themes of the Seminars. The Assessments raise and develop other themes. Here I will focus on an issue that is developed in a number of Assessments, and is, I think, the most pressing and also furthest from resolution: what kinds of accounts of modern and contemporary art are being constructed now, how those accounts might be related to one another and to past accounts, and what the most interesting options currently are. I will mainly be drawing on contributions to this book, but the literature is growing quickly, and several new sources are also crucial, including an exchange with Partha Mitter in the Art

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Bulletin31 and new essays by Hans Belting, Iftihkar Dadi, John Clark, Suman Gupta, David Carrier, Whitney Davis, Hiroko Ikegami, and Dipesh Chakrabarty.32 What I have in mind is a very provisional “state of the art” essay on the optimal strategies for writing about the art of the last hundred years. Before I begin, I want to acknowledge a tremendously useful distinction made by Itfikhar Dadi, between the first phase of international modernism and a second phase that has obtained in the world art market roughly since the 1990s. In my reading of Dadi’s distinction, the first phase includes high modernism and its many forms around the world, but the second phase is not exactly a symmetrical complement: it includes not so much postmodernism and poststructuralism as much as the the economic and institutional structures that enable contemporary international art. This is helpful because the first phase presents very different problems. Some otherwise intractable differences among scholars evaporate when it comes to the more recently globalized world, as Caroline Jones describes it. The first phase is articulated quite differently: painting is exemplary, resistance is not a central concern, and there is a much deeper uncertainty about how the art should be interpreted in current scholarship. What I have said so far in summarizing the Seminars pertains mostly to the second phase; what I want to explore now is mainly a concern when it comes to the first phase. I will organize this exposition into four options for current scholarship on modernism in the visual arts. Three options came up at the end of Section 5 in the Seminars: writing that sees itself as contributing to a cumulative account of world art under the name “art history”; writing that concentrates on economic, 31. The exchange with Partha Mitter is one of the Art Bulletin’s “Interventions.” It begins with Mitter’s essay “Decentering Modernism: Art History and Avant-Garde Art from the Periphery,” and includes responses by Alistair Wright, Rebecca Brown, Saloni Mathur, and Ajay Sinha. See Art Bulletin 90, no. 4 (2008): 531–48 (Mitter’s essay), 549–54 (Wright’s response), 555–57 (Brown’s response), 558–60 (Mathur’s response), 561–67 (Sinha’s response), and 568–74 (Mitter’s reply). I will cite these as Art Bulletin “Intervention.” 32. Iftikhar Dadi reviews Mitter’s Triumph of Modernism: India’s Artists and the AvantGarde, 1922–1947 in Art Bulletin 90, no. 4 (2008): 652–54. As of August 2009, Hans Belting has published three essays from his ongoing international project on Global Art and the Museum (www.globalartmuseum.de/site/home). One, “Contemporary Art and the Museum in the Global Age,” is cited in Section 4 of the Seminars; the second is Belting, “Art in the TV Age: On Global Art and Local Art History,” in Transmission Image: Visual Translation and Cultural Agency, edited by Birgit Mersmann and Alexandra Schneider (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2009), 169–82; and the third is “Contemporary Art as Global Art,” in Belting and Buddensieg, Global Art World, 38–73. An unpublished paper by Chakrabarty, “Belatedness as Possibility,”

was given at a symposium organized by Christopher Pinney at Northwestern University, May 21, 2008; I thank Dipesh Chakrabarty for sharing the MS. Clark is at work on a MS provisionally titled “Modernities Compared: Chinese and Thai Art in the 1980s and 1990s”; I thank him for sharing the table of contents. Gupta graciously shared chapters from an unpublished MS, cowritten with Milena Katsarska, on the Bulgarian painter Zlatyu Boyadzhiev. See also David Carrier, A World Art History and Its Objects (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008). I also thank Whitney Davis for sharing two drafts of chapters on the subjects of world art history and perspective; and Hiroko Ikegami for sharing material from her The Great Migrator: Robert Rauschenberg and the Global Rise of American Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, forthcoming), which promises to be an interesting contribution to the conversation about world art concentrating on a moment in the dissemination of North American modernism from a postrevisionist perspective. As I write this (February 2009), I have just found out about a PhD dissertation, “The Globalization of Contemporary Art,” by Lotte Philipsen (Aarhus University, 2009), which takes as its point of departure the Institute of New International Visual Arts conference Global Visions (1994).

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political, and identity issues, and often strays from the concerns of art history in favor of postcolonial theory and other strategies; and writing that presents itself as outside of academic concerns, often by experimenting with new kinds of narrative.33 It fits the Assessments better if I interpolate a further option, which I will put just between the second and third: writing that avoids global themes, concentrates on particular contexts and places, and treats individual artworks, their makers, and their publics. Such writing is engaged in an ongoing project of acknowledging and reading multiple histories of modernism, in ways that art-historical writing (the first strand) and postcolonial theory (the third strand) may not. The four options are a productive and flexible way of thinking about the current directions of scholarship on modernism. They correspond to four degrees of skepticism about the appropriateness of art history for the project of understanding the last hundred years of art production around the world. Beginning with art history, the options move through postcolonial theory and related efforts, to writing that declines theories in favor of specific historical examples (the third option), and finally to writing that attempts to speak from outside academia altogether. In addition—and at the risk of making this analysis a bit too elaborate—the four options articulate three dialectics: a dialectic that binds and differentiates art history and postcolonial studies (the first and second options); one that ties and also distinguishes global concerns with local ones (the first and second in relation to the third); and one that relates academic historical accounts and any and all other historical accounts (the first three in relation to the fourth). Here are the four options, along with some of the questions that were raised in the Assessments.34 1. Write about modern art in such a way that the scholarship builds a cumulative account of world art under the name “art history.” There is a substantial academic industry devoted to building, critiquing, and elaborating the existing Euramerican sense of modernism and postmodernism so that it can account for practices around the world: perhaps that needs to be said, because there are no representatives of that perspective in this book. It is a sign of the current distress of art history in the face of global issues that there is little similarity among attempts to expand and rethink art history. Some are attempts to encompass art made outside Europe and North America.35 Others are 33. Like most other things in this book, that schema draws on other material that isn’t included in this book, but is presupposed in the discussion. In addition to sources cited in the Seminar, there is a review of Steven Mansbach, Modern Art in Eastern Europe, in Art Bulletin 82, no. 4 (2000): 781–85, and “Response [to Anthony Alofsin’s letter regarding the review of Mansbach’s Modern Art in Eastern Europe],” Art Bulletin 84 (2002): 539. 34. J. W.-L. Wee says the three-part schema

“repeats an old argument that the creation of modern culture came about without any cultural or other interaction with the economic periphery or the colonial-era frontier.” I don’t feel this is my argument: my purpose here is to make all the possibilities, including the received idea of an independent European modernism, as clear as possible. 35. Examples include Carrier’s World Art History and Its Objects and John Onians’s Atlas of World Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

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attempts to revise art-historical understanding without looking beyond Europe and North America. In Art Since 1900, the few references to non-Western art, colonial art, or anything outside a few countries in Europe and a few states in eastern North America demonstrate that the project of continuing a geographically limited art history still has critical purchase.36 The same has to be said of the many PhD theses written in Europe and North America that rework our understanding of the canonical figures and issues of modernism and postmodernism. The contributors to this book are all more or less committed to writing about art and issues outside those canonical walls. As Iftikhar Dadi says, “canon formation is linked to global power imbalances, capitalist accumulation, and institutions in complex ways that require analysis rather than tacit acceptance of its a priori status.” In this book and in an article in the Art Bulletin, Mitter proposes “a radical decentering of the avant-garde canon,” and in that he speaks for a large number of scholars. But I don’t share even Mitter’s very guarded optimism that such a decentering can be accomplished mainly by the accumulation of studies of the “margins,” unless the new scholarship also does its work of decentering by addressing the coherence of the old work. Mark Jarzombek, for example, makes the excellent point that non-European modernist architecture can be not only “a fundamental challenge to the European nation-state model” but one that is legible within art history. But it is not easy to move a conceptual apparatus as heavy as art history. I think of it as steering a bulk ore carrier, so heavy and slowmoving that it can hardly be stopped. Of the many issues here, belatedness has emerged as the exemplar, the synecdoche. Any account of modern art that tries to keep itself connected to existing narratives in art history will need to acknowledge the belatedness of many modernist practices in relation to western Europe and North America. Belatedness is a prickly concept: it forecloses sympathy and prohibits dialogue by offering a value judgment as a description. It trails a string of problematic concepts with normative implications, including the avant-garde, influence, originality, and precedence. All these, and especially belatedness, have been the subject of concerted critiques. Yet I am not fully convinced by the strategies that have been suggested to adjust or abandon belatedness or its enchained concepts. The most direct approach, taken by Charles Green, Chris Berry, and others, is not to critique the concept, but to enumerate examples where the West was belated. After a while, it can seem as if Europe learned as much from other parts of the world as vice-versa, and that can suggest several things: the provincializing of Europe (as in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s work), the weakness of distinctions between Europe and other parts of the world (this is most fully developed in Martin Powers’s scholarship), or the existence of multiple centers of innovation and belatedness 2004) and his Neuroarthistory: From Aristotle and Pliny to Baxandall and Zeki (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), and, in a different vein, David Summers’s Real Spaces; my review of that book, reprinted in Is Art History Global? is meant to ask about the nature of “art history” when it is expanded in that fashion.

36. Art Since 1900 is also the starting point of Partha Mitter’s “Intervention,” which is perhaps the most extended recent attempt to expand art history in this fashion. See Mitter, “Decentering Modernism,” especially 531.

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(I will consider this later). A less straightforward approach is to reconsider the concept of belatedness itself. A number of scholars, including Partha Mitter, have contributed to redefinitions of belatedness and the avant-garde.37 Such conceptual critiques have led to several proposals: to acknowledge the fact that belatedness and the avant-garde are different in different places;38 to abandon influence in favor of concepts like affinity or resonance;39 to see belatedness as a positive possibility on account of the way that newness is always partly disguised by displacement and repetition;40 to “frankly” note the ideological interests that drive talk about belatedness;41 and to make belatedness into a virtue by stressing the self-reflexivity and sophistication of belatedness outside the West.42 That is five possibilities in my count, and they are often mingled and combined with a sixth—simply ignoring the issue, writing around it or overwriting it with new material. An example of the first possibility—stressing how belatedness, and the avant-garde, appear differently in different places—occurs in C. J. W.-L. Wee’s Assessment. His crucial and final example is Ahmad Mashadi’s contribution to the Singapore Biennale in 2006, which proposes that new Asian figuration and conceptual art should not be seen as belated because they arose for different reasons than they did in the West. “Thus,” Wee concludes, “by implication, the region has no need to be in sync with Western narratives of such art forms.” This 37. Mitter’s contribution is the concept of the “Picasso manqué syndrome,” which he develops by comparison between Picasso’s borrowing of African motifs and Gaganendranath Tagore’s borrowing of cubist motifs. The former did not “compromise” Picasso’s “integrity,” but the latter was seen to result in the loss of Gaganendranath’s “self as an Indian” (Mitter, “Decentering Modernism,” 537). Mitter does not elaborate a theoretical platform for avoiding the syndrome, but his statement of it is clear and helpful—although I would rather it had been called the “Gaganendranath-Picasso syndrome,” to keep cultural parity. A useful source for the reconsideration of the modernist avant-garde is Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt, Stammbäume der Kunst: Zur Genealogie der Avantgarde (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2005). 38. This is perhaps best argued in Clark, Modern Asian Art, 217–32. For a critique, see my “Writing About Modernist Painting Outside Western Europe and North America,” in Compression vs. Expansion: Containing the World’s Art, edited by John Onians (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 188–214. 39. This is Mitter’s proposal. For a critique of the proposal, see Dadi, review of Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism, 654. 40. This is an inadequate condensation of Chakrabarty’s reading of Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition in the unpublished paper “Belatedness as Possibility.” Chakrabarty takes repetition in the Deleuzian sense of behaving “in a certain manner, but in relation to

something unique or singular that has no equal or equivalent,” so that newness is at first not experienced, because it “enters the world in disguise . . . in disguise and through displacement.” Chakrabarty, “Belatedness,” unpaginated, unpublished MS, section II. The first quotation is from Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, translated by Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 1, as cited by Chakrabarty. This approach, which is akin to questions that have long been debated in aesthetics about the nature of originality, could be useful in discussing modernist art; in my reading, it would refocus inquiries on the structure of repetition, disguise, and apparent newness. For some sources in aesthetics on the reciprocal relation of originality and repetition, see my “From Copy to Forgery and Back Again,” British Journal of Aesthetics 33, no. 2 (1993): 113–20, and David Fenner, ed., Ethics and the Arts: An Anthology (New York: Garland, 1995). 41. “Frankness” is enjoined in Reiko Tomii’s Assessment. 42. This is the strategy deployed by Ajay Sinha’s “Intervention” in the Art Bulletin. Sinha argues that Indian modernists felt a “historical ‘blush’” at such moments, and he divides his theory into three examples, “virtualism, feminization, and mimesis” (Sinha, “Intervention,” 567). Sinha’s position is promising, but it runs the risk of valuing complexity, self-reflexivity, and irony, qualities that were the possession of the European avant-garde.

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is the commonest form of the argument against belatedness, and it insists reasonably enough that forms and practices can be reinvented in new contexts. One could add that forms and practices are also interesting to the degree that they are visible as reinventions. But this does not resolve the initial problematic of belatedness. Contemporary figuration and conceptual art in Singapore can be described in such a way that they are of interest to people who follow conversations on non-Western forms of twentieth-century figuration or conceptual art, so that the practices in Singapore do not appear as only belated. Singaporean figuration and conceptual art can also be described so they are comprehensible to scholars who are concerned about Western precedents, so that the practices in Singapore appear in some way dependent on Western modernism and postmodernism, and not as putatively original creations. Contemporary Singaporean figuration could be framed as a development in the ongoing, worldwide explorations of the figure; or else it could be acknowledged, as it would be by a historian of an earlier generation, that while contemporary Singaporean figuration has its own interest, it is also belated. Either one of these two can be accomplished by itself, but there is not yet a way of joining the two discourses to make a new, more complex whole. That further problem, the problem of synthesis or rapprochement, is only occluded by saying, as Wee and Mashadi do, that Singaporean figuration is something different, because that is true, differently, from both perspectives. Because there is truth in both ways of describing contemporary figuration in Singapore, it may seem that this is only a pseudoproblem, and a thoughtful text or exhibition might embrace both as a dialectic condition of current practices. But that would lead, I think, to a genuine dilemma, because the the two positions are not in a dialectic relation: there are political investments in both positions, and one perspective partly excludes the other. If I call a figurative painting done in Singapore in 2005 “belated,” I foreclose some talk about how the work is part of a different socioeconomic and temporal condition. I am as helpless on this point as I think anyone is. Concepts like belatedness are not disarmed by the observation that they differ in various places, or that they are culturally produced, or that they depend on politics, imperialism, nationalism, or identity. That makes concepts like belatedness less magical, but it does not make contact with the force they have in their original contexts, both in North America and western Europe and also in various centers, including Singapore, where artists work in ways they know are indebted to previous Western models. Belatedness, the avant-garde, influence, derivativeness, originality, and precedence are in turn enmeshed in problems of periods, styles, manners, practices, schools, and groups. These latter are the primary organizational tools employed by art history. A problem for work that wishes to be read as art history is the occurrence of periods and styles outside their normative origins. What is Paraguayan expressionism? Czech cubism? Peruvian surrealism? Even though such expressions are reductive, in some form they are unavoidable in art historical description. There is an awful formula, “the Iliad of X,” that is used for innumer-

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able national poems: the Shanameh is the Iliad of Persia; the Manas is the Iliad of Kyrgyzstan; the Lusiad is the Iliad of Portugal; the Three Kingdoms is the Iliad of China; and so on without end. These formulas are persistent because they capture the irreducibly comparative character of modernist historical understanding. Several people who wrote assessments for this book are concerned with ways to avoid such comparisons; Carolyn Loeb, for example, suggests “transcultural” studies. The difficulty with all such projects, as important as they are, is that the structure of understanding on one side—the Euramerican side—depends on versions of such formulas. It is that structure itself that we need to study: the way the integrity and sense of European modernism relies on the development of comparisons at all levels of historical understanding.43 Several people who wrote Assessments are working on these problems, and avoiding words like “influence” in favor of concepts like affinity or resonance. (This is the second of the options I mentioned above.) Speaking of Global Conceptualism, the exhibition she helped curate, Reiko Tomii remarks that viewers found “resonances” between conceptual art in different regions of the world even though connections were not actively pursued in the exhibition. She defines “resonance” as “similarity with little or no evidence of actual connection, influence, or knowledge.” There can be many kinds, resulting in layered “maps” of analogous phenomena, “extended chain[s] of similarities and dissimilarities,” and “hidden degrees of similarity.” I think that with work, the concept of resonance might gain in interpretive power, but I am already convinced by her stress on individual concepts, such as shinkō geijutsu (new art), and especially avantgarde (zen’ei), which in its original Anglicized French version “is effective only as a way of aligning Japanese practices to similar practices outside Japan.” I prefer the analysis of terms to the construction of a theory of resonances, because concepts can be more exact. As Tomii says, partly following Terry Smith, “the perception of international contemporaneity at a given locale at a given time and the actual state of international contemporaneity are not always the same”—and the way to get at that, I think, is through individual concepts and not through fine-tuning of multiple “layers” of resonances, similarities, and analogies. There may not be a clear alternative to the old-fashioned art-historical reliance on cause and effect (that is, on influence).44 43. My own effort is the book-length study Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010). 44. Reading this section, Zhivka Valiavicharska added a long marginal comment. In part she was urging that “the question is also that effects are not necessarily passive results of what is causing them, and the ‘effect’ itself can radically subvert or unpredictably alter the agency that produced it, in our case the phenomena that have the power to influence . . . That way [the] ‘derivative’ can have a radically different social, political, or cultural function.” It is true, as Valiavicharska went on to point out, that accounts by Derrida, Judith Butler, and

others have problematized the sort of dead-end, one-way theory of influence that is ingrained in older art history. This entire subject needs to be explored in, and as, art history. In this context I will only add the observation that logically speaking, resonances, affinities, analogies, and other kinds of relations can function more to defer questions of causality as to offer alternate models. Causal models are hidden inside models of affinities like the load-bearing structures hidden inside architectural edifices. No matter how complex the model of causality becomes, it will have to come to terms with logical causation. An interesting text here is Karl Aschenbrenner’s study of the concept of coherence, which is remarkably difficult to define because

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Yet “resonance” and “affinity” are not the only possibilities. Tomii also calls for a deconstruction of originality and derivativeness to find “differences within similarities.” Ming Tiampo writes about the concepts of influence and originality, in an attempt to rethink them from the bottom up. Like Tomii, Tiampo, Dadi, and many others, I think fundamental conceptual analysis is indispensable, but I wonder if it will ever be enough. These concepts have deep roots, and the culture in which they grew has impacted around them like clay. We can work hard at understanding how the concepts have operated, and we can acknowledge their continuing grip, but it is as if they are fused to the soil.45 If concepts like influence are radically reduced by critique, I think we will be little left of what matters. My best try so far is to redefine terms such as “figuration,” “conceptual art,” “cubism,” and so on, for each next new context—that is what I am experimenting with in a work in progress. In the same vein, Iftihkar Dadi mentions the need to reconsider terms such as “Islamic art.” That way, at least, frail bridges remain in place linking concepts and practices in different places. “Cubism,” for example, does not sound the same in a text on France as it does in a text on Chile, Colombia, or China, and it can help to set out the different meanings, so that “cubism” appears as two different words, or three or four different words, in different contexts.46 Singaporean figuration would be “belated” in one sense when it is introduced to an art history seminar on the histories of modernism, but it would be “belated” in another sense when the artists themselves talk about their relation to the art-historical past. (Some artists treat words like “belated” or “original” the way people sometimes treat serious words like “cancer”: they are said as quickly as possible, as if in passing, or else insouciantly, as if they were simple and easy.) Instead of changing the subject and talking about socioeconomic contexts, it is possible to continue using even dangerous words like “belated,” provided it is understood that their meanings can vary so widely that they are effectively different concepts camouflaged as a single word. The same applies to period and style terms such as “cubism.” It seems to me a way forward here is to take the generative concepts, the building blocks of art-historical writing on modernism, and reveal their multiple meanings. its operation as an aesthetic term depends on the occlusion of its relation to causality. Claiming a work of art is “coherent,” like claiming a cultural relation depends on “resonance,” is a way of conjuring but postponing inquiry into causal relations. Aschenbrenner, The Concept of Coherence in Art (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1985). 45. Rebecca Brown puts this concisely in her Art Bulletin “Intervention,” responding to Partha Mitter. “We require,” she writes, “a major shift in our understanding of modernism and postmodernism.” She feels Mitter “does not make this move,” but he “tempts us to discard the modern altogether as an organizing principle.” She doesn’t advocate that, however, because it would go against the importance modernism had for the artists. I agree, but I also note

Brown implies that it would be possible to shift or discard the concepts of modernism (Brown, Art Bulletin “Intervention,” 556). The metaphor of the conceptually rooted discipline is also used by Saloni Mathur: “To tug at these deeply rooted ideas is to realize the extent to which they remain firmly attached to the epistemological bedrock of the discipline itself ” (Mathur, Art Bulletin “Intervention,” 558). 46. See the end of Section 3 of the Seminars. This method is pursued in my experimental article “Writing About Modernist Painting Outside Western Europe and North America,” in Compression vs. Expansion, Onians, 188–214.

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The crucial point in regard to current revisions of art history is that the test of an adequate reconceptualization of a term like “belatedness” will be whether it can sustain a conversation that combines the anxiety the word continues to provoke in some quarters with the many decathected versions in current scholarship. It is not enough to explore “differences within similarities,” or to write about repetition and disguise, or affinities instead of influence. It is necessary to “move away from blunt instruments such as originality, influence, and derivation that remain embroiled in discourses of domination,” as Ming Tiampo writes, but it is also necessary to include them, to let them speak. There is an opportunity here, because despite suggestive work by Judith Butler and others, none of our current solutions are enough. Without a synthesis, an account calling itself art historical will only tell part of the story, and be compelled to omit the rest. 2. Stop asking about a work’s value or its visual quality (the old questions of Euro-American modernist art history) and consider identity issues, subjectivities, social settings, market forces, economic frameworks, national and political constructions of meaning. This change of focus creates an interpretive dilemma, which Charles Green expresses most eloquently. “If art history’s terms of value and the reasons for valuing painting have been formulated across the North Atlantic,” he writes, “then attempts to think of other centers as equal—as Asianist John Clark does, for example—might seem to risk cutting off the reasons for valuing painting as painting. Do such attempts risk tending to change the conversation from the value and quality of the painting to the socioeconomic contexts that make different art unique in different places?” As Green notes, the interest in not framing modernist art in terms of its value or quality springs from the awareness of the historical and political conditions under which the art was given attributes such as value and quality. This is an interesting opening for new scholarship, but also a problem, because the two approaches are not understood as compatible, and only one—the new one—includes an account that explains the other. (This is not to say that the two approaches should be reconciled, or their deep disagreements resolved; but the unequal interpretive power of the two makes it especially challenging to see how they might coexist in a single text.) This issue is also succinctly put in Ming Tiampo’s Assessment. She notes the assumption “that modernism was a closed system, located in the West and relentlessly disseminated to its territories with no reciprocal exchange; and that once ‘transplanted,’ modernism was replicated around the world, resulting in no contributions that were necessary to modernism.” Her suggestion is to shift the question into politics: “As Edward Said suggested in Culture and Imperialism, modernism needs to be reevaluated as a transnational movement that is inextricably linked to its history of colonialism, imperialism, and war and the outcomes of travel,

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commerce, media, immigration, and imagination.” In this way the new interests are presented as ways to understand the old interests: the two perspectives are unequal in their interpretive power. The shift from aesthetic interests, such as value and quality, to socioeconomic ones is the sea change in art-historical scholarship in the last thirty years, and it is still far from being resolved. In this book, as in many others, the change plays out as a divergence of opinion between those for whom judgments of aesthetic quality are primary and those who want to understand art as a social and economic phenomenon. Broadly speaking, the interest in quality, visual and formal properties, aesthetic content, value, and judgment is pursued within art history; and the interest in politics, nationality, and economic context is identified—again speaking broadly and informally—with postcolonial theory and cultural studies. The common rhetorical form this difference takes is that scholars who speak from outside art history are outspoken and those who write as art historians are circumspect, and I think the reason is partly the perceived unequal explanatory power of the two positions. This, at least, is how I would put the situation as a heuristic formula. There are a thousand shades of gray and a million compromises. Thus, T. J. Demos, for example, takes Susan Buck-Morss to task for a “totalizing tendency” that “reduces all culture to economic reason,” even though Demos’s interest is not aesthetics but the complexity of the market and the concept of the imagination.47 But in the gray of ordinary compromise it is possible to discern the blurred outlines of a deep and fundamental disagreement about the nature of art. In this book the greater interpretive power of socioeconomic analysis is not questioned, but its relation to aesthetic understanding is unresolved. Three questions in particular stand out. I arrange them in order of the strength of the claims that are made on behalf of political interpretations. A. Make use of social and cultural contexts to problematize the simple identification of the visual qualities of unfamiliar art. Iftikhar Dadi cites the enormous compendium Modernism, edited by Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska, and especially an essay by Andreas Huyssen called “Modernism at Large.” The argument, as Dadi presents it, is that modernism needs to be understood by “careful and patient work, including an awareness of social and political history, languages and literatures, and other cultural conceptions.”48 As Dadi notes, much of that work has been done in the pages of Third Text. Before Third Text, it had seemed possible to quickly assess whether a particular Kazakh, Indian, 47. In the Art Bulletin “Intervention,” Saloni Mathur says that what made Gaganendranath Tagore’s modernism distinctly “Indian” was “the revolutionary currents of Indian nationalism, the radical forms of cultural resistance operating in Bengal in the 1920s,” and other factors, all of them political and social rather than aesthetic (Mathur, Art Bulletin “Intervention,” 559). Although none of the respondents to Mitter’s “Intervention” quite say it, Mitter’s position is taken to be more traditional, formal, and per-

haps even aesthetic. See, for example, Iftikhar Dadi’s review of Mitter’s Triumph of Modernism; and among the “Interventions,” especially Wright, 554. 48. Dadi’s position is interesting and complex, and he also advocates “careful studies of the intellectual and aesthetic concerns of modernist and globalist artists at large.” For the purposes of this summary, I am concentrating on what I see as his principal interest, which is not aesthetic but social.

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or Japanese painter was worthy of consideration in the context of canonical modernism, or whether the work lacked value or quality. Without extensive research into the particular conditions of each place, Dadi points out, writing about South Asian modernists will just be a new form of trophy hunting, with the Eurocentric historian bringing back astonishing and exotic new examples of avant-garde art. I agree with these reservations. When I travel, I do not hope to augment the modernist canon, and in fact I systematically avoid “discovering” “new” artists.49 I say this because I have been misidentified as a covert agent for the moribund traditions of Western art history.50 And yet it is a common temptation for scholars to “discover” “new” artists, and describe them using terms familiar from North Atlantic modernism.51 This is explicit in Steven Mansbach’s book Modern Art in Eastern Europe, which describes many eastern European artists in terms of their similarities to western European artists.52 Yet it is nearly impossible not to do so, and the reason is not simply that it is natural to understand new things in terms of familiar things; it is because the logic of modernism requires incessant aesthetic judgment, and we—all of us—are not yet free of modernism. Even scholars trained in postcolonial studies can find themselves “discovering” “new” artists. In this book, several Assessments propose political and economic analyses of artists, including criticism of previous work that had made simple identifications of the art and aesthetic values, but without saying why those artists are worth considering aside from their political and socioeconomic contexts. The absence of that justification is a sign that aesthetic and socioeconomic understandings are immiscible: within a politically oriented critique, an artist can still be understood as having intrinsic value, but that value is presupposed and not directly addressed. The unarticulated assumption that an artwork has intrinsic value, and is therefore worth writing about, is a limit to the postcolonial studies project of problematizing the modernist scholars’ identification of 49. See Stories of Art (New York: Routledge, 2002); “Is There a Canon in Art History?” in Partisan Canons, edited by Anna Brzyski (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); and “Writing About Modernist Painting.” 50. Most recently, Parul Mukherji has argued this in a reaction to a reading of an Indian text. Her essay will appear as part of a volume edited by Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann; the paper was originally given at the 2008 CIHA conference in Melbourne. Mukherji refers in her paper to an abbreviated version of an account of the Visn.udharmottara Pura¯n.a in my Stories of Art. My interest in the original analysis of that text, in On Pictures and the Words That Fail Them (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), as I hope is clear, is not to shore up a Western understanding of art history: it is rather to help erode that sense. Ironically—unfortunately— Mukherji and I have compatible aims, even though her essay doesn’t make it sound that way. See Parul Dave Mukherji, ed. and trans., The Citrasu¯tra of Visn.udharmottara Pura¯n.a,

Kala¯mu¯la´sa¯stra series 32 (New Delhi: Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, 2001), and the review by Doris Meth Srinivasan, “The Citrasu¯tra of Visn.udharmottara Pura¯n.a,” Journal of the American Oriental Society (July 1, 2004). 51. “North Atlantic” is also a term used by Charles Green; I like it because it acknowledges that the principal centers of scholarship on modernism and postmodernism are still centered on Western Europe and the Eastern seaboard of North America. When it comes to art practices, markets, and institutions, other terms are also useful, such as “Euro-american” or “Euramerican” (preferred by John Clark), or “Eurocentric” and “Anglocentric.”When it comes to art practices, as distinct from the centers of theorization and scholarship, a diverse vocabulary of “centers” is helpful. Each “provincializes” differently. 52. Review of Mansbach, Modern Art in Eastern Europe, and Mansbach, “Response”; and a reprise in “Writing About Modernist Painting Outside Western Europe and North America.”

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visual qualities, because the initial choice of the artwork is beyond the text’s horizon of conceptualization. A corollary is that the project of problematizing the identification of aesthetic qualities in art appears as a project because modernist logic remains so pervasive. In this case it is the internal conceptual structure of modernism that leads scholars to see their task as the dismantling of modernist concepts. This is a complex argument, but it is a complex problem: postcolonial theory and visual and cultural studies that interpret art as a socioeconomic and political phenomenon conceive themselves as engaged in a critique of judgments of value and quality that emanate from particular cultural institutions in Europe and North America, and that critique takes the form of the assertion of the conceptual dependence of valuation on politics, rather than an examination of the possibility and history of valuation, and that is because valuation is involved in the initial location of objects of study, outside the text: and that, in turn, is a result of the ongoing dependence of writing about modern art on the conceptual machinery of high modernism, no matter how distant that machinery may appear to be. B. Replace older assertions of value and aesthetics with the critical tools of postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and critical theory. It is one thing to employ socioeconomic and political tools to problematize previous assertions about the visual qualities of art, but it is another to assume that such tools will remove or vitiate older assertions. Some contributors to this book imply that work on political histories will come to replace the older, art-historical concerns that I am identifying with aesthetics. It seems reasonable that as the new scholarship grows, the old art-historical valuations will fade away along with the institutions and ideologies that supported them. For several respondents, the best way forward is to just change the subject from aesthetics to politics. The argument is not explicit in this book, but it is implied whenever a writer remains silent about value, quality, and other aesthetic judgments. I am not convinced: I think that modernist investment in judgment, together with the art-historical and critical narratives that give it voice, is tougher than postcolonial theory.53 I do not think that even the massive accumulation of scholarship on art outside of North Altantic modernism has had an effect on either the global value of North Atlantic modernism or the ongoing power of its master tropes. Despite Rasheed Araeen’s very serious criticism, I do not think that Third Text has come to terms with the power of the aesthetically driven narratives of modernism in the way that is necessary if they are to be fundamentally changed and not just rewritten as episodes in the history of nationalism, or slowly forgotten as fading remnants of European hegemony. The new subjects (economics, politics, postcolonial histories, languages and social contexts, material culture, identity construction) will not remove the old subjects (including 53. Master Narratives and Their Discontents, Theories of Modernism and Postmodernism in the Visual Arts 1 (Cork: University College Cork Press; New York: Routledge, 2005), is an

attempt to see how the existing narratives are structured, so that new accounts can get a grip on them and build an effective critique.

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not just value, quality, and other aesthetic judgments, but also “master narratives,” concepts of the avant-garde, originality, immediacy, formalist criticism, notions of the significance of cubism or surrealism—the entire narrative and scholarly tradition of Western modernist and postmodernist art history).54 The reason is an old chestnut: value matters in modernism, and judgment of quality is not separable from modernist self-descriptions. Postcolonial theory, area studies, and critical theory have rewritten judgments of quality and originality as ideologically and historically specific notions, whose persuasive force depends on specific political and institutional interests; but aesthetic quality cannot be made into a socioeconomically determined property of modern art without loss of a historical grip on the self-understanding of the modernist artists.55 Dadi writes that “in the absence of powerful but outdated institutional and academic codes to rebel against, the avant-garde simply cannot exist.” This is a good observation, but it may miss something that can be crucial to the ways artists outside Europe understood what they were doing: the fact that in the absence of the institutions that propelled European modernism, it was and still is possible to desire to have an avant-garde. You can still mimic what you take to be avant-garde styles and ideas, and you can still measure the quality of your art against them. In my experience, most modernist painters working today do not measure their work directly against North Atlantic models, but that is not because they are convinced that their socioeconomic condition makes them different in kind, it is because a direct comparison is debilitating. Modernist artists in places like Chile, Paraguay, and Argentina—or Cambodia, Thailand, and the Philippines—have long understood their projects as emulations of European modernism, and that makes it not only permissible but necessary to think of 54. Tani Barlow criticizes Third Text and mentions Positions, Traces, and Inter-Asia Cultural Studies as promising venues for Asian studies. It may be that in a decade Third Text or journals such as the ones Barlow prefers to it will be the principal texts in seminars on art history and criticism. But if that is so, it will be partly because people prefer writing that appears independent of older discourses. That is a working premise in journals such as Third Text that set out fresh problems and unfamiliar contexts rather than revisiting older ones. On the one hand, it is vital that projects like Third Text continue to bring new material into writing on art. But on the other, it is often easier to work with new ideas than it is to continue engaging the same stubborn bankrupt ideas of older art history. This is my principal complaint about visual studies: it is too easy, because there is often too little sense that the past of disciplines bears down on the present. This is developed in Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2003), 63–124. In relation to this book, see also Kasfir Sidnay, “Thinking About Artworlds in a Global Flow: Some Major Disparities in Dealing with Visual Culture,”

International Journal of Anthropology 18, no. 4 (2003): 211–18. I thank Joaquín Barriendos for drawing this to my attention. 55. Reading this passage, Zhivka Valiavicharska suggested I could add that “these concepts were the epistemological foundations of this kind of knowledge and they produced a modernist subjectivity (what you call selfunderstanding); an epistemological analysis of modernism and this modernist subjectivity is yet to happen. We need to write genealogies of when, how, and by what necessity notions of ‘originality,’ ‘immediacy,’ ‘value’ appeared, . . . and how artists become agents of this knowledge.” I agree, but I also would add that such genealogies would not necessarily improve our sense of the artists’ self-understanding, both because that self-understanding was not always, or often, self-critical, sufficiently articulate, or capacious enough to accommodate narratives about its deployment of concepts such as ‘agency’ or ‘originality’; and because aesthetic judgments are experienced as immediate and outside concepts. This is an obdurate problem because of the opacity of judgment, not just because of the lack of analysis.

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aesthetic questions including quality and value. Dadi is sensitive to this, and he writes that it is important to engage in “a writing of artistic practice that respects the formalist properties of the art.” But how, I wonder, can formalist properties be represented in a discourse that sees formalism and its attendant aesthetic properties as products of specifically European and North American practices? There is an enormous, largely submerged problem here. Reconfiguring concepts such as value or the avant-garde as particular effects of specific Euramerican socioeconomic configurations only delays and deflects the possibility of better understanding their effect on our own choices and interests—on the reasons why we choose to write about certain art practices. As Ian Hacking has argued, naming something as a social construction is not the same as critiquing that thing.56 I agree wholeheartedly with Partha Mitter that despite the new scholarship in postcolonial and area studies, “the problem remains,” because of the “sedimentation that has accumulated over the centuries with regard to what art is and must be.” The privilege of the center will continue, he says, unless there is “some drastic rethinking of the underlying assumptions of art history.” C. Use socioeconomic analysis to describe any art. An inbuilt assumption of postcolonial studies and other recent work is that a sensitivity to economic and political contexts is apposite to any art practice. Because all art is politically implicated, a political act, scholarship that attends to socioeconomic conditions will in theory be able to describe any unfamiliar art practice. I wonder about this assumption, not because some practices may cease to appear as interesting art, but because socioeconomic interest can be high where the art practices appear to be uninteresting, and vice versa. This is clearest to me in John Clark’s work on the Tokyo Academy of Art at the beginning of the twentieth century, which which I mentioned in the Seminars.57 I was arguing that Clark avoids the derivative nature of the paintings in order to write about the socioeconomic conditions in the Tokyo Academy at the time. But it is not clear how the politics or economics of the Tokyo Academy bear on the qualities of the artwork: indeed, it is meant not to be clear because Clark intends to change the subject, to avoid the unfruitful and restricted discourses of belatedness and quality. Yet the reason why that disconnection is itself unproblematic is not addressed within the text. 3. Avoid global themes or concentrate on particular contexts and localities, treating artworks and their makers and publics as individual instances; acknowledge and develop multiple histories of modernism. The emphasis on the particular, the unique, and the unreproducible is an exemplary purpose of historical writing, and it would be hard to maintain that compelling historical accounts could be written without such an emphasis. I list this option separately because it has become a trope in the historiography of art 56. Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

57. See Section 5 of the Seminars. Clark, Modern Asian Art (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1998), especially 217–25.

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history and postcolonial studies, and also because it has been put in such a way that it bypasses specifically disciplinary concerns. At its core, it revives an old historiographic debate about the importance of individual events and objects as opposed to universal ones.58 In that debate, the question is whether scholarship that attends only to particular people and objects can be historical writing, and conversely what happens when scholarship becomes so interested in large-scale ideas that it ceases to see structure in history. In this book there are several calls for a return to specificity. Speaking of the Seminars, Hyungmin Pai asks: “Is this a search for a global theory in a globalized world? . . . One must emphasize that there are centers and peripheries; divergent communities defined through language, ideology, nationhood, financial interests, wealth, and connectedness to a global world . . . The point is how writing changes when one is immanent to the concepts that one uses.” Other Assessments exemplify Pai’s point. Caroline Jones gives a persuasive account of Hélio Oiticica’s sense of the local and global; Suman Gupta offers a glimpse of his work on Zlatyu Boyadzhiev; Esther Gabara reads all the Seminars through the example of Cildo Meireles; Rasheed Araeen mentions Third Text work on nonwhite artists in postwar England and the United States; and Iftikhar Dadi reports that he is working on a book on Pakistani artists. I think it is helpful to distinguish a pragmatic and a critical form of the valorization of the local and particular. As a pragmatic approach, it is a way of suspending conversation about large issues such as influence or experiences of the avant-garde. It is a tonic to the repressive effect of those concepts, and also a tacit response to what is understood as their lack of consequences for day-to-day writing. As a critical strategy, looking at local contexts is a way of revealing the fundamental disunity of the European center. Alistair Wright, for example, suggests that thinking about Rabindranath Tagore can also reveal the “hybrid and contingent nature of Picasso’s own work.”59 Both the pragmatic and the critical purpose raise several issues. A. The question of how to best understand what is meant by the “local.” I mentioned that Seminar 1, led by Fredric Jameson, attracted most attention not for its theorization of the global or the national but for those concepts’ putative opposites. Saskia Sassen’s Assessment is exemplary in this regard. Among the terms that are used to name what the global or the national occlude, the “local” is a common choice. Hyungmin Pai writes about Jameson’s seminar that “it is mostly disappointing when brilliant writers who deal with the global never assume themselves to be local.” For Pai, the local is a practice, not a conceptualization. It is therefore not available to universalizing theories. He makes an analogous point about the affiliated concept of the “everyday” when he asks: 58. A useful comparison is Erwin Panofsky’s debate with the anthropologist Franz Boas. See Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (New York: Icon, 1972); “atomism,” the logical extreme of a focus on the local and particular, is discussed in my Stories of Art, chap. 1.

59. Wright, Art Bulletin “Intervention,” 554. This is another instance of the work that the hybrid does in current scholarship; here it signifies a foundational dissimilarity to self that is taken as a critique of the self-image of Western modernism.

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“Isn’t the everyday, even in its varied uses, defined as something that is practiced rather than thought?” For Pai, the everyday and the local are immersive: they may own us rather than the other way around. “The everyday impinges on the concept,” he writes. These two kinds of experience, the local and the everyday, appear in a number of Assessments.60 They are understood in various ways, but their uses share a stress on nonconceptual, phenomenological, lived experience, and in that respect the conversations in this book echo conversations elsewhere in art theory and contemporary art criticism.61 A common thread in these otherwise divergent usages is an interest in inhabiting a represented experience that is phenomenological rather than conceptual. Yet it could be said that Arjun Appadurai, one of the authors of the currently circulating idea of the local, warned against the identification of the local with “phenomenological” experience.62 In this book, the local moves between a phenomenological experience that can only be conjured or excerpted and never assimilated, and a compressed microcosm of the global, which remakes global conditions while participating in their conceptualization.63 As Pai says, paraphrasing Mark Wigley, the local “is a form of knowledge” that reconciles “knowledge” with “place-bound conditions.” A truly phenomenological sense of the local, however, could only be hinted at through “thick description,” and not analyzed using the tools developed in this book.64 A purely phenomenological local would be inimical to accounts of historical structure, but the evocation of an unthought, practiced, and lived experience is an integral part of the presentation of the local in this book. This opens a question for future writing: what threads lead from the practiced, unthought, experienced, unconceptualized sense of the local—which I think is primarily a phenomenological conceptualization—to 60. The everyday is a common concept in contemporary art criticism, although it is not often articulated beyond Michel de Certeau’s formulation. The canonical source is Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, translated by Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). For uses of the everyday in current art criticism—sources that could be used to do more work on temporality—see Anna Dezeuze, “Assemblage, Bricolage, and the Practice of Everyday Life,” Art Journal 67, no. 1 (2008): 31–37; Dezeuze, “Everyday Life, ‘Relational Aesthetics,’ and the ‘Transformation of the Commonplace,’” Journal of Visual Art Practice 5, no. 3 (2006): 143; and Meir Wigoder, “Some Thoughts About Street Photography and the Everyday,” History of Photography 25, no. 4 (2001): 368–78. See also Sarat Maharaj on “everyday space,” in his “Counter Creed: Quizzing the Guangzhou Triennial 2008 According to James Joyce’s ‘Catechetical Interrogation,’” in “Farewell to Post-colonialism,” 5–11, especially 7. 61. Pai’s intervention, for example, resembles the nonconceptual, phenomenological account of “land” and “landscape” that is developed by the geographer Denis Cosgrove as an example of what Marxist and other ideological analyses

of landscape omit. See Landscape Theory, coedited with Rachael DeLue, The Art Seminar 6 (New York: Routledge, 2008), 93. This theme is developed in my “Über das Buch Landscape Theory,” in Points of View: Landschaft verstehen: Geographie und Ästhetik, Energie und Technik, edited by Richard Schindler (Freiburg: Modo Verlag Freiburg, 2008), 45–54. 62. Appadurai, “The Production of Locality,” in his Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 178–200, especially 182. 63. For another critique of the use of “local,” see Lee Weng Choy, “Just What Is It That Makes the Term ‘Global-Local’ So Widely Cited, Yet So Annoying?” in Over Here: International Perspectives on Art and Culture, edited by Gerardo Mosquera and Jean Fisher (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). I thank Nora Taylor for drawing this to my attention. 64. Pai’s invocation of the local has resonance with Partha Mitter’s evocation of Clifford Geertz’s “thick description” in “Decentering Modernism: Art History and Avant-Garde Art from the Periphery,” Art Bulletin 90, no. 4 (2008): 568–74, especially 569.

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the wider concerns of scholarship, up to and including the global? Or to put it more formally: how can phenomenological experience be represented in accounts that are engaged with concepts that devolve from the universal? B. How does modernism-at-large serve as a counterbalance to the local or individual? When some version of the local, particular, or individual is valorized and the global is suspended or rejected, it becomes necessary to develop an alternative term that can function to counterbalance the global. One of the candidates here is “modernism-at-large.” Tani Barlow makes an especially strong stand in favor of the individual, distinguishing it from modernism-at-large: “So let me make my first point as unmistakable and clear as possible,” she writes. “Tanizaki, Oiticia, Doxiados, Lu Xun, Na Haesuk, and so on are not integers on a larger platform or project about globalism or global art. They are critical and inventive actors in the historical events of modernism-at-large.” Here modernismat-large is the critical counterbalance to the individual, but it could be argued that modernism-at-large is not as clearly disjunct from either larger platforms or individual “actors” as it would need to be to serve the distinction Barlow makes. Andreas Huyssen, who coined the expression, defines “modernism-at-large” as “the hybrid cultural forms that emerge from the negotiation of the modern with the indigenous”; for him the expression is more about mediation than difference.65 Arjun Appadurai’s concept of “modernity-at-large” is similar, although it does oppose itself more distinctly to modernity’s “universalism.”66 Modernismat-large and modernity-at-large, along with other concepts that point to modernism’s entanglement in nationalism, global media, capital, migration, and colonial experience (to paraphrase a list of Dilip Gaonkar’s), are parts of a general conversation on the impure, hybrid, self-dissimilar, and continuously political sense of modernism.67 The issue raised by Barlow’s Assessment is different: it is to do with what concepts might be evoked by scholars who wish to distinguish their interests from any that have a potentially global reach. One reason the debates in this book have so much energy is because of the unremitting difficulty of replacing a discourse relating a universalizing modernism or postmodernism with the individual or local, with a discourse relating the individual or local to something else. Holding too tightly to the particularity of local contexts or individual artists and artworks can mean releasing the companion term of the dialectic into an open-ended or ill-defined conceptual field. In Barlow’s Assessment, that problem is avoided by adducing modernism-at-large, which she also links to Dadi’s use of the expression, to neoliberalism, and to the collapse of the central position of the United States in the world economy. There are many possibilities for this kind of move, and they can be developed by exploring exactly what roles are 65. It is also another concept that depends on an agreed-upon sense of hybridity. Huyssen, “Modernism at Large,” in Modernism, edited by Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007), 53–66. 66. Appadurai, Modernity at Large. Huyssen

acknowledges Appadurai’s concept only in passing (“Modernism at Large,” 57). 67. Gaonkar, “On Alternative Modernities,” Public Culture 11, no. 1 (1999): 1–18; Gaonkar’s formulation is also quoted in Huyssen, “Modernism at Large,” 57.

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played by the three groups of concepts: the large terms that are suspended (in Barlow’s text, “globalism or global art”), the small-scale terms that are valorized (the “actor,” the “integer”), and the new alternatives to the large-scale terms (“modernism-at-large”). C. How do multiple modernisms serve as counterbalances to the local or individual? One possible outcome of attending to many local contexts is the sense that modernism was a multiple endeavor, and that the European version need not be privileged over the others. Charles Green’s brilliant Assessment takes stock of mutual influences, resonances, and other kinds of connections, and opts for a model that accommodates many modernisms. “Imagine,” he writes, “that many places have seen analogous modernities, and many of the artists are of equivalent value. The canon depends on where you live, and depends on the ability to imagine that you are not at the center of the world and that there are many potential places of greatness.” If painting is the art we’re interested in, Green says, then Paris will indeed have to be the center, but there are other centers for other media. That is one way to conceive multiple modernities or modernisms. Another is to notice the presence of non-Europeans in European contexts, and to see how “Europe” itself was always divided. Like others in this book, I am exploring whatever possibilities present themselves, but I am not certain that histories of the multiple centers of modernism can ever, in the end, be more than adjustments and correctives to the self-described unity, universality, and independence of North Atlantic modernism. The problem here is strictly symmetric to problem of replacing older assertions of value with the critical tools of postcolonial studies: in replacing older ideas, we risk losing a sense of the way the modernist artists understood themselves. In the case of value, there is the fact that modernists in many countries aspired to the avant-garde, to value and quality and originality. In the case of multiple modernisms, there’s the fact that modernists in many countries sought to emulate European or North American modernism. Those desires can be dissected and their ideology can be revealed, but then they disappear as desires, and something of the sense of the particular historical situation gets lost.68 On the other hand, modernisms were multiple in many ways, and Green is absolutely right to keep reminding us of the fact. Even if no one at present is trying to write an answer to Art Since 1900, and even if “new” centers of modernism and modernist artists are likely to be swallowed into the slightly bulging canon of modernism that is still growing in North Atlantic scholarship, there are few things as sensible as continuing to point out what has been overlooked, and why. D. And finally, how do we recognize the local? So far I have just been arguing that as we explore ideas of the local, individual, or particular, we keep a watch on the ecology of terms in which they thrive. It is also possible to ask how we come to recognize what counts as interesting local or particular practices to be68. Again this is a question of modernism, Dadi’s “first phase.” It’s true that “the problem melts away,” as Green says, when it comes to

more recent art. “John Cage,” he says, “is as good a cosmopolitan example as [Colin] McCahon or Xu Bing.”

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gin with. I wonder if what counts as persuasive immanence to local practices isn’t limited to work that makes contact with “our” interest in global capital and the possibility of resistance, as Caroline Jones puts it. Critical or resistant practices are the main examples of the local throughout this book. What about the very modest, direct, and crystal-clear Assessment by Karl Eric Leitzel, director of Landscape Artists International? He also has things to say about his practice, but they scarcely touch on anything we discuss in this book. He only mentions the local and the global, the intuitive and the theoretical, because he was generously trying to reply to my request. There may be more to this than our concern with critical art: it may also be that our interest in critical art is shaped and even limited by our sense of persuasive immanence or local practice—or, more troubling, that that our sense of local practice is limited by our sense of critical art. What about artists who speak like Leitzel? Perhaps they reveal another limit to “our” apparently capacious interests in current writing on art. 4. Create a compelling narrative that might be detached from existing academic concerns. So far I have outlined two dialectics: one that binds and differentiates art history and postcolonial studies; and one that binds and also distinguishes global concerns and local ones. This fourth and last strategy I want to introduce reimagines both of those dialectics by focusing on writing, trying to find a working method that can be independent of some customs of academic writing. The Seminars and Assessments suggest several possibilities. In this case, they are all hypothetical. A. Use interpretive methods other than Western ones, such as concepts and theories outside semiotics, deconstruction, structuralism, or psychoanalysis. Many contributors are also invested in the kinds of writing that scholars produce when they present the new art, and the ongoing dependence of that writing on models developed in North America and western Europe. What is new in such writing is the art, the artists, and their cultural contexts. The writing can also appear new because it is so full of unfamiliar points of reference—“new” geographies, languages, politics, and temporalities. As a thought experiment, let me propose a more radical possibility, one that is consistent with these interests: deploy interpretive methods that are not used in North America or western Europe—methods that are more temporally or culturally consonant with the work that is being studied. Again it is Tani Barlow who puts the argument most strongly. She quotes my idea that a young scholar who tries to explain Renaissance altarpieces in terms of Peruvian huacas might not get a job at a major university. I should have said “in an art history department, as a specialist in the Italian Renaissance.”69 It is definitely the case that such a person could get a job in a major university, and 69. So I agree that there is “precious little danger to even the most rarefied aspirants to even the best universities, if they write across disciplines.” But my point wasn’t about writing

across disciplines, which is widely encouraged; it was about using interpretive methods taken from disparate cultures.

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that writing that deploys unexpected interpretations is often privileged in the humanities. Visual studies, anthropology, and philosophy are filled with such experiments, and they can be compelling. At the same time, academia continues to impose limits on such experimentation. Elsewhere I have noted that Gayatri Spivak reads Derrida for the interpretive methods she deploys, and not, for example, Bengali texts. (She reads and works with Bengali texts for many other purposes, but she takes deconstruction as her interpretive tool.) Vinay Lal and others have proposed a radical rejection of Western interpretive sources and concepts in favor of Indian sources, but that suggestion has not been taken up by any scholars I know.70 It remains the case that a text on a Renaissance altarpiece, elucidated by reference to Peruvian concepts, would not be acceptable in specialist journals or conferences. There is a great deal more that can be done along these lines. B. Write a text that risks, or invites, being read as “poetry” rather than as expository prose. The word “poetry” came up several times in the Seminars, as a name for any sort of writing that would not be immediately recognizable as a contribution to an existing body of disciplinary knowledge. A “poetic” text on an Indonesian modernist, for example, might not appear as art history or postcolonial studies, even though it might still appear as a text of interest for art history or postcolonial studies. “Why demonize poetry?” Barlow asks. “For me the poem is a precisely a problem in universality.” Poetry, she notes, asks about the “universal in the appreciation of this thing called art.” So why be skeptical of “poetry”? Why can’t it be a solution to the problems raised in the Seminars? It can, and perhaps it will. Yet very few people write outside academic conventions in this sense. There is actual poetry on visual art, John Ashbery’s for example; and there is creative writing on visual art, such as John Berger’s or Thomas Bernhard’s. But the list of people who write genuinely unclassifiable prose on visual art is very small; for me, it includes Joanna Frueh and the inimitable Jean-Louis Schefer. Real “poetry”—meaning nonacademic writing, unclassifiable as expository or fiction—is exceptionally rare. The vast majority of us, including the most disaffected among the contributors to this book, write normative expository narratives with footnotes, captions, section headings, and bibliographies. Sometimes we also write the nonacademic “poetry” that is conventional in commercial gallery publications, but for the contributors to this book, that is an unusual sidelight on our principal work.71 If we want to hold up an ideal of inventive writing such as Carl Einstein, Walter Benjamin, or Aby Warburg, we 70. For Lal and Spivak, see my Visual Studies, 115–16. The closest is perhaps Parul Mukherji’s analysis of the Citrasu¯tra of Visn.udharmottara Pura¯n.a, cited above, but her essay in the ambitious anthology Towards a New Art History cites Norman Bryson and Griselda Pollock, and the introductory essay, “Towards a New Art History,” co-written with Deeptha Achar and Shivaji Panikkar, ends with a “select bibliography” of exclusively European and North American scholars—no Indian sources are con-

sidered as interpretive models. The anthology is an excellent conceptualization in many ways, and I mean only to point to the existence of an even more radical possibility. Towards a New Art History: Studies in Indian Art, edited by Deeptha Achar, Parul Dave Mukherji, and Shivaji Panikkar (New Delhi: D.K. Printworld, 2003), especially 47–68 and 122–30. 71. This is discussed in The State of Art Criticism, coedited with Michael Newman, The Art Seminar 4 (New York: Routledge, 2007).

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need also to acknowledge that we ourselves are not following in those footsteps. This is, I think, another opportunity for radical experimentation. Both this and the idea of using non-Western interpretive methods would acknowledge the implication we all have in our writing: as long as scholars in art history, critical theory, and postcolonial studies continue to write normative academic papers, with abstracts, introductions, and carefully signposted arguments, supported by archival research, trailed by footnotes, presented at conferences, revised for edited volumes, and published by university presses, we will confine the “newness” of our scholarly practice art to the art we describe. A more radical engagement with the “new” can involve, and risk, more than just the pouring of new art into vessels that are now not only quite old but deeply stained by the very Euramerican interests that we often wish to question.72 C. What does it mean to be outside Western academic writing, but still inside academic writing? This last question concerns what happens when an author wants to be distinct from a specifically Euramerican context, but still participate in an international—globalized—academic discourse; in other words, when a scholar does now want to be seen to be writing “poetry.” John Clark’s despondent Assessment concludes with this line: “In short, this was another case of discussion in Euramerica that will end up being for Euramerica, and its very inconclusiveness points to an aporia that will become more apparent with time.” It is true that the only non-Euramericans “admitted” to the book (as editor, I have to say that many more were invited) are from Japan, China, India, and Singapore, places where scholars “know how to discuss in these modes” and can read English (the transcript was not offered in translation, but Assessments could be in any language). But is Clark as “distant,” as far outside this immense self-lubricating mechanism of Euramerican art scholarship as he proposes? For some, his work would be even further “inside” than most, because his writing can be exceptionally difficult to read: it depends on extensive knowledge of political, poststructural, and postcolonial theory, all of which have been elaborated in Euramerican academia.73 One of the principal unresolved issues in the book Is Art History Global? was the question of the existence of nonEuramerican (or, as I would rather say, North Atlantic) practices of art history. It is a sensitive question, because it leads not only toward the limits of our awareness of our implication in academia, but also toward the limits of our acceptance

72. As I see it, this position is commensurate with calls for a radical and transformative encounter between critics and artists, which can be found, for example, in Irit Rogoff’s work. In other words, it already happens in some art criticism; the scholarly disciplines represented in this book lag behind. A good comparative source here is Gavin Butt, ed., After Criticism: New Responses to Art and Performance (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), discussed for example in The State of Art Criticism. 73. David Carrier’s recent book on world art history can be used to raise the same ques-

tion. Carrier ends the book with three fictional examples of art historians who work in Beijing, Mumbai, and Baghdad and write about Western modernism and postmodernism. The fiction is meant to sketch a condition of the near future, in which art history is written everywhere, about everyone. However, it also posits a future in which a particular kind of Western academic writing has won the day. (One of Carrier’s fictional authors has supposedly published in the Burlington Magazine.) Carrier, World Art History, 147–52.

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of whatever might count as different, as “poetry.” In the next few decades, as questions about world art history and world critical studies become increasingly common and central, it will be necessary to develop good accounts of what, exactly, will count as being outside Euramerican scholarship other than writing about non-Western subjects.74 “Poetry,” I think, is as good a cipher as any for that supposed “outside,” but the structure of the “inside” is still very much in question. conclusion My purpose in setting out these four options is not to produce a taxonomy, but just to temporarily tease apart practices that are actually mixed. The options blend, diverge, and converge continuously, in all the writers represented in this book. Although Suman Gupta’s Assessment is mainly about the inefficacy of our abstract arguments, his current project on Boyadzhiev is a mixture of close readings (they are, broadly speaking, art historical), meditations on the economic and political histories that have kept Boyadzhiev out of the mainstream (those passages are consonant with postcolonial studies and related initiatives), and enthusiastic appreciations of the work (which can be read as criticism or even “poetry”). Gupta mixes modes as practical matter; in theological terms, his project is kathenotheistic, because it turns to whatever will help throw light on the mysterious object of his attention. Most scholars have mixed practices. (A few don’t: Benjamin Buchloh’s political readings, for example, are relentlessly consistent.) The reason I treated these four options as if they exist separately in the literature is that sometimes it is helpful to look at just one strand or another in a practice that is, like all real-world practices, entangled. My concern is that when an interpretive strategy harbors an endemic problem that is pertinent to the artwork and to the projected audience for the text, then mixing that strategy with others may hide the problem rather than healing it. But that observation does not imply that purer practices are more effective. In practice, writing is mixed, and it thrives on that mixture. None of the purer themes I have considered would be as nourishing. My own interest in this book has been to make it a little more difficult to add to the current glut of writing on contemporary international art. In the art world, you can say almost anything you like about expression, meaning, ethnicity, nationality, nationalism, translation, hybridity, universality, postcolonialism, locality, place, everyday experience, temporality, identity, or neoliberalism, provided it is sufficiently multivalent, ambiguous, ambivalent, open-ended, allusive, impressionistic, coy, or otherwise free from critical accountability. As C. J. W.-L. Wee so nicely puts it, art world writing has “a vocabulary that indicates ‘critique’” but “a tone that suggests ‘celebration.’” I hope this book demonstrates 74. I thank Whitney Davis for sharing a chapter of his work in progress on global art history, which is partly an “ethnography” of the different initiatives. Many are mentioned in Is

Art History Global? and in World Art Studies, edited by Wilfried van Damme and Kitty Zijlmans (Leiden: Valiz, 2008).

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that there are rigorous discourses available to help make sense of what is happening in contemporary art production. At the same time, I have no illusions that this book will make a difference—I can’t imagine many exhibition catalogues, brochures, reviews, or monographs taking these arguments on board. There is tremendous euphoria in the market, and despite little dips and crises it is doing just fine without serious discussion of meaning. As long as artworks are used as signs of prestige, culture, mobility, and patriotism, then art writing can remain vague, polyphonic, evocatively allusive, provocatively opaque, teasingly meaningful, and intellectually evasive. Happily there is great pleasure in the hard work of rethinking contemporary art. It is often said that the complexity of art theory is artificial, and that it damages our love of art. I think more often the opposite is true: after a while, the unfocused joys of unanalyzed art can get a little old. The thorny, contentious, and often brilliant critiques in this book are not aimed at art but at the ways it is understood, and they have the effect of making the art even more rewarding. I learned a tremendous amount from the contributors of this book, and now I think we are only at the beginning of a truly reflective and ambitious account of art and globalization.

notes on the contributors

ján bakoš is Emeritus Professor of Art History at Comenius University, Bratislava, and a member of the Presidium of the Slovak Academy of Sciences. His books include Dejiny a koncepcie (History and Conceptions of Medieval Art in Slovakia; 1984); Umelec v klietke (Artist in the Cage; 1999); Štyri trasy metodológie dejín umenia (Four Routes of Art History Methodology, 2000); Periféria a symbolický skok (Periphery and Symbolic Jumps, 2000); and Intelektuál a Pamiatka (Intellectual and Historical Monuments, 2004). He has also edited Artwork Through the Market (2004). joaquín barriendos is a visiting professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Barcelona. Since 2007 he has coordinated the platform Global Visual Cultures (http://www.culturasvisualesglobales.net). He is currently a Fellow in the program in Museum Studies at New York University. His publications include “Geopolitics of Global Art: The Reinvention of Latin America as a Geoaesthetic Region” (2009); and Geoestética y Transculturalidad: Políticas de representación, globalización de la diversidad cultural e internacionalización del arte contemporáneo (2007). chris berry is the Professor of Film and Television Studies in the Department of Media and Communication at Goldsmiths, University of London. His research is focused on Chinese cinemas and other Chinese screen-based media. His books include Postsocialist Cinema in Post-Mao China: The Cultural Revolution After the Cultural Revolution (2004); TV China, coedited with Ying Zhu (2008); and Chinese Films in Focus II (2008). charlotte bydler is a lecturer at the Department of Art History at Södertörn University. Her publications include The Global Art World Inc.: On the Globalization of Contemporary Art (2004); “Global Contemporary?” (2010); and The Global, the Cosmopolitan, and Other Internet Art Worlds (forthcoming). néstor garcía canclini is Distinguished Professor at Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in Mexico City and Emeritus Researcher of the National System of Researchers. His awards include a Guggenheim scholarship, the Premio Casa de las Américas, and the Book Award of Latin American Studies Association for Hybrid Cultures for the best book on Latin America in 1992. His most notable publications are Consumers and Citizens (2001); Hybrid Cultures (1995); Diferentes, desiguales y desconectados: Mapas de la interculturalidad (2006); and The Imagined Globalization (forthcoming). john clark is Professor of Asian Art History at the University of Sydney, and was founding director of the Australian Centre for Asian Art and Archaeology. Among his books are Modern Asian Art (1998); Eye of the Beholder, coedited with Maurizio Peleggi and T. K. Sabapathy (2006); Modernities of Chinese Art (2009); and Modernities Compared: Chinese

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and Thai Art in the 1980s and 1990s (forthcoming). From 2004–2006 he worked on the new Biennales in Asia under an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant, for which a book draft, “Biennales and Contemporary Asian Art: Histories of the Asian ‘New,’” is now in submission. iftikhar dadi is Assistant Professor in the Department of History of Art, Cornell University. His research interests include modern and contemporary art, with emphasis on South and West Asia. Recent essays include “Shirin Neshat’s Photographs as Postcolonial Allegories” (2008) and “Ghostly Sufis and Ornamental Shadows: Spectral Visualities in Karachi’s Public Sphere” (2009). He recently published Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia (2010). t. j. demos is a critic and reader in the Department of Art History, University College London. He is the author of The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp (2007). His essays on modern and contemporary art have appeared in international journals such as Artforum, Grey Room, October, and Texte zur Kunst, and in numerous exhibition catalogues; recently he contributed “The Politics of Sustainability: Contemporary Art and Ecology” to the Barbican’s Radical Nature: Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet, 1969–2009. Currently a Fellow at the Flemish Academic Centre for Science and the Arts in Brussels, Demos is working on a new book, provisionally titled “Migrations: Contemporary Art and Globalization.” pedro erber is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Classical and Modern Languages and Literatures at Rutgers University. His publications include Política e Verdade no Pensamento de Martin Heidegger (2003); “Theory Materialized: Conceptual Art and Its Others” (2006); and “O Maio japonês: Arte, política e contemporaneidade” (2008). esther gabara is Associate Professor of Romance Studies and Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke University. Her publications include Errant Modernism: The Ethos of Photography in Mexico and Brazil (2008); “Fighting It Out: Being Naco in the Global Lucha Libre” (2009); and “Recycled Photographs: Moving Still Images of Mexico City, 1950–2000” (2006). charles green is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Melbourne. His books include The Third Hand: Artist Collaborations from Conceptualism to Postmodernism (2001). He has been Australian correspondent for Artforum for many years. As Adjunct Senior Curator, Contemporary Art, National Gallery of Victoria, he was lead curator and editor of the books accompanying Fieldwork: Australian Art, 1968–2002 (2002); World Rush 4 Artists: Doug Aitken, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Lee Bul, Sarah Sze (2003); 2004: Australian Visual Culture Now (2004); and 2006: Contemporary Commonwealth (2006). He is also an artist working in collaboration with Lyndell Brown. In early 2007 they were Australian Official War Artists, working on location in Iraq and Afghanistan. Recent publications include “The Atlas Effect: Constraint, Freedom and the Circulation of Images” (2009). michele greet is an Assistant Professor of Twentieth-Century Latin American and European art at George Mason University. She recently received a Research Fellowship at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, to begin work on a new book project on Latin American

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artists in Paris between the two world wars. Selected publications include “From Indigenism to Surrealism: Camilo Egas in New York, 1927–1946” (forthcoming); “Manifestations of Masculinity: The Indigenous Body as a Site for Modernist Experimentation in Andean Art” (2007); “Inventing Wifredo Lam: The Parisian Avant-Garde’s Primitivist Fixation” (2003); and Beyond National Identity: Pictorial Indigenism as a Modernist Strategy in Andean Art, 1920–1960 (2009). marina grzinic, a philosopher, artist, and theoretician is Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Institute of Fine Arts, Post-conceptual Art Practices and Researcher at the Institute of Philosophy at the zrc sazu (Scientific and Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Science and Art) in Ljubljana. She also works as freelance media theorist, art critic, and curator. Her most recent book is Re-politicizing Art, Theory, Representation, and New Media Technology (2008). Grzinic has been involved with video art since 1982. In collaboration with Aina Smid, she has realized over forty video art projects. suman gupta is Professor of Literature and Cultural History, the Open University, and Honorary Senior Research Fellow, Roehampton University, United Kingdom. His nine singleauthored books include The Theory and Reality of Democracy (2006); Social Constructionist Identity Politics and Literary Studies (2007); and Literature and Globalization (2008). He has also published seven coedited volumes, as well as numerous book chapters, journal papers, and reviews. jonathan harris is Professor of Art History in the School of Architecture, University of Liverpool. His books include Art, Money, Parties: New Institutions in the Political Economy of Contemporary Art (2004); Writing Back to Modern Art: After Greenberg, Fried, and Clark (2005); and Art History: The Key Concepts (2006). shigemi inaga is a Professor at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies as well as the Department of the Japanese Studies of the Faculty of Cultural Sciences in the Graduate University of Advanced Studies, Kyoto. His publications include Kaiga no Tasogare (1997) and Kaiga noTôhô (1999). Books he has compiled and edited include Crossing Cultural Borders: Toward an Ethics of Intercultural Communication (1999); and Traditional Japanese Arts and Crafts: A Reconsideration from Inside and Outside Kyoto (2007). mark jarzombek is Professor of the History and Theory of Architecture and is currently Associate Dean of MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning. He has taught at MIT since 1995, where he has worked extensively on nineteenth- and twentieth-century aesthetics as well as a range of historical topics, from the Renaissance to the modern. He has published numerous books, including a textbook, A Global History of Architecture (2006), with co-author Vikramaditya Prakash and the noted illustrator Francis D. K. Ching. caroline jones teaches contemporary art and theory in the History, Theory, and Criticism Section of the Department of Architecture at MIT. She is producer/director of two documentary films and curator of many exhibitions. Her most recent books include Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (2005) and Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art (edited, 2006).

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Fellowships in Berlin and Paris and at the Newhouse Humanities Center will inform her next project, titled “Desires for the World Picture: The Global Work of Art.” anthony d. king, Emeritus Professor of Art History and Sociology, Binghamton University SUNY, now lives in the United Kingdom. His books on globalization include Urbanism, Colonialism and the World-Economy (1990); Culture, Globalization and the World-System (edited, 1991); Spaces of Global Cultures: Architecture, Urbanism, Identity (2004). With Thomas A. Markus he coedits Routledge’s Architext series on architecture and social/ cultural theory. isla leaver-yap is Exhibition Organiser of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, and editor of map magazine. At the ica she co-organized Nought to Sixty (2008) and Talk Show (2009), and is the curator of Artists’ Film Club. Recently she realized a solo exhibition and publication by artist Rosalind Nashashibi, ica and Bergen Kunsthall. karl eric leitzel is a full-time professional artist living in Spring Mills, Pennsylvania. He works primarily in oil and acrylic, depicting a variety of representational subjects. He is the founder and director of Landscape Artists International and is a member of Oil Painters of America, International Plein Air Painters, and Farmland Preservation Artists of Central Pennsylvania. carolyn loeb teaches in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities at Michigan State University. Her publications include Entrepreneurial Vernacular: Developers’ Subdivisions in the 1920s (2001); “Planning Reunification: The Planning History of the Fall of the Berlin Wall” (2006); and “The City as Subject: Contemporary Public Sculpture in Berlin” (2009). suzana milevska teaches at the Accademia Italiana in Skopje, Macedonia. Her publications include “The Hope and Potentiality of the Paradigm of Regional Identity” (2008); “Curating as an Agency of Cultural and Geopolitical Change” (2008); and “Participatory Art and Its Hierarchies” (2009). angela miller is a Professor of Art History and American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Her book Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825–1875 (1993) won awards from the Smithsonian Institution and the American Studies Association. She is a lead author, along with five others, of American Encounters: Cultural Identity and the Visual Arts from the Beginning to the Present (2008), focusing on intercultural exchange as a driving force in the history of American arts. Recent essays include “Beyond the National Self: Cross-Cultural Exchange and Postcolonial Studies” (2008). partha mitter is Emeritus Professor in Art History, University of Sussex. He has held fellowships at Cambridge University; the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University; the Getty Research Institute; the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Mass.; and casva, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. His publications include Much Maligned Monsters: History of European Reactions to Indian Art (1977, 1992); The Triumph of Mod-

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ernism: India’s Artists and the Avant-garde, 1922–1947 (2007); and “Decentering Modernism: Art History and Avant-Garde Art from the Periphery” (2008). nina möntmann, a curator and professor, is Head of the Department of Art Theory and the History of Ideas at the Royal University College of Fine Arts in Stockholm. She curated the group shows If We Can’t Get It Together .  .  . Artists Rethinking the (Mal)function of Communities (Toronto, 2008/9) and The Jerusalem Show: Jerusalem Syndrome (2009, with Jack Persekian), as well as the Pavilion of the Republic of Armenia at the 52nd Venice Biennial (2007). Selected publications include New Communities (edited, 2009); Manifesta 7: Companion (coedited, 2008); and Art and Its Institutions (edited, 2006). keith moxey is Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Art History at Barnard College and Columbia University. His recent publications include “Mimesis and Iconoclasm” (2009); “Visual Studies and the Iconic Turn” (2008); “Aesthetics Is Dead: Long Live Aesthetics” (2006); and “Dialogue with Mark Cheetham and Michael Ann Holly” (2005). bhaskar mukhopadhyay, an Indian researcher and activist, is a lecturer in Postcolonial Studies at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London. He has written an ethnography of vernacular globalization, The Rumour of Globalisation: Decentring the Global from Vernacular Margins (forthcoming). His works on folk and vernacular art, on kitsch, and on indigenous and new media in India have been published in international journals. hyungmin pai was trained as an architect and urban designer at Seoul National University and received his PhD from the History, Theory, and Criticism program at MIT. Twice a Fulbright Scholar, he is professor at the University of Seoul. His books include The Portfolio and the Diagram: Architecture, Discourse, and Modernity (2002) and Sensuous Plan: The Architecture of Seung H-Sang (2007). In 2008 he was curator for the Korean Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. saskia sassen is the Lynd Professor of Sociology and Member, the Committee on Global Thought, Columbia University. Her recent books include A Sociology of Globalization (2007); Cities in a World Economy (3rd ed., 2006); and Deciphering the Global (edited, 2007). She wrote a lead essay in the 2006 Venice Biennale of Architecture Catalogue and has just completed a five-year project for Unesco on sustainable human settlement with a network of researchers and activists in over thirty countries; it is published as one of the volumes of the Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems. andrzej szczerski is Lecturer and Director of Postgraduate Curatorial Studies at the Institute of Art History, Jagiellonian University, Kraków. He has been a visiting lecturer at Goethe University, Frankfurt, and St. Andrews University. His books include Patterns of Identity: The Reception of British Art in Central Europe Around 1900 (2002); Art in the People’s Republic of Poland (coedited, 1999); and The Mousetrap Book (coedited, 2007). He recently co-curated the exhibition Symbolism in Poland and Britain at Tate Britain (2009). He is advisor to Małopolska Foundation Museum of Contemporary Art in Kraków and current President of the Polish Section of the International Association of Art Critics.

290

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ming tiampo is Associate Professor of Art History at Carleton University. Her book Gutai: Decentering Modernism (forthcoming) examines Gutai’s transnational activities as a case study to suggest new ways of framing modernism. She has published and lectured in Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Her previous projects include the AICA award-winning exhibition Electrifying Art: Atsuko Tanaka, 1954–1968 (New York and Vancouver, 2004). reiko tomii is a New York–based independent scholar and curator. She is a co-founder of PoNJA-GenKon (www.ponja-genkon.net), a scholarly listserv group for contemporary Japanese art. Her publications include Making a Home: Japanese Contemporary Artists in New York (2007); Kazuo Shiraga: Six Decades (2009); and “‘International Contemporaneity’ in the 1960s: Discoursing on Art in Japan and Beyond” (2009). zhivka valiavicharska studied art history at the Academy of Arts in Sofia and the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. Currently she is finishing her PhD at the Department of Rhetoric, University of California, Berkeley. She has written on contemporary art, cultural policy, and neoliberal governance in postsocialist southeastern Europe. Currently she is working on a project exploring the fate of the legacy of Marx and the Left in postsocialist eastern Europe, and on recovering the multiplicity of east European Marxisms during socialism. c. j. w.-l. wee is an Associate Professor of English in the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He is the author of Culture, Empire, and the Question of Being Modern (2003) and The Asian Modern: Culture, Capitalist Development, Singapore (2007), and the editor of Local Cultures and the “New Asia”: The State, Culture, and Capitalism in Southeast Asia (Singapore, 2002). Most recently, he coedited the anthology Contesting Performance: Global Sites of Research (2009). His essays have appeared in journals such as Public Culture, Critical Inquiry, the Drama Review, and positions: east asia cultures critique.

index

academia, 281–22 Adorno, Theodor, 22, 125 aesthetics, 18, 20–21, 25, 30 n. 18, 31, 41. See also border aesthetic affinity, 268 Africa, 77; photography in, 31 Agamben, Giorgio, 209 Ahmadaliev, 104 Akanayev, Amandos, 98 Alcock, Rutherford, 28 allochronism, 185 America, as like the Roman Empire, 17 Anderson, Benedict, 161 Anglocentric, 271 n. 51 anti-aesthetic, 3 Anti-Art, 173 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 32 Appadurai, Arjun, 94, 213, 261, 276 Araeen, Rasheed, 184, 272, 275; critical of the Seminars, 252 Archetti, Eduardo, 142 architecture, 188–94 Argentine art, 53 art, status of in Japan, 26–27, 30 Art Basel Miami, 105 Art History versus Aesthetics, 51 n. 1 art market, as not being studied by scholars, 105 art history, 67, 52, 59; as a broken vase, 81, 100, 103–4, 106–7, 170, 214; on death row in the early 1990s, 44. See also Is Art History Global? art journals, not read by students, 1 n. 1 Art Seminar book series, viii n. 1. See also Art History versus Aesthetics; Is Art History Global?; Landscape Theory; Photography Theory; State of Art Criticism Art Since 1900, 264, 278 autonomy, 22, 59, 102, 119 Avicenna (Ibun Sînâ), 23

Baier, Simon, 228 Ján Bakos˘, 251 Barkan, Elliot, 253 n. 11 Barlow, Tani, 277, 279 Barr, Alfred H., Jr., 166 Barriendos, Joaquín, 257, 273 n. 54 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb, 41 Baumgarten, Tilo, 13 Baxandall, Michael, 59 n. 20, 206 Beck, Ulrich, 144 Behrens, Howard, 3, 98 belatedness, 264–67, 274 belonging, 18 Belting, Hans, 40, 54, 206, 262 Benjamin, Walter, 67, 74, 79, 280 Berry, Chris, 261, 264 Bhabha, Homi, 55–61 biennales, 71, 87; as celebratory, 2, 95, 97, 105–7 Bloom, Harold, 168 Bonami, Francesco, 3 n. 8 Bonnard, Pierre, 13 border aesthetic, 53 Bourdieu, Pierre, 16 Bourriaud, Nicolas, 238 Boyadzhiev, Zlatyu, 233–36, 252 Bravo, Alvarez, 166 bricolage, 53 British Museum, 31 Brown, Wendy, 92 Browne, Sir Thomas, 107 Brzyski, Anna, 271 n. 49 Buchloh, Benjamin, 2 Buck-Morss, Susan, 130, 158, 169, 197, 210–13, 215, 246; on postcolonial narratives, 256–57; on universality, 261 Buden, Boris, 164 Burke, Peter, 57 Butler, Judith, 111 Cai Guo-qiang, 53, 166, 174 Canclini, Néstor García. See García Canclini, Néstor Carrier, David, 262, 281 n. 73 Caygill, Howard, 41 n. 10 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 18, 115 n. 6, 155, 255, 262

Chan, Paul, 118, 213 Chatterjee, Partha, 59 n. 18 Chicago World Fair, 30 Clark, John, 252, 262, 269, 274; Westernness in, 281 Clark, Lygia, 133 Clark, T. J., 21, 69–70, 80, 206 class, excluded in discussions of hybridity, 57 Clifford, James, 142 commodification, 22, 87, 95, 125 communication, new forms of, 15 community, 165 consumption, 15 contact zones, 57 contemporaneities, 171–75 contemporary, the, 173 contemporary art: ease of speaking about, 97–99; as a focus of scholarship, 38; lacking in this book, 210; as Western, 253 cosmopolitanism, 73, 110, 116; baleful history of, 46–47 crafts, 25, 89, 158; in Japan, 26, 30 Critical Art Ensemble, 105 critical geography. See geography, discipline of Cuban Revolution, 17 cubism, 268 cultural categories, unmarked, 31 cultural imperialism, 13 culture: homogeneity or heterogeneity of, 29–30, 60; material, 42 Dadi, Iftikhar, 195, 228, 246, 264, 270–71, 273, 275; distinction between modernism and globalization, 183–87, 262 Danto, Arthur, 166 Davis, Whitney, 262 de Certeau, Michel, 64–65, 256 deconstruction, 279 de Duve, Thierry, 41 n. 11 Deleuze, Gilles, on nationalism, 17

292

index DeLue, Rachael, 276 n. 61 De Marchi, Neil, 15 Demos, T. J., 251–52, 258, 260–61, 270 denationalism, 239, 253. See also transnationalism Derrida, Jacques, 58, 74, 119 n. 16, 232, 280. See also deconstruction Documenta, 37, 87, 155 Dussel, Enrique, 257 Dyer, Richard, 58 Ecuadorian artists, 32 Eitel, Tim, 13 Elkins, James, 130–32, 136, 176, 224 el-Salahi, Ibrahim, 228 Empire, 17, 77–96, 212 English, Darby, 143, 210 Erasmus, Garth, 121 Erber, Pedro, 132, 210 Errington, Shelly, 158, 161, 229, 231, 246 Euramerica, 181–82, 263, 267, 281. See also North Atlantic Euro+ model of art historical narrative, 192–93 Eurocentrism, 271 n. 51 Exposition universelle, 30 failures of the Seminars, 97–108, 258–61 Fairbanks, Douglas, 25 Fanon, Frantz, 74–75, 110, 159 Farago, Claire, 218 Florensky, Pavel, 83 Flores, Patrick, 257 Fluxus, 166 Foster, Hal, 190–91 Foucault, Michel, 40, 43; truth and, 76 Freud, 63–64 Frey, Bruno, 130 n. 2 Frueh, Joanna, 280 Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, 178–79 Gabara, Esther, 251–52, 275 Galison, Peter, 63 Gaonkar, Dilip, 277 Gao Shiming, 256 Garcés, Marina, 150 García Canclini, Néstor, 19–20, 56, 94, 220, 225, 255–57 Gehry, Frank, 190–91 gendai, 173 Genpei, Akasegawa, 172 geography, discipline of, 6 Germany, art history in, 40. See also names of

individual scholars Gerz, Jochen, 117 global art practices: distinguished from modernism, 183–87; as Western, 146–7, 181–82. See also glocal art practices; local art practices; regional art practices global capitalism, 119, 131 n. 4, 148–49, 164–65, 200, 212 Global Conceptualism, 172, 267 globalism, 38, 40; as aesthetic strategies opposed to globalization, 129–37; discourses outside of art, 6; ease of talking about, 97, 105 globalization: as an inadequate concept, 238; incoherent in a Marxist world order, 222; more represented than lived, 46; as a new phenomenon, 13–14, 38–39, 42–43, 254; as as opposed to globalism, 129–37, 259–60 globalized art market, 105 globalized world, 46, 115 glocal art practices, 178 n. 8. See also local art practices; regional art practices Gombrich, E. H., 28, 206 Gopnik, Blake, 253 governmentalities, 77–96 Green, Charles, 264, 269, 271 n. 51 Greet, Michele, 143, 226 Grünewald, 31 Gruzinsky, Serge, 47 Guangzhou Triennial, 256–57 guojia, 33 Gupta, Suman, 251–52, 262, 282 Gutai, 166–69; as stereotypical Western interest, 25–26 n. 8 Gu Wenda. See Wenda Gu Hacking, Ian, 274 Hall, Stuart, 142 Hallward, Peter, 61 n. 21 Hanru, Hou, 177 Hardt, Michael, 17, 77–96, 212, 253 Harootunian, Harry, 158, 198, 246, 248 n. 4, 256 Hart, Gillian, 77, 121

Harvey, Penelope, 142–43 Hatoum, Mona, 166 Hegel, G. W. F., narrative of art, 27, 40 Heidegger, Martin, 24, 58; on Western metaphysics, 74 heterogeneity. See culture, homogeneity or heterogeneity of Heynen, Julian, 2 Hill, Mike, 58 Hokusai, 26 Holly, Michael Ann, 170, 225 n. 5, 226 huacas, 34, 82, 279 Hussain, M. F., 122 Husserl, Edmund, 82 Huyssen, Andreas, 184, 277 hybridity, 51–62, 142–45, 229, 277; arguments summarized, 254–55. See also mestiçagem, mestizaje identity, postcolonial theories of, 58–59 Igarashi, Hitoshi, 23 Ikegami, Hiroko, 262 Iliad of X, the, 266–67 images, methodological work done by, 79 Inaga, Shigemi, 130, 146, 168, 169 n. 5, 195, 197–98, 202, 211, 229–30 indigenous practices, 143, 154, 184–85, 202, 212, 242, 277 influence, 265 interdisciplinarity, 76–78 International Gothic style, 39 IRWIN group, 122–24, 210 Is Art History Global?, 25, 29, 44, 117; disagreements about the uniformity of art history, 99–100, 280; lexica in, 34 Jacobs, Karen, 154 Jameson, Fredric, 130–33, 134 n. 16, 143, 146, 170, 177, 201, 209, 211, 212, 220, 222; aesthetics in, 20–21; critical of García Canclini, 19, 143; criticized for opinion on Wong Kar-wai, 253; criticized for views of nation-states, 252–3; as nostalgic about America, 162; on postmodernism, 21 Jarzombek, Mark, 195, 260, 264

293

index Jiro¯, Yoshihara, 168 Jones, Caroline, 155, 166, 169, 187, 195, 220, 259–60, 275, 279 Journal of Visual Culture, 76 Kahlo, Frida, 166 Kant, 27, 81–82, 115, 116 n. 8 Kantorowicz, Ernst, 93 n. 8 Kapoor, Anish, 95, 155 Kapur, Keeta, 120 Kaufmann, Thomas DaCosta, 130–32, 159, 161, 170, 201 n. 8, 203, 209–11, 222, 225 n. 5, 226–28, 246, 251 Kawabata, Yasunari, 25 Kazakhstan, 34, 98, 104, 123, 131, 136, 260 Kentridge, William, 166 Kim, Alice, 131 n. 5, 140 Ko¯jin, Karatani, 167 kokka, 33 Koselleck, Reinhart, 93 n. 9 Kraniaukas, John, 143 Kris, Ernst, 27 Kubin, Alfred, 123 Kuitca, Guillermo, 53 kumys, 34 kuni, 33 Kunstgewerbe, 29 Kunstindustrie, 29 Kyrgyzstan, 98, 103 Lam, Wilfredo, 166 Landscape Artists International, 138–39 Landscape Theory, 276 n. 61 Latin America, 32, 43–44, 52, 56, 58, 82, 200–201, 224–25, 257 Lee, Pamela, 210 Lippit, Yukio, 102 Leitzel, Karl Eric, 251, 279 local art practices, 131–37, 143, 145, 146, 151, 152, 154, 166–67, 172–74, 179, 184, 202, 208, 212, 218–21; definitions of, 275–79; as an illusion, 187. See also glocal art practices; regional art practices localities, 253 local, the. See local art practices, definitions of Loeb, Carolyn, 267 Löwith, Karl, 24 Louvre, 28 Lukács, Georg, 125

Mack, Bill, 3 n. 7 Maharaj, Sarat, 256 Manas, 267 Mandel, Ernest, 130 Manet, Edouard, 26 Mansbach, Steven, 271 Marx, Karl, 46, 125; on revolution, 19 Mashadi, Admad, 265 McKenzie, Jon, 150 Medalla, David, 118 Meireles, Cildo, 200–204, 275 Melville, Stephen, 77 Mendieta, Ana, 166 mestiçagem, 202 mestizaje, 47–48, 51–53, 57, 144 methods, interpretive, 279–80 Meuchian, Martiros, 3 n. 7 Miegroet, Hans van, 15 Mignolo, Walter, 149–51 Milevska, Suzana, 165, 176, 210 Miller, Angela, 143 Mitter, Partha, 261, 264–65 modernism at large, 184, 277 modernisms, alternate, 69–70, 171. See also Euramerica, North Atlantic modernities, alternate, 6 Möntmann, Nina, 253, 259 Morris, William, 28 Moxey, Keith, 37, 53, 146, 161, 203, 213, 220, 225 n. 5 Mukherji, Parul Dave, 271 n. 50 Mukhopadhyay, Bhaskar, 136, 159, 176, 196, 212, 215, 224, 230 Murakami, Takashi, 166 Musée de l’Homme, 32 Musée Quai Branly, 32, 42 nation, as conceptual unit, 18; as disappearing, 14; as failing, 17; in Z˘iz˘ek, 132 nationalism. See denationalism, nation-states, transnationalism nation-states, 39, 46–47, 53 n. 5, 191, 207, 222, 238; arguments summarized, 252–53; compared to grammar, 162; contrasted to states, 151–55; as tied to labor, 14 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 165 Nechita, Alexandra, 3 n. 7 Negri, Tony, 17, 77–96, 212, 253 négritude, 59, 184 neoliberalism, 6–7, 77–96, 258 Neo Rauch, 13

netsuke, 27 Nobuo, Sekine, 175 North Atlantic, 241, 271 n. 51, 278. See also Euramerica Obrist, Hans-Ulrich, 177 Oiticica, Hélio, 132–37, 166, 260, 275 Oldenburg, Claes, 175 On Kawara, 166 Other, the, 53 Pai, Hyungmin, 275 Panofsky, Erwin, 20, 117, 189, 206 Papastergiadis, Nikos, 142 particularity, 37 Peru, 34 phenomenological experience, 276 photography, African, 31 Photography Theory, viii–ix n. 2 Pickford, Mary, 25 Pollock, Griselda, 80 postcolonial theory, 58, 73–83; speculation on what comes after, 256–57 postmodernism: in China, 14; Jameson on, 21 postnationalism, 238 Powers, Martin, 264 Preziosi, Donald, 218 “primitive art,” 60 psychoanalysis, 279 purity, as an aberration, 57 Quemin, Alain, 205–6 Ra’ad, Walid, 136 n. 20 Rancière, Jacques, 105, 113 Rankin diane, 156 Rauschenberg, Robert, 14 Rea, Will, 154 readers, absence of, 1 regional art practices, 53, 77, 121, 179, 191, 196, 198, 207–8, 212, 234–35, 248. See also local art practices resistance, 15–16, 19, 54, 105–7 Richter, Gerhard, 172, 205 Riegl, Alois, 27–28; of the future, 136 Rivera, Diego, 166 Roman Empire, 17 Roy, Jamini, 119, 122, 176, 224 Rückaberle, Christoph, 13 Rushdie, Salman, 23–24

294

index Said, Edward, 167, 210, 269 Salcedo, Doris, 170 Samarqand, 66 Sassen, Saskia, 99, 159, 253, 275 Satinsky, Abigail, 53 n. 5 Schefer, Jean-Louis, 80 Scheibitz, Thomas, 2–3 Schwartz, Martha, 13 Schjeldahl, Peter, 1 n. 2 Schlosser, Julius von, 27–28 School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1 Schwartz, Gary, 15 Sebald, W. G., 107 Sehgal, Tino, 2–3 semiotics, 279 Shonobare, Yinka, 166 Simmel, Georg, 64 Singapore, Biennale, 265 Smith, Terry, 171 society, 34 Södertörn University College, 43 Solanas, Fernando, 32 Spivak, Gayatri, 162, 280 Stallabrass, Julian, 115 state. See nation-states State of Art Criticism, viii nn. 2, 3, 280 n. 71 Stenger, Isabelle, 41 Stone, Howard and Donna, ix–x styles: mixed, 60; national and international, 39, 60 subjectivity: Balkan, 61 n. 23; constructions of, 15 suf painters, 260 Sugimoto, Hiroshi, 166 Sumic-Riha, Jelica, 149–50 Summers, David, 86, 100 superflex, 105 suzhi, 216 Sweden, art history in, 43–44 Sydykhanov, Abdrashit, 104 Tagore, Abanindranath, 122 Tagore, Rabindranath, 275 Tanizaki, Jun’ichirô, 24–25, 277 Tashkent, 66, 104 Taylor, Brandon, 155 Taylor, Charles, 164 Taylorization, 64–65 temporality, 63–72, 255–6 Tetsurô, Watsuji, 24 thick description, 276 Thiong’o, Ngugi wa, 83, 110, 261 Third Text, 184, 275; absent from the Seminars, 141; and aesthetics, 272 Tiampo, Ming, 268–69

time. See temporality toilets, 25, 195 Tomii, Reiko, 267–8 translation, 76, 83, 131; arguments summarized, 253–54 transnationalism, 13, 17, 48, 53, 55, 86, 88, 99, 135, 145, 154, 159, 163, 165, 238, 245–46, 248, 253. See also denationalism Tsing, Anna, 81 Turner Prize, 154 unesco, 192 universality of art, 37, 101–17, 261; in relation to the market, 45 utopias, 19–20, 74 Uzbekistan, 98 Valiavicharska, Zhivka, 156, 159, 167, 169, 176, 197, 200 n. 4, 209, 211, 219, 246, 251, 258, 261 Vansina, Jan, 77 vase metaphor. See art history, as a broken vase Veh, Karen von, 156 visual culture, 45 visual studies, 42, 44–45, 77, 79 n. 6, 118, 119 n. 16 Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction, 273 n. 54, 280 n. 70 Wall, Jeff, 13, 102 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 17, 38 Warburg, Aby, 41, 79–80, 280 Wee, C. J. W.-L., 196, 259, 265, 282 Weischler, Matthias, 13 Weltliteratur, 30 Wenda Gu, 33, 53 Werber, Pnina, 142 Whiteness studies, 31, 58 Wickhoff, Franz, 27 Wigley, Mark, 219, 276 Williams, Raymond, 152–54 Wollen, Peter, 20 Wong Kar–wai, 15, 131, 253 Wright, Alistair, 275 Wu, Chin-tao, 156 Xu Bing, 53–54, 135, 174, 216 Yin Xiuzhen, 13 Young, Robert, 142 Yúdice, George, 91 n. 6, 145 n. 7

zen’ei, 173, 267 Zero Dimension, 174 Zeshin, 27 Zhang Xiaogang, 178