World Art History

This folio documents the exhibition RETURNS, curated by David Teh for the 12th Gwangju Biennale, 2018. The exhibition was conceived as a walk-in magazine, a lounge space in the Biennale Hall populated by a series of art historical vignettes mounted on large, moveable plywood displays. Each carried a story drawn from the first four editions of the biennale (1995-2002), informed by research in the Gwangju Biennale Foundation archives. The vignettes were also distributed for free as A3 cards, with designs by Ella Sutherland based on her analysis of printed matter from the early editions. This loose-leaf exhibition history has been bundled as a PDF folio for wider dissemination. Texts by David Teh, SooJin Lee & Grace Samboh. Design by Ella Sutherland. Special thanks to Han Jungsun and Cho Inho.

The interdisciplinary project reported here combines art history, archaeology and the historical anthropology of religion. It consists of a study based on the material culture of recusancy from the mansion and medieval bishop’s palace at Fetternear, Aberdeenshire. After the Reformation, the property became the main seat of the Leslies of Balquhain, a recusant family. A stone plaque bearing the inscription IHS MRA, probably dating from 1691, placed on the façade of the mansion indicates the religious allegiance of the family. This study of the contents of the mansion is based on surviving material culture associated with Fetternear and documentary sources and shows that the Leslies of Balquhain were building up the necessary intellectual and material resources for sustaining Roman Catholic worship and that their property served as the headquarters of the Jesuit mission in Scotland in the late 17th century.

Catalog of the 2011 exhibition of works by renowned Tunisian artists Nja Mahdaoui and Khaled ben Slimane at the New Sahara Gallery, Northridge, CA.  Co-organized with Galerie el Marsa (Tunisia). Contact me about obtaining a hard copy of the book.

In Pursuit of Universalism is the first comprehensive, English-language study of early twentieth-century Japanese modern art. In this groundbreaking work, which is also the inaugural recipient of the Phillips Book Prize (awarded by the Phillips Collection Center for the Study of Modern Art), Alicia Volk constructs a critical theory of artistic modernism in Japan between 1900 and 1930 by analyzing the work of Yorozu Tetsugorô, whose paintings she casts as a polemic response to Japan's late-nineteenth-century encounter with European art. Volk places Yorozu at the forefront of a movement that sought to define Japanese art's role in the world by interrogating and ultimately refusing the opposition between East and West. Instead, she vividly demonstrates how Yorozu reframed modern art's dualistic underpinnings and transposed them into an inclusive and synthetic relation between the local and the universal. By looking closely at questions of cultural exchange within modern art, In Pursuit of Universalism offers a new and vital account of both Japanese and Euroamerican modernism. Volk's pioneering study builds bridges between the fields of modern and Asian art and takes its place at the forefront of the emerging global history of modern art.

Reviews:
“Masterfully written. . . . Alicia Volk embarks upon a fascinating journey to develop an alternative perspective for narrating the complexities of the Japanese art scene. . . . Volk’s stimulating book definitively illuminates a new horizon for the field of modern Asian art. . . . It is precisely what the discipline needs.”— Journal Of Oriental Studies

“Forceful and eloquent. . . . Volk masterfully unravels the knotty strands that coalesced to shape one individual artist’s perception of self and his work within existing academic, institutional, and professional structures. . . . [The] book deserves praise for being a substantially rigorous and provocative probe into the search for universalism in a differentiated world.”—International Journal Of Asian Studies

“Deserves to be read by all historians of modern art and East Asian culture.”—Journal Of Asian Studies

“An impressive book, beautifully produced and sustaining intellectual rigour with its detailed, stimulating research.”— Japanese Studies

“Excellent. . . . Exquisitely written.”—The Art Bulletin

"Written beautifully and compellingly... Volk has made an important contribution to the growing literature on alternative artistic modernisms." --The Journal of Japanese Studies

"In presenting readers with this most cogent argument for the emergence of Japanese modernism through the artistic engagement of one of its central players Volk has made a genuinely original contribution to the field."--New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies

"This is an... intellectually nourishing read, in which Volk's voluminous knowledge of art movements and discourse creates a text of commanding erudition."--The Japan Times

“Volk's impressive study rethinks the East-West binary often reiterated in discussions of Japanese modernism by reinserting local aspects into the universalizing tendencies of modernism itself. The book makes an important contribution to the growing literature on modern Japanese art history by providing an alternative comparative framework for understanding the global development of modernism that decenters Euro-America. Rigorously historical in her critique, Volk destabilizes our understanding of the Japanese experience of modernity through the prism of Yorozu's singular vision of the self, leaving us questioning conventional wisdom and contented to wobble.”—Gennifer Weisenfeld, Duke University

“In Volk's affectingly stunning and deeply reflective study of the Japanese artist Yorozu Tetsugorō's work between 1910-1930, we have a profoundly historical reminder of how modernism everywhere struggled to meet the demands of the new with the readymades of received artistic practices. In this study of Yorozu's utopian universalist project, Volk has imaginatively broadened our understanding of the modernist moment and perceptively captured its global program to unify art and life, contemporary culture and history.”—Harry Harootunian, author of Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture and Community in Interwar Japan

prologue, intro and afterword of book
Publication date: October 20, 2016
Abstract:
Restrictive border protection policies directed toward managing the flow of refugees coming into neoliberal democracies (and out of failing nation-states) are a defining feature of contemporary politics. In this book, Verónica Tello analyses how contemporary artists--such as Tania Bruguera, Isaac Julien, Rosemary Laing, Dierk Schmidt, Hito Steyerl, Lyndell Brown and Charles Green--negotiate their diverse subject positions while addressing and taking part in the production of images associated with refugee experiences and histories. Tello argues that their practices, which manifest across a range of contexts including Cuba, the United States, Australia and Europe, represent an emergent, global paradigm of contemporary art, 'counter-memorial aesthetics'.

Counter-memorial aesthetics, Tello argues, is characterized by its conjunction of heterogeneous signifiers and voices of many times and places, generating an experimental, non-teleological approach to the construction of contemporary history, which also takes into account the complex, disorienting spatial affects of globalization. Spanning performance art, experimental 'history painting', aftermath photography and video installation, counter-memorial aesthetics bring to the fore, Tello argues, how contemporary refugee flows and related traumatic events critically challenge and conflict with many existing, tired if not also stubborn notions of national identity, borders, history and memory.

Building on the writings of such thinkers as Michel Foucault and Jacques Rancière, this book offers a useful concept of 'counter-memory' for the twenty-first century. It shows how counter-memorial aesthetics is not only central to the nexus of contemporary art and refugee histories but also how it can offer a way of being critically present with many other, often interrelated, global crises in the contemporary era.

http://bloomsbury.com/us/counter-memorial-aesthetics-9781474252737/

What is the scope of 'global art' and who drives its framing within the current climate of corporate globalization? In what ways do the recent global turn and curatorial turn underwrite meaningful global inclusivity and visibility, and to what degree does this globally shared art constitute mutuality? Does 'global art', including the accompanying process of biennialisation, allow for local narratives in a way that seriously accounts for a geopolitical view of contemporary art in the twenty-first century? While the inclusion of 'new art worlds' in what Belting, Buddensieg and Weibel (2013) term 'global art' is framed as a democratisation of contemporary art and the demise of the western art canon, it is important to raise questions regarding the blind spots of this supposedly global, post-1989 expansion.

In this article I analyse the current discourse of 'global art' as articulated in The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds (Belting, Buddensieg & Weibel 2013), focusing on its origin, transcription, mapping, consumption and ultimately, I
suggest, its emergence as a function of privilege. Challenging the charting of supposedly new art regions (Belting et al. 2013:100), which 'writes-out' local narratives and counter-narratives, I argue for a logic of subtraction in place of a logic of addition. While the latter triumphantly implies that 'new' art worlds have been added to the dominant core, the former is useful to a geopolitical perspective that strips away normative vision and actively seeks that which people often fail to see.

In this paper I analyse the work of CAPE Africa Platform in South Africa, which, while briefly and erroneously used as "evidence” of biennialisation and global expansion in The Global Contemporary, was locally referred to as 'not-another-biennial'. Discussing what some see as the shortcomings of the Cape 07 and Cape 09 exhibitions, I propose a reconsideration of measures of 'success' and 'failure', suggesting that an embrace of 'failure' can enable new ways of seeing the privilege of the contemporary art world. It is only when blanks, failures and things presumed not to exist are carefully regarded, that the goal of achieving mutually shared art on a global scale might become possible. Only then does it become apparent that the global south can have a certain edge over what is viewed as the prevailing art world.

Der kontrovers diskutierte Begriff einer globalen Kunstgeschichte, »Global Art History«, wird in diesem Band zum übergreifenden Thema gemacht.

Die Beiträge international renommierter KunsthistorikerInnen fokussieren jeweils spezifische Regionen und künstlerische Praxen, die in globalen und transkulturellen Zusammenhängen differenziert betrachtet werden. Es geht um Standortbestimmungen, theoretische Fundierungen und methodische Klärungen – und nicht zuletzt darum, wie Kunstgeschichten außerhalb euro-amerikanischer Kontexte gedacht und geschrieben werden.

https://www.transcript-verlag.de/978-3-8376-4061-8/global-art-history/

In the late 1980s women artists took the reins of the contemporary Aboriginal art movement in Australia. After years of working in the shadows, assisting their fathers and husbands, they burst onto the scene, giving it a new vitality and dynamism. Women artists redrew the boundaries of Aboriginal art, and continue to be among its most daring innovators.

Drawn from the collection of Debra and Dennis Scholl, Marking the Infinite features the work of nine leading exponents of this ongoing tradition: Nonggirrnga Marawili, Wintjiya Napaltjarri, Yukultji Napangati, Angelina Pwerle, Carlene West, Regina Pilawuk Wilson, Lena Yarinkura, Gulumbu Yunupingu, and Nyapanyapa Yunupingu. These nine artists offer a snapshot of the diversity of Aboriginal Australian contemporary art practice. Matriarchs in their communities, they are steeped in the ancient cultural traditions of their people. Inspired by these traditions, they extrapolate to the universal, creating artworks that speak
to the entangled globalized world in which we live.

In this volume, the art of each artist is given in-depth analysis by leading art historians, curators, and anthropologists. The essays shed light on the rich and complex histories behind the artworks, placing them in the contexts of traditional Aboriginal culture, philosophy, colonial experience, and the contemporary art world. Marking the Infinite shows nine artists producing works that cross cultures and bridge worlds. This strength of vision is immediately evident in works that shimmer and swirl, affirm their authority like lightning bolts, or sparkle like the night sky. These are marks upon
the infinite, connecting people from different cultures and countries, and reminding us of our shared humanity.

Featuring contributions from Tina Baum, Anne Marie Brody, John Carty, Rachel Kent, Howard Morphy, JoAnne Northrup, Hetti Perkins, Cara Pinchbeck, Sarita Qunilivan, Elina Spilia, Will Stubbs and Suzette Wearne.

The corpus of art from the Pleistocene has grown substantially in recent decades, and with it, the earliest evidence of visual art has become much older than previously anticipated, going back over 100,000 years. This new information has rendered some traditional ideas about the recent origins of visual art obsolete. Existing archaeological and evolutionary models that aim to explain the emergence of visual art should now be reassessed in light of current data. That is the aim of this book. First, it reviews the earliest examples of different forms of visual art in two important archaeological periods of human artistic innovation, the height of the African Middle Stone Age, and the European Early Upper Palaeolithic. It then takes a critical view at three influential origins-of-art models, namely, the sexual selection model, the social cohesion model, and the cognitive evolution model. Finally, it offers an alternative proposal that redefines visual art as a communication signal and, using the archaeological evidence, relates its emergence and development to the evolution of human cooperation strategies. This book will appeal to anyone interested in the debate of the origins of art and the evolution of modern human cognition, behaviour, and culture.

The Fowler’s activist museology deploys an interdisciplinary model based on the fact that the disciplines of art history and anthropology remain separate overall in their university departments and in their categorical museums. My own chapter for this volume provides an update to art historical practices by returning to the foundational European institutions of art history and anthropology in order to track the shifting boundaries of exhibitions of art and science. In questioning the definition, meaning, and ideology of world art and global art, this study returns to the Louvre as the original “art academy” in France (since 1793) and the Pitt Rivers and Manchester Museums as the earliest university museums of anthropology in England (begun in the late nineteenth century). The Louvre’s inauguration of a new wing for the “tribal arts” in 2000 was the symbolic act of admitting ethnographic objects into the canon of European masterpieces; while at the Pitt Rivers and Manchester Museums of anthropology and natural science, artistic conceptualism and collaboration with global performance artists have transformed the viewing engagements with the “tribal arts.” The symbolic change to the ways in which objects represents peoples in the historical European sites of cultural hegemony impacts the new global museum sites, especially in the countries of the source cultures of anthropology.

Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, 2020

Images are not neutral conveyors of messages shipped around the globe to achieve globalized spectatorship. They are powerful forces that elicit very diverse responses and can resist new visual hegemonies of our global world.Bringing together case studies from the field of media, art, politics, religion,anthropology and science, this volume breaks new ground by reflecting on the very power of images beyond their medial exploitation.The contributions by Hans Belting, Susan Buck-Morss, Georges Didi-Huberman, W.J.T. Mitchell, and Ticio Escobar among others testify that globalization does not necessarily equal homogenization, and that images can open up alternative ways of picturing what is to come.

In the article, I analyse France Stele’s essay K problematiki Jugoslovanske nacionalne umetnostne zgodovine (On Yugoslav National Art History) published in 1955. I first present a literature review of world art studies, especially the beginnings of world art studies and their relation to the so-called ‘new art history’, post-colonialism, and globalisation. I proceed with a discussion of the role of nationality and nationalism in traditional art history and present how world art studies attempt to overcome nationalistic paradigms. I also discuss methodologies with which scholars of world art research art in the global perspective. In the second part of the paper, I analyse France Stele’s essay K problematiki Jugoslovanske nacionalne umetnostne zgodovine (On Yugoslav National Art History). I begin my analysis with a discussion of the centre-periphery paradigm in Stele’s conception of art history as presented in the essay and his other works. I further discuss Stele’s relation to the Vienna school of art history, where he finished his doctoral thesis in 1912 under the supervision of Max Dvořák. The school greatly influenced his understanding of art history as an academic discipline, especially his understanding of non-European art and his conception of centres and peripheries of artistic development. Stele’s position on both questions in the essay can be further demonstrated on two levels; first, by analysing his relationship towards Strzygowski and Kunstwissenschaft, and second, by looking at his reception of Ljubo Karaman’s conception of “free peripheral environment”. In the conclusion, I discuss how Stelè used the centre-periphery paradigm in order to conceive a national history of art the aim of which is to promote national, Slovenian art and demonstrate that it can be valued as equal to art in other artistic centres of Europe.

The avant-garde movement Estridentismo (Stridentism) erupted in 1921, in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution, with the distribution of the poet Manuel Maples Arce's subversive manifesto Actual No. 1, which disparaged local art and literature as retardataire and outlined an aesthetic plan based on models from Futurism and Dada. As a result of dialogues between artists – including Mexico's first generation of mural painters – and writers over the course of the 1920s, Estridentismo eventually expanded its original proposal, increasingly embracing socially responsible causes and allying itself with radical politics. It became emblematic of the complexities of avant-garde thought in Latin America, torn between formal innovation and social relevance, cosmopolitan dreams and local concerns. This paper uses the example of Estridentismo and its offshoot movement ¡30–30! to shift the geography of modernism, assessing how such movements upset Eurocentric narratives and force us to recognize the importance of other locales to the production of knowledge.

The call for decolonising in the fields of culture studies has gained impetus, especially through numerous publications from and interviews with the circle around Walter Mignolo. In this article I look specifically into decolonising the art museum. For this I take it for granted, also based on my experience as a curator, that museums, including art museums are struggling with issues of cultural diversity and inclusivity. This struggle is rooted in fundamental frictions in which Art History plays a role.

From the end of the 1980s the innovations of Cultural Studies and the more recent positions
of Visual Studies have been the object of a broad international debate. Having to
deal with the postcolonial question in a renewed global dimension, art history has been
affected by the methodological crisis which had already involved other historical disciplines.
It therefore turned to several disciplines, among which anthropology, in order
to update its own methods. Hans Belting took effective part in this debate without ever
abandoning his studies in the field of medieval art, but moving closer to different histories
and cultural areas. In this way he developed his Global Art History, research which
extended from the study of art to that of its audience. Thematizing the historicity of the
concept of art and the universalizing demand for a historicist approach, he consciously
opened the geographical and cultural confines of his investigation. In the study of the
image, Belting identified one of the cornerstones of his proposal and formulated the
hypothesis of new narratives, free from the colonial gaze, necessary for the constitution
of a Global Art History.

I am deeply grateful to Anna Maria Guasch (AMG) for having composed this questionnaire. I have learned a great deal about myself and my views from attempting to provide answers to her very searching questions. She has gotten me (ACD) to situate myself as a critic in the present configuration of the art world. This has been an extremely interesting and personally valuable task
AMG:  As a person who has lived and worked as an art critic in two different “eras” (in the modernism and currently postmodernism, multicultural, and global world), how could you define the changes in the profile of an art critic or in the activity of art criticism in between these two “eras”?
ACD:  In truth I have not exactly lived in both these eras as an art critic. My first piece of art criticism was published in The Nation on October 24, 1984, which falls, according to my concept of the period, squarely in the post-modern era. Before that, I wrote only philosophy, and though my writings often described works of art, it was always for the philosophical ideas the art suggested, rather than in the spirit of criticism as I later practiced it. My criticism, so far as I am in position to judge it, is neither modernist nor post-modernist, and I think both kinds of are based on misleading ideas. Modernist criticism is formalist, while post-modernist criticism is relativist – not that these are necessarily in opposition to one another. My objection to formalism is that it tends to imply that formalism is all there is to criticism. My objection to post-modernism is that it tends to imply that there are no universal truths about art. Post-modernists base this belief on the radical pluralism that has overtaken the art-world in recent decades. I am entirely a defender of radical pluralism (the term was invented by William James), which may make it seem that I am in fact post-modernist myself. But I am, to the contrary, an essentialist, and my project as a philosopher of art had been to nail down a definition of art that covers all cases, western and non-western, contemporary and traditional. So I am entirely anti-relativist. It is, however, consistent with my essentialism that works of art can look any way at all, be made of anything, and put together in any manner whatever. I don’t think this would have occurred to me before the post-modernist era, when this unlimited diversity is what first strikes the eye when one looks at art, however superficially. I might also note that if we considered all the art made in the different cultures at a given moment, all across the world, the result would be deeply pluralistic. What is remarkable about the post-modern era is that this pluralism marks the collective production of art within a single culture – ours.

The call for decolonising in the fields of culture studies has gained impetus, especially through numerous publications from and interviews with the circle around Walter Mignolo. In this article I look specifically into decolonising the art museum. For this I take it for granted, also based on my experience as a curator, that museums, including art museums are struggling with issues of cultural diversity and inclusivity. This struggle is rooted in fundamental frictions in which Art History plays a role.