The challenge of globalization and the “decolonization” of our way of thinking have become a majo... more The challenge of globalization and the “decolonization” of our way of thinking have become a major concern for most art historians. While it is still too early to assess the impact on the discipline of the “Global turn”—a turn that is all the more timid that it materializes more slowly in public collections and public opinions than in books—we nonetheless wanted to probe scholars who are paying close attention to the new practices in global art history. Coming from different cultural milieus and academic traditions, and belonging to different generations, they agreed to answer our questions, and to share with us their insights, questions, doubts, but also hopes for the discipline. This survey must be regarded as a dialogue in progress: other conversations will follow and will contribute to widening the range of critical perspectives on art history and the Global challenge. Jonathan Harris * Birmingham City University * Jonathan Harris studied art history at Sussex University, 1980-8...
Sugata Ray and Venugopal Maddipati, eds. Water Histories of South Asia: The Materiality of Liquescence, Visual and Media Histories Series (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2020)
The challenge of globalization and the “decolonization” of our way of thinking have become a majo... more The challenge of globalization and the “decolonization” of our way of thinking have become a major concern for most art historians. While it is still too early to assess the impact on the discipline of the “Global turn”—a turn that is all the more timid that it materializes more slowly in public collections and public opinions than in books—we nonetheless wanted to probe scholars who are paying close attention to the new practices in global art history. Coming from different cultural milieus and academic traditions, and belonging to different generations, they agreed to answer our questions, and to share with us their insights, questions, doubts, but also hopes for the discipline. This survey must be regarded as a dialogue in progress: other conversations will follow and will contribute to widening the range of critical perspectives on art history and the Global challenge. Jonathan Harris * Birmingham City University * Jonathan Harris studied art history at Sussex University, 1980-8...
Sugata Ray and Venugopal Maddipati, eds. Water Histories of South Asia: The Materiality of Liquescence, Visual and Media Histories Series (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2020)
A “third” alternative to the Cold War’s bipolar politics, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) generate... more A “third” alternative to the Cold War’s bipolar politics, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) generated a transcontinental network across Asia, Africa, East Europe, and Latin America. Studied extensively in the social sciences, the NAM is acknowledged to have shaped global politics, making space for the articulation of a critical “Third Worldism.” Yet, even as the Cold War remains central to discussions on postwar art, we are yet to engage with the NAM’s art historical resonances. What new forms of transcultural intellectual and artistic solidarities did non-alignment engender? How did non-alignment exert pressure on Cold War cultures? Might a renewed alertness to the NAM shift temporal, spatial, and conceptual categories within modern and contemporary art? We invite scholars, curators, and artists to examine creative practices in non-aligned worlds; investigate collaborations, exhibitions, and art writing as zones of interlocution; or even approach non-alignment as a method for art, art history, and exhibition practices today.
Taking the years between 1905 and 1965 as the temporal frame, this conference seeks to rethink Gl... more Taking the years between 1905 and 1965 as the temporal frame, this conference seeks to rethink Global Modernisms from a transregional perspective. Current conceptualizations of avantgardism and formal innovation often related to places like Paris, New York, Weimar or Moscow continue to inform Global Modernisms’ intellectual field. Global Modernisms are often presented as a symptom for new Westernism that masquerades as the universal. This conference seeks a more constitutive conceptual vision.
Understanding Global Modernisms as clusters of artistic, intellectual, technological, institutional, socio-cultural, and political arrangements, the conference focuses on this field as an effect of contiguities and infrastructures. We approach contiguities as global and local zones of intellectual and artistic proximity and difference, and infrastructure as a combination of physical, political, social and intellectual formations. The conference then aims to situate the concept of Global Modernisms within the scalarity of the macro, meso and the micro and within the plurality of temporal and geographical spaces, movements and events.
To what extent did the relation between material infrastructure (institutions, the formation of disciplines, public policy, architecture, and engineering) and immaterial infrastructure (domination, freedom of movement, gendered hierarchies of power) generate semantic conditions for articulating aesthetic, intellectual, and critical concerns in dispersed parts of the world? Might thinking in terms of contiguities and infrastructures allow us to jettison conceptions of repetition, influence, and derivation that continue to haunt modernisms’ perceptual field?
The conference is an invitation to engage the architectonics of such contiguities. How, for instance, did innovations in science, technology, and engineering affect Global Modernism/s’ zones of contiguities, around the globe? Did museological discourses and modernist display techniques contribute in creating a new domain of visibility? To what extent did new infrastructures generate the semantic conditions for articulating the aesthetic, intellectual, critical, art historical, and curatorial concerns of Global Modernism/s? What, for instance, were the formal and aesthetic outcomes of Global Modernism/s, and how might we, in retrospect, recognize formal contiguity and distinguish it from more conventional conceptions of repetition, influence, and derivation?
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Understanding Global Modernisms as clusters of artistic, intellectual, technological, institutional, socio-cultural, and political arrangements, the conference focuses on this field as an effect of contiguities and infrastructures. We approach contiguities as global and local zones of intellectual and artistic proximity and difference, and infrastructure as a combination of physical, political, social and intellectual formations. The conference then aims to situate the concept of Global Modernisms within the scalarity of the macro, meso and the micro and within the plurality of temporal and geographical spaces, movements and events.
To what extent did the relation between material infrastructure (institutions, the formation of disciplines, public policy, architecture, and engineering) and immaterial infrastructure (domination, freedom of movement, gendered hierarchies of power) generate semantic conditions for articulating aesthetic, intellectual, and critical concerns in dispersed parts of the world? Might thinking in terms of contiguities and infrastructures allow us to jettison conceptions of repetition, influence, and derivation that continue to haunt modernisms’ perceptual field?
The conference is an invitation to engage the architectonics of such contiguities. How, for instance, did innovations in science, technology, and engineering affect Global Modernism/s’ zones of contiguities, around the globe? Did museological discourses and modernist display techniques contribute in creating a new domain of visibility? To what extent did new infrastructures generate the semantic conditions for articulating the aesthetic, intellectual, critical, art historical, and curatorial concerns of Global Modernism/s? What, for instance, were the formal and aesthetic outcomes of Global Modernism/s, and how might we, in retrospect, recognize formal contiguity and distinguish it from more conventional conceptions of repetition, influence, and derivation?