The World of Kantha, circa 1950, by Jamini Roy. Courtesy Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art
July 06, 2014
A recent work, Contemporary Art and Its
Commercial Markets: A Report on Current Conditions and Future Scenarios, edited by Maria Lind and Olav Velthuis, discusses the complex
relationship between contemporary art and the commercial market, as represented
by auction houses, biennales, art fairs, and similar global institutions. Art
has become an asset to be exploited by hedge-funders. Equally it serves as a
status symbol for super-rich transnational celebrities. Sotheby’s and
Christie’s are bending over backwards to penetrate the burgeoning art market in
the Middle East; and a venerable museum, the Louvre, is not far behind by
commissioning a museum in Abu Dhabi. The rapidly changing scenario is
encapsulated in a blunt question posed at the Art Dubai fair, itself a
subsidiary of the Dubai International Financial Center: how will the Middle
East affect contemporary art in the next ten years?
This question arises only because
Dubai, part of a region that until recently hardly featured in the world of
art, now wields considerable power: certain developments have taken place in
the last decades as art increasingly acquires a global persona and becomes an
asset in postcolonial geopolitics. Not just Dubai but neighboring Qatar and
also the BRICS nations (Brazil, India, Russia, China, South Africa) have
ushered in a new world order. The changing balance of power is having an
obvious impact on the art market. The heroes of Thomas L. Friedman’s book The World is Flat are the “zippies,” offspring of Indian and Chinese capitalism, who are now
big players in global art transactions. These changes reflect the growing
dominance of the super-rich from the periphery—Roman Abramovich and Dasha Zhukova,
Anil and Tina Ambani, Carlos Slim, Jack Ma, and the Gulf emirs, among others.
Comparable in some ways to the spread of multinational
conglomerates, the world market in art has reached enormous proportions.
Biennales, art fairs, and other global institutions shape our taste and tell us
what good art is. Among significant changes, the global presence of
international curators and artists from outside Europe and America has had a
radical effect. The art critic and curator of Nigerian origin, Okwui Enwezor,
had a very successful global art show for the documenta in Germany where he
sought to redress past exclusions. In 2011 he was appointed director of the
Haus der Kunst in Munich, and has been named artistic director of the 56th
Venice Biennale in 2015. Equally, ambitious European curators like Hans Ulrich
Obrist, who direct international mega projects, cast their nets far and wide.
Their intervention has made leading art museums such as the Tate Modern in
London, or the Museum of Modern Art in New York, sit up and take note of
hitherto unknown artists from the margins. One of the memorable events in the
art world of 2013 was an ambitious retrospective of the visionary Sudanese
painter Ibrahim El-Salahi at the Tate Modern.
Multiple
Modernities
Biennales and similar mega-institutions aim to reach
all the way from the extreme east to the westernmost corner of the globe. One
cannot but commend the inclusion of artists from regions that were previously
considered to be peripheries. However, the utter newness of the situation has
given rise to unease, creating a growing sense of crisis and uncertainty. The
discipline of art history, the armature that sustains and forms our taste in
art, seems to be in a turmoil faced with multiple modernities with their multiple
and clashing time frames. The contradictions between the narrow focus of
mainstream art histories, and the enormous diversity of art forms and practices
have become acute. This has caused serious soul searching among art historians
about the future of a discipline faced with the collapse of earlier
certainties—strikingly expressed in the 1982 work by the German scholar Hans
Belting, The End
of the History of Art?, who regrets the death of art history as a
grand Hegelian narrative. He is led to the conclusion that contemporary global
art encourages the repudiation of art history. Societies that had no previous
share in modernism insist on creating art narratives that define visual
production as a form of cultural practice.
While agreeing with this sense of crisis, I see the
problem somewhat differently. The disquieting aspect of globalization in art is
that it is predicated on the streamlining of taste. The presence of artists
from the Middle East, East and South Asia, Latin America, and Africa may appear
to celebrate an all-embracing inclusiveness while in reality it underscores the
continued hold of the Western modernist canon, which tends to undermine local
voices and practices, thereby undermining the plurality of expressions. The
Social Darwinian survival of the fittest within the art canon contains its own
inherent predicament. While artists from the margins have been allowed access
to Western institutions with a global reach, there has not been much change in
the narrow focus of the discourse of modernism, which continues to present the
Western canon as a universal one. Thus any artist who happens to fall outside
the unilinear progress of modernism or does not subscribe to it is quietly left
by the wayside.
There were significant developments in Middle Eastern,
African, Asian, and Latin American art in the twentieth century, with many of
its artists engaged in creating vital modernist expressions of cultural
resistance to colonialism that did not fit the objectives of mainstream
avant-garde art. (I use the concept avant-garde interchangeably with modernist
art in this essay.) Hence it is useful to remind ourselves of the definition of
avant-garde, which is an aspect of wider modernism. The word refers to works
that are experimental or innovative. In this context it is important to
remember that the artists outside Euro-America sought to evolve radical art
forms that were meaningful to their own societies and cultural contexts even
though their timeframe may not coincide with that of the narrative of Western
modernism. Surprisingly, even today leading artists from outside the charmed
circle of Euro-America rarely feature in standard art history textbooks. Put in
another way, the avant-garde aesthetic canon continues to be a closed discourse
that has tended to erase non-Western art from art history. Such marginalization
is explained in terms of the “derivativeness” of non-Western art, a delayed
development from the metropolitan centers of invention. This judgment still
dominates representations of the art of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and
Australia. Also least known is the fact that the non-canonical art of northern,
central, and eastern Europe has suffered a similar fate. The omission of
artists from regions outside the metropolis, however, is simply a reflection of
a wider problem: the common practice of equating Western norms with global
values has the unintended consequence of excluding the art of the periphery
from art history. The concept of “art” is often regarded as neutral and
disinterested, but this systematically ignores the implications of race,
gender, sexual orientation, and class in art history. Such misguided faith in
universal values is not unique to art history but pervades all aspects of
knowledge although art history creates its own specific inclusions and
exclusions.
The embedded hierarchy implicit in the modernist canon
and its impact on contemporary art in regions regarded as the periphery can
only be explained in historical terms. The rise of art history as a discipline
in the eighteenth century coincided with European expansion overseas. In the
following century, the colonial powers sought to inculcate “good taste” in the
subject nations through the introduction of academic naturalism and classical
standards of taste. At the end of the century, the avant-garde revolution in
the West challenged academic art, as Cubists, Expressionists, and Surrealists
declared war on the colonial/capitalist system and bourgeois artistic values.
Modernism’s experimental attitude constantly sought to push the intellectual
frontiers. Its ideology of emancipatory innovation, and its agonistic
relationship to tradition and authority, spread to the colonial world, shaping
global perceptions of contemporary art and literature. The revolutionary
technology of avant-garde art, notably the formal language and syntax of
Cubism, allowed artists in the periphery to devise new ways to represent the
visible world. The modernist revolt against academic naturalism was openly
welcomed by the subject nations who were preoccupied with formulating their own
resistance to the colonial order.
Colonizer
and Colonized
The worldwide impact of the Western avant-garde cannot
be exaggerated. Also from the 1970s, Marxist, postmodern, and postcolonial
critics helped temper the triumphalism of avant-garde art, the fractures and
contradictions of modernity, and its complex relationship with tradition.
Nonetheless, the discipline of art history is yet to question in any
substantive manner the implicit acceptance of non-Western modernism as
derivative, a product of delayed growth and imitation. Put simply, certain
ingrained ideas persist.
Let me take two cases that highlight the glaring
contrast in art-historical assessments of cultural borrowing between the
metropolitan center and the peripheries. The exhibition “Primitivism” in 20th-Century Art: Affinity of the
Tribal and the Modern, held in New York in 1984, aimed at highlighting the
“accidental affinities” between the “primitive” motifs in the works of Picasso
and other iconic modernists and “tribal” art, affinities that were supposed to
transcend time and space. Any hint of the influence of African art on Picasso
was studiously avoided. In sum, Picasso’s borrowings from ethnographic objects,
produced by a simple society, did in no way compromise his cultural integrity
as an artist. In a similar vein, John
Golding, a noted art historian, writing a decade later on Vladimir Tatlin’s
discovery of a tribal mask in Picasso’s studio, could thus exclaim: it is one
of the wonders of our age that such a simple tribal artifact, which could
justifiably be called primitive, should have given birth indirectly to Russian
Constructivism, one of the most technically visionary of all twentieth-century
art movements.
The same process of cultural
borrowing is treated very differently in the case of colonial artists. The
Indian artist Gaganendranath Tagore, a pioneering Indian modernist, was one of
the first Indian painters to adapt the revolutionary syntax of Cubism to
produce a series of exquisite miniature paintings between the years 1921-28. Writing
on him, the English art historian William George Archer posed a pertinent
question: can modern art be appropriated by Indians and then in what manner? In
answer to this, he claimed that such appropriation must be ‘absorbed into the
blood stream’ of that society to be a genuine item. Following his own logic,
Archer drew the conclusion that Gagenendranath had failed miserably. Archer
simply could not appreciate the Indian artist’s achievement in deploying the
flexible syntax of Cubism in order to create water colors of poetic intensity
that were meaningful in the colonial-nationalist milieu of India.
Gagenendranath belonged to the world of the colonized, which immediately locked
him into a dependent relationship, the colonized mimicking the superior art of
the colonizer.
The idea rests on a reductive criterion, which I call
the “Picasso manqué” syndrome: successful imitation was a form of aping, but
imperfect imitation represented a failure of learning. I have ascribed this
phenomenon to the complex discourse of power, authority, and hierarchy involved
in evaluations of the non-Western avant-garde. The debate itself seems to hinge
on the politics of stylistic influence, which has been a formidable tool of art
history. Yet as a category, influence ignores more significant aspects of
cultural encounters, the enriching value of the cross-fertilization of cultures
that has nourished societies since time immemorial. These exchanges of ideas
and forms need not necessarily be interpreted through ideas of domination and
dependence. We have the example of the migration of symbols across ancient
cultures, which is a fascinating story of how the West received and transformed
images and motifs from the Orient.
The modernist canon embraces a great deal more than
influence; its powerful teleology constructs a whole world of inclusions and
exclusions, the epicenter and outlying regions. What is involved in the
relationship between the global and the local is the asymmetrical valuations of
the center and the periphery, the roots of which are to be found as far back as
Renaissance art history. The idea of a linear art history, with its ideology of
constant and inevitable progress, originated with the Italian artist Giorgio Vasari
(1511–74), who created the master narrative for Renaissance art centering on
the conquest of visual representation. Vasari defined Florence, Rome, and
Venice as centers of innovation, categorizing other regions in Italy as sites
of delayed growth and imitation. Thus periphery became a matter of geography,
not of art history. In the next century, the German antiquarian Johann Joachim
Winckelmann enshrined these prejudices in his history of ancient art by
formulating climatic, national and racial differences in art as objective
facts. Following in his wake, other historians applied Darwinian principles in
the mapping of world art from its “primitive” base to its triumphal climax in
Victorian history painting. In the process they assigned an inferior position
to non-Western art within the hierarchy.
So the question facing us in the postcolonial period
is this: what theoretical framework can we deploy to make sense of the
transmission of ideas and technology across cultures that are not predicated on
the notions of power and authority or on the center/periphery imbalance? If we
discard stylistic influence as a meaningful category, in what other ways can we
study the origin and development of an art form? Recently, postcolonial art
histories and studies in visual culture have offered a rich array of strategies
of empowerment through new readings of the avant-garde in Asia, Africa, and
Latin America. Visual culture, for instance, aims at destabilizing the
modernist canon by challenging aesthetic hierarchy and the narrow, empirical,
connoisseurship-focused discipline of art history that focuses on analysis and
documentation of style and iconography. Its aim has been to erase the
distinction between high art and material objects that had been excluded from
the canon, thereby destroying the exclusivity of the concept of high art that
tends to reinforce global inequality in power relations. Others plead for a
more open discourse of avant-garde art that would embrace plurality and uneven
edges, and allow within art history critical voices from the periphery. The
most exciting aspect of modernisms across the globe has been their plurality,
heterogeneity, and difference. The Argentine anthropologist Néstor García
Canclini proposes multi-temporal heterogeneities, while the Cuban curator
Gerardo Mosquera opts for the notion of a decentralized international culture.
He feels confident that the peripheries are emerging as multiple centers of
international culture, even as they strengthen local developments in a constant
process of cultural hybridization.
These are laudable efforts. But my conviction is that
before we can proceed with the task of creating a less hierarchical art history
that is tied to the Western aesthetic canon, we need to de-center the canon
itself. There is the necessity of destabilizing Vasarian concepts of artistic
center and periphery, which were given unique authority in the German
philosopher Hegel’s theory of artistic progress as the inevitable unfolding of
the world spirit. To put it in a nutshell, the whole concept of art history
since Vasari, including the history of Western modernism, is predicated on the
notion of continuous technological progress from the Italian painter Giotto in
the thirteenth century to the present. This doctrine is considered to have a
universal value and is applied to art traditions outside the West, inevitably
resulting in distortions simply because these other traditions have different
objectives and priorities. Hence, there is the urgent need to historicize the
development of Western art and not view it as possessing a timeframe that is
universally applicable. Although it is tempting to view Western modernism as
transcending time and space, the greatest achievements of the Western
avant-garde have in fact been historically situated within its own set of
conventions, even though its experience has enriched other traditions. Without
privileging any art in particular, and not even Western avant-garde, we may
investigate art practices in their social and cultural settings, taking into
account the peculiar contextual needs and expressions of regional artistic
productions and consumptions, and the local assertions of global concerns. To
my mind, it is the multiple local possibilities that illuminate the global
processes of modernity more effectively than a grand globalizing narrative,
which is more likely than not to perpetuate a relationship of power. Thus an
inflected narrative of global modernity offers us a possible way of restoring
the artist’s agency in the context of colonial empires, by analyzing art
practices and their reception as a cultural document that is historically
situated. One serious criticism of “influence” as an analytical tool is that it
views artists as passive agents of transmission rather than active agents with
the ability to exercise choice.
Virtual
Global Community
I want to take a case study in order to clarify what I
propose as a contextual analysis of avant-garde art in the period of
globalization. It is possible to formulate concepts that will address not only
the particular interactions between global modernity, artistic production, and
the construction of national identity in the colonized regions, but also seek
to restore the artist’s agency in these regions. I have chosen the rise of the
Indian avant-garde art in the 1920s—an area of my specialization—where I have
tried to show that its history can be meaningfully mapped within the context of
nationalist resistance to the British Empire. One of the powerful aspects of
modern nationalism has been the interplay of the global and the local in the
urban space of colonial culture. “Hybrid” cosmopolitan port cities, such as
Shanghai or Kolkata (Calcutta), gave rise to a Western-educated intelligentsia
that created flourishing centers of cultural exchange. Recently, scholars have
applied the concept of cosmopolitanism to redress current asymmetrical global
relations. Cosmopolitanism is seen as an inevitable consequence of global
technology transfers, and communication and transport revolutions. Cosmopolitanism
appears to challenge the pessimism regarding the possibility of fruitful
cultural exchanges and offers a corrective to the politics of identity and
difference. Nonetheless, the problem of power and authority that confer
visibility and inclusion, in the historically uneven relationship between
center and periphery, cannot be ignored.
Wherever we may stand on the particular interpretation
of cosmopolitanism, I would point out that asymmetrical power relations do not
prevent the free flow or cross-fertilization of ideas on the level of
virtuality. More privileged cosmopolitans from the periphery could of course
afford international travel because of the development of faster transports
such as the train and the steamship in the nineteenth century, which enabled
them to overcome a narrow parochial view of the world. However, the apparently
less fortunate ones that remained at home represented a different kind of
cosmopolitanism. I have proposed the notion of the virtual cosmopolis to
explain the colonial elite’s critical engagement with modernity—a hybrid city
of the imagination that engenders elective affinities between elites of the
center and the periphery. The shared global outlook was possible through
English, French, and Spanish, the major hegemonic languages, disseminated by
means of the printed media, such as books and journals. The Indian colonized
elite—the typical virtual cosmopolitan, for instance—had the opportunity to
share the global storehouse of ideas on modernity through print culture without
having to travel to distant places. They also had the freedom to appropriate
these circulating ideas and engender new discourses that were not beholden to
their Western sources. Virtual cosmopolitanism is a community created among
strangers through the print medium because of a sense of common project, the
project of modernity.
I will illustrate an example of virtual
cosmopolitanism in colonial India in the realm of art. One of the most creative
ideas developed by the Indian avant-garde in the 1920s was the use of the
empowering concept of primitivism, which can be defined as a form of resistance
to urban industrial capitalism and the ideology of progress; the cornerstones
of colonial empires. Primitivism was a critical form of modernity that united
likeminded critics of industrial capitalism in the East and West even though
they were not necessarily in contact with one another and sometimes did not
even know of one another’s existence. They were simply reacting to global
issues such as urban alienation and the loss of the community spawned by
industrial capitalism. Importantly, their responses related to their own
historic contexts. The Western primitivists consisted of an important group of
German thinkers, notably the theorists Carl Einstein and Wilhelm Hausenstein,
and the artist Oskar Schlemmer. Critics of industrial capitalism and urban
alienation, they sought to restore collective art and the sense of community
that had been lost in the industrial age.
In many ways parallel to their
ideas, the innovative formalism of the Indian painter Jamini Roy (1887-1972)
was based upon a primitivist re-imagining of the folk art of India that
powerfully mediated between the global and the local. His aim was to restore
through art the pre-colonial community that had been severed from national life
during British rule, alienating the elite from its cultural roots. The intimate
connection between the vitality of an artistic tradition and its mythological
richness became the central plank in his theory of collective art. Roy created
his own nationalist ideology of art by repudiating urban colonial society and
seeking to return to the village community. The Indian painter deliberately
eschewed artistic individualism and the notion of artistic progress, the two
flagships of colonial art. Roy’s search for the formal equivalent to his
primitivist doctrine eventually led him to the village scroll painting of
Bengal, the pat, which offered him an ideal synthesis of
formalist robustness and political theory. Through intense concentration and a
ruthless ability to eliminate inessential details, Roy created an avant-garde
art of monumental simplicity and radical social commitment. Primitivists East
and West did not deny the importance of technology in contemporary life; they
simply refused to accept the unquestioning faith in modern progress. I call
these similarities of ideas “structural affinities in a virtual global
community,” since neither the Germans nor the Bengali artist knew of the
existence of the other.
Future art history will be
enriched through such grounded studies of non-Western modernism that engage
with the socially constructed meaning of artistic production. This will help
challenge the commonplace that peripheral modernisms are merely attempts to
catch up with the originary avant-garde discourse of the metropolitan center.
Partha Mitter is a historian of
art and culture. He is the author of Much Maligned Monsters: A History of European
Reactions to Indian Art; Art and Nationalism in Colonial
India 1850–1922: Occidental Orientation; Indian Art (part of the Oxford Art History series); and The Triumph of Modernism: India’s
Artists and the Avant-garde 1922–1947. He is
emeritus professor in art history at the University of Sussex, a member of
Wolfson College, Oxford, and an honorary fellow at the Victoria & Albert
Museum.