Re-envisioning the Contemporary Art Canon

Perspectives in a Global World

Ruth Iskin, Ruth E Iskin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317275039
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Storia dell'arte moderna

Re-envisioning the Contemporary Art Canon: Perspectives in a Global World seeks to dissect and interrogate the nature of the present-day art field, which has experienced dramatic shifts in the past 50 years.

In discussions of the canon of art history, the notion of 'inclusiveness', both at the level of rhetoric and as a desired practice is on the rise and gradually replacing talk of 'exclusion', which dominated critiques of the canon up until two decades ago. The art field has dramatically, if insufficiently, changed in the half-century since the first protests and critiques of the exclusion of 'others' from the art canon.

With increased globalization and shifting geopolitics, the art field is expanding beyond its Euro-American focus, as is particularly evident in the large-scale international biennales now held all over the globe. Are canons and counter-canons still relevant? Can they be re-envisioned rather than merely revised? Following an introduction that discusses these issues, thirteen newly commissioned essays present case studies of consecration in the contemporary art field, and three commissioned discussions present diverse positions on issues of the canon and consecration processes today.

This volume will be of interest to instructors and students of contemporary art, art history, and museum and curatorial studies.

Part I

Artists

Part I: Artists

The first part of the volume focuses on case studies of the canonization processes of artists, since the individual artist continues to occupy a central place in the art field, despite the significant influence of critiques by Roland Barthes (“The Death of the Author”) and Michel Foucault (“What Is an Author?”), which advocated shifting focus from the individual author to the reader and to the “author function” respectively. The analysis offered here of the canonization of specific artists, however, focuses not merely on the individual artist but on his/her canonization within the field of artistic production, discourse, exhibition, dissemination, collecting and consumption – in other words, within the institutional, social and market contexts. The individual artist’s centrality is shown to be reinforced by mass media attention, as in the cases of two of the artists analyzed in this section whose respective artworks and media personas are intertwined in powerful ways: Jean-Michel Basquiat, who during his lifetime was a popular mass media subject, and Ai Weiwei, who has become an international celebrity.

The case studies selected in this section address a wide range of issues relevant to the present-day processes of the canonization of artists, from art-world discourses and social, ethnic and gender issues to geopolitics in an era of increased globalization in the field of art. None of the artists discussed here were part of the art canon several decades ago, and all but one are contemporary artists. Two are based outside the West (El Anatsui in Nigeria and Ai Weiwei in China), and two are women (Cahun and Hicks). Thus, the five artists discussed in this section were chosen to reflect the pluralization that has occurred in the art world. Claude Cahun, active in the first half of the 20th century and discovered posthumously after four decades of total obscurity, burst onto the contemporary scene in the mid 1990s. Tirza Latimer’s essay “Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore: Casualties of a Backfiring Canon?” argues that in Cahun’s case, the ingrained pattern of canonizing individual artists overpowered the actual reality of a team of two artists who worked collaboratively. Jordana Moore Saggese’s “Jean-Michel Basquiat and the American Art Canon” examines the key roles of capitalism, race and the mass media in the canonization of Jean-Michel Basquiat, an American artist of Haitian and Porto Rican descent who began as a graffiti artist before developing his oeuvre of paintings and entering the American art canon.

In “Sheila Hicks and the Consecration of Fiber Art,” Elissa Auther reconstructs the process of Hicks’s canonization, aligning it with the change of attitude in the art field toward the medium of fiber, which was still regarded as strictly a craft medium during the 1960s, when Hicks was setting out on her career, but was increasingly accepted as an art medium during the 1990s. Auther’s analysis also demonstrates the impact of specific art-world actors within the changed attitude to fiber and craft. Wenny Teo’s essay “The Elephant in the Church: Ai Weiwei, the Media Circus and the Global Canon” argues that the canonization of the dissident Chinese artist in the global art canon reflects longstanding geopolitical anxieties and prejudices. Discussing Ai’s use of social media, she questions whether his larger-than-life public persona has overpowered the social-political and critical import of his art and activism. In the final essay, “El Anatsui’s Abstractions: Transformations, Analogies and the New Global,” Elizabeth Harney examines the consecration of the Nigerian-based artist in the West-dominated global contemporary art canon, stating that current “canon-talk” in established art centers posits new modes of “universalism,” imagined as a cosmopolitan globalism that re-thinks the geo-temporal coordinates of the art world. She questions whether Anatsui’s inclusion signals a significant shift in the manner in which histories of art can now be narrated or whether it simply re-inscribes governing fictions of “otherness” into the contemporary art-world discourse.

1

Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore

Casualties of a backfiring canon?

Tirza True Latimer

Claude Cahun, rediscovered posthumously after four decades of total obscurity, burst onto the contemporary scene as a prescient harbinger of postmodernism. In 1995, the Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris organized an exhibition showcasing hundreds of Cahun’s theatrical “self-portraits.” The contemporary relevance of these photographs stunned audiences in Europe and the U.S. An exhibition catalogue essay by the French critic Elisabeth Lebovici adroitly mobilized Judith Butler’s then newly published writings about the relationship between gender and drag to illuminate the photographs, which pictured Cahun posing in various guises.¹ The images appeared to propose gender as a socially codified masquerade performance. So easily did this body of work align with the feminist, queer, and identity politics agendas of the 1990s that it attracted international attention.

Scholars of modernism, historical avant-gardes, and photography considered the ways the discovery of this oeuvre altered dominant art-historical narratives and expanded art-historical canons.² Feminist and queer cultural historians lauded Cahun as one of the rare female surrealists practicing in France between the two world wars and a vanguard image maker who challenged the gender norms of her day. Why hadn’t we heard of this remarkable artist before? Feminist scholars, from Mary Ann Caws to Laura Cottingham, attributed Cahun’s historical marginality to misogyny and homophobia.³ This is not an entirely inaccurate assessment, but the artist’s compensatory canonization a generation after her death (her photographs are now preserved in the collections of first-tier museums and sell on the art market for tens of thousands of dollars) may have done her legacy as much harm as good. Cahun’s apotheosis distorted her creative enterprise in significant ways.

First, the exhibition of Cahun’s photographs in major museum retrospectives and production of accompanying monographic catalogues (mechanisms of her canonization) framed her as a visual artist. In her own era, though, she was recognized primarily for her literary efforts. The scion of a bourgeois literary family, Cahun had, in adolescence, already published reviews and editorials in her father’s newspaper and his literary journal. Born Lucy Renée Mathilde Schwob, Cahun adopted a more gender-neutral pen name in her early twenties. Her father, Maurice Schwob, was a prominent Nantes publisher. Her uncle, Marcel Schwob, was a renowned symbolist author and co-founder of the prestigious literary journal Mercure de France. Cahun published in Mercure at an early age. Her work also appeared in such surrealist reviews as Minotaure. In addition to signing seventy-five articles, poems, editorials, pamphlets, manifestos, and works of short fiction between 1914 and 1936, Cahun wrote two books: Vues et visions (1919), a symbolist-inspired artist book, and Aveux non avenus (1930), a surrealist anti-autobiography. Cahun’s lifelong partner Suzanne Malherbe (nom d’artiste Marcel Moore) illustrated both books. The publications made the division of labor within the couple clear. Cahun created texts; Moore, a trained visual artist, created images.

Their first collaborative effort, Vues et visions (Views and Visions), was printed as a collector’s edition in a run of 460 copies. The book consists of verses by Cahun embedded in symbolist-inspired visual frames penned in black ink, in the style of Aubrey Beardsley, by Moore. The title Vues et visions describes the book’s structure. Each two-page spread features a worldly “view” of the present and, on the facing page, an idealized “vision” of the classic past. The latter incarnates ideals of art, romantic friendship, and same-sex eroticism that might inspire certain readers to imagine an equally golden future. Moore’s graphics frame and reinforce the poetics of Cahun’s texts. Although the title page acknowledges Cahun as the book’s author, the dedication justly acknowledges the importance of Moore’s complicity. “I dedicate this puerile prose to you,” Cahun writes to Moore, “so that the entire book belongs to you and in this way your designs may redeem my text in our eyes.”⁴ The interlacing of possessive articles here, like the interlacing of text and images in the book, acknowledges collaboration as the operative creative paradigm.

The same collaborative ethos – an ethos at odds with myths of individual artistic genius – also characterizes the later and better-known publication Aveux non avenus (Disavowed Confessions). The book’s title references and negates the conventional premise (following Jean-Jacques Rousseau) of biographical writing: the “confession” or revelation. Aveux non avenus, rather than illuminating the essential facts of the author’s life, offers only fragments. Visual collages created by Moore accompany the textual collage composed by Cahun. Here, as in the earlier publication, the book’s textual and visual components function in tandem. These elements work together to deconstruct the very genres they cite: biography and portraiture – genres conceived to immortalize the “great men” whose stories constitute world histories and artistic canons.⁵ Cahun’s skepticism, evident here, about great-men scenarios renders her contemporary pantheonization ironic, at the very least.

Perhaps the most consequential distortions Cahun’s work has suffered in the course of (and, indeed, as a condition of) her canonization concern the terms and contexts of the photographic oeuvre’s production. The most celebrated works, the collages illustrating Aveux non avenus and the related archive of so-called self-portraits, were not made by Cahun alone but rather by Moore and Cahun together. It is obvious that many of the now-canonical photographs – those picturing Cahun immersed in a tide pool, curled up in a wardrobe, or with her head in a bell jar, to cite just a few examples – resulted from some sort of collaboration. Cahun could not have realized these shots without assistance, even with a cable release. This observation alone suffices to compromise the word “self” in the generally accepted formulation “self-portrait.” Some shots, moreover, picture first Cahun and then Moore posing alternately in the same setting and, in certain photographs of Cahun, traces of Moore – a shadow or reflection – appear within the picture’s frame. At a minimum, “self” should be dropped from the descriptive formulation.

Yet, in fact, these photographs are not “portraits” at all. They would be more accurately described as documentation of performances. Most of Cahun’s performances were staged in the privacy of the homes and gardens she and Moore shared, in Paris, in Le Croisic, on the Isle of Jersey. However, during the photographically prolific decade of the 1920s, Cahun and Moore also actively took part in the life of Paris’s avant-garde theater. They participated in the productions of the Théâtre Esotérique, founded by Berthe D’Yd and Paul Castan, and then joined Le Plateau, a company directed by Pierre Albert-Birot. In 1929, Cahun performed in several Albert-Birot productions: as Satan (Le Diable) in an adaptation of a twelfth-century mystery play about Adam and Eve, Les Mystères d’Adam; Blue Beard’s wife (Elle) in a feminist parable, Barbe bleue; and the character Monsieur in a satire titled Banlieu. Moore documented all of these performances photographically. Describing such images of Cahun costumed for theatrical roles as “self-portraits” or even “portraits,” as most publications and exhibition labels do, effaces the important historical contexts of their production. Awareness of the couple’s engagement with experimental theater, moreover, enables us to understand the t...