Engaging Transculturality

Concepts, Key Terms, Case Studies

Laila Abu-Er-Rub, Christiane Brosius, Sebastian Meurer, Diamantis Panagiotopoulos, Susan Richter, Laila Abu-Er-Rub, Christiane Brosius, Sebastian Meurer, Diamantis Panagiotopoulos, Susan Richter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429771842
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

Engaging Transculturality is an extensive and comprehensive survey of the rapidly developing field of transcultural studies. In this volume, the reflections of a large and interdisciplinary array of scholars have been brought together to provide an extensive source of regional and trans-regional competencies, and a systematic and critical discussion of the field's central methodological concepts and terms.

Based on a wide range of case studies, the book is divided into twenty-seven chapters across which cultural, social, and political issues relating to transculturality from Antiquity to today and within both Asian and European regions are explored. Key terms related to the field of transculturality are also discussed within each chapter, and the rich variety of approaches provided by the contributing authors offer the reader an expansive look into the field of transculturality.

Offering a wealth of expertise, and equipped with a selection of illustrations, this book will be of interest to scholars and students from a variety of fields within the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Part E

The transcultural lens

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20

‘A very civil idea…’

Art history and world-making – with and beyond the nation*

Monica Juneja

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At the Venice Biennale of 1993, the Austrian pavilion featured an audio installation, Garden Program, created by the artist Andrea Fraser, that allowed visitors an unusual peep into an important meeting of the Biennale’s national commissioners, as they debated whether the principle of national representation, the central organizing principle of the world’s oldest and most canonical biennial, still had a raison d’être in a rapidly globalizing, post-Cold War world (Weibel 1993). Fraser’s ingenious work was a tongue-in-cheek collage of sound clips with recordings from the deliberations surrounding plans for the 45th Biennale di Venezia, the first since the end of the Cold War.¹ The recordings usher us into a moment of uncertainty, a roomful of confused, contradicting voices, each looking for ways to handle the challenges that a transformed geopolitical condition confronted the institutions of the art world with.² In their anxiety to be global and therefore in keeping with the times, curators from the more established art centres of the metropolitan West spoke for an inclusion of artists from ‘elsewhere’ into the Western art system by proposing that existing pavilions be opened to participants from the ‘peripheries’ in the Eastern and Southern hemispheres. ‘A very civil idea’ was how Achille Bonito Oliva, the Director of the Biennale, described what he further termed a gesture of ‘cultural hospitality’ (Fraser et al. 1993: 187). As opposed to such moves that – in an inverted spirit of patriotism – questioned the rationale of a national pavilion, the response of nations from Latin America, or those from Eastern Europe, or Central Asia, newly born following the demise of the Soviet Union, was not entirely surprising. Their spokespersons made a forceful claim to a demarcated, non-shared space, now due to them as independent nations, to be able to showcase their national cultures on an equal footing with Western nations (Fraser et al. 1993). In what today has the appearance of a single world that has discarded its former tripartite division, the intimate connection between art and national identity retains its hold over imaginations in diverging, though mutually constitutive ways. While older, metropolitan nations strive to establish their ‘cosmopolitan’ credentials by offering to share their exhibition sites with art from the hitherto neglected backwaters of the globe, latecomers in the race for nationhood cling to the view that art bearing exclusive national labels is one effective way of catching up with the present.

Art, nations, cultures

These positions could perhaps serve as a wedge to break open the idea of the nation, conventionally characterized as a juridical, geopolitical entity, to conceive of it instead as an imagined conceptual realm, not territorially bounded, but one that in the imagination of artists and scholars could both be local and transgress boundaries. How do the debates about the tangled relationship between nations and cultures challenge our disciplines and institutional practices, as they urge us to develop new frameworks for our scholarly enterprises? More specifically, how does art history negotiate the tension between national identity and such relationships that break out of national frames and inform memories and visions of so much of artistic and literary production? When art is made to stand for or express allegiance to the nation, what does the art historical life of that entity embody, at any given moment in the past or present? Have art and artists been able to outline different modes of engaging with the idea of the nation?

The events of 1989 and their aftermath brought forth a flurry of terms announcing a post-ideological, post-ethnic, post-historical, even post-political condition, while art, at the same juncture, is said to have become fully ‘contemporary’, that is, an active component of a shared present. The proliferation of biennials, art fairs and mega-exhibitions in and beyond Euro–America since 1989 that featured works of artists from distant corners of the world, meant that the ‘the global contemporary’, according to Hans Belting, could be characterized as a freely circulating, ahistorical, non-situated and economically exploitable mass (Belting 2008).³ Critical responses to such an interpretive framework that unquestioningly links aesthetic changes to the geopolitical shifts of 1989 have since then come from several positions (see Simbao 2015; Hlavajova and Sheikh 2017; Ott 2013). The discussion of the contemporary has now shifted from the issue of visibility gained by art from beyond the West in the exhibition circuits and scholarly accounts of the ‘mainstream’ to querying the conditions that make such visibility possible.⁴ The new geo-aesthetic maps of globally networked ‘artworlds’⁵ (see also Bublatzky, in this volume) that figured prominently in the Karlsruhe exhibition curated by Hans Belting and Andrea Buddensieg cannot be read as an unproblematic dissolution of hierarchies, without examining the nature of relationalities that connect the luminous nodal points distributed across the surface of cartographic representation. Like all signposts, 1989 has not turned out to be consensual; grasping its explanatory message depends on the location of the traveller. The inability to gather from a single viewing position the dispersed elements of a world map has, however, turned into a productive exercise, given the shifts in critical attention that have followed. The euphoria over the forces of globalization expressed in the writings of the early 1990s that celebrated an effortless, even naturalized ‘flow’ of materials, goods, capital and human resources, dissolving national and cultural boundaries, has given way in the new millennium to critiques of neoliberal economics and politics, the disregard of human sovereignty and evasion of environmental responsibility.

For art historians, some key questions have been: Must a global art history follow the logic of economic globalization or does it call for an alternative conception of globality to be able to effectively theorize relationships of connectivity that encompass disparities as well as contradictions, and negotiate multiple subjectivities of the actors involved? What are the choices available to artistic producers to negotiate, between complicity with or dependence on global capital and its managers, and critical initiatives that foster transcultural modes of co-production and sustainability? How can art history enable us to view the historical present as a simultaneity of clashing and conjoining temporalities constituted by their pre-histories? How does it handle issues of commensurability or its absence among cultures? How can it translate intellectual resources and insights of regional experiences from beyond Euro–America into globally intelligible analyses?

These are some among the many unresolved questions that confront the discipline today as it strives to respond to the challenge of globality. The difficulties they pose stem partly from the slippery quality of the well-worn term ‘global’, one that has been used in several and diverging ways, as for instance to characterize art history as a discipline to be practised uniformly across the globe, one that would subsume ‘local’ art. Alternatively, the epithet ‘global’ signals towards an inclusive discipline – also labelled world art history – that would encompass different world cultures, or that searches for the lowest common denominator to hold together humans across time and space who have been making art for millennia ‘because our biological nature has led us to do so’ (Onians 2008: 11).⁶ The term is equated at times with conceptual imperialism, at others with multicultural eclecticism. Hans Belting’s definition of ‘global art’ to characterize those contemporary artistic productions emanating from the non-Western world, which become publicly accessible through exhibitions and mega-shows, continues to inform the discussions on what could define the contours of a global art history, namely a focus on artworlds post 1989 (Belting 2008).⁷ World art history, on the other hand, an art history expansively charted to bring the ‘world’ in its fold within a framework of concepts – going back to Immanuel Kant and Latin Antiquity – whose histories and underpinnings remain largely unquestioned, is likely to end up as one more variant of a master narrative. For expansion, as a methodological and pedagogical move, does not by its analytical intent undermine the frameworks it seeks to transgress, or at best does so only tangentially. This is a lesson to be learnt from precedents of a century ago, when art history assumed a similar world-configuring function while seeking to produce authoritative knowledge about nations, cultures and the world. A look at this particular genealogy of world-making in art history directs our attention to those epistemic foundations that continue to shape our scholarly practice: the exercise in unpacking these is an urgent one in contemporary times as the discipline strives once more to become ‘global’.

Genealogical routes

The intent to bring the ‘world’ into the purview of art history is not a new one. The transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century that coincided with the revitalization of art history as a scientific discipline was marked by similar moves to make art history inclusive of regions beyond the West. German art historical writings in particular had espoused a Weltkunstgeschichte as ‘a history of art of all times and peoples’,⁸ a historiographical perspective that today is being upheld as an example of a cosmopolitan moment in art history, one that is claimed to have prefigured the present ‘global turn’ in the discipline and its institutions (see Pfisterer 2008). It is worth taking a closer, critical look at this current in art historiography, in order to understand the founding premises of the discipline that continue to be largely unquestioned even as it seeks to expand its range of vision. As the nineteenth century transited to the twentieth, art history was confronted with the challenges posed by the globality of that particular moment, a challenge not dissimilar to that of our present. Art history’s effort to redefine itself as a scientific discipline – as a Kunstwissenschaft rather than Kunstgeschichte – was viewed as a new orientation that could offer a key to grappling with the ‘world’ as a category.⁹ Weltkunstgeschichte, though it meant different things to different people, was intended to equip art history with a series of aesthetic categories and explanatory methods that would be able to encompass a new and ever-increasing diversity of objects the discipline was confronted with. The physical presence and continuous flow of objects and archaeological finds from other regions of the world into European contexts had brought forth a fresh challenge – to museums, curators, publics – and not least to a discipline fixated aesthetically on Classical Antiquity. Museums of different kinds functioned as a primary site where viewers in the West could encounter non-European objects of art, and from where persuasive narratives of sameness and difference could be constructed and disseminated. A further consideration animating the concern to write an art history as the story of all regions and peoples of the world, and going back in time to the beginnings of humanity, was to find a way in which art could work as a criterion to register the humanity of its creator – to be able to locate human beings on the evolutionary ladder beyond animals. In other words, the search for the origins of art was equally linked to the tangled question whether the earliest forms of art were a biological or a cultural phenomenon.

For the proponents of Weltkunstgeschichte, art theory, by drawing on ethnology, would be able to transcend its Eurocentric bias, abandon its speculative character and come closer to the spirit of the natural sciences – this would in fact lead up to a revitalization of the humanities. For the art historian Ernst Grosse (1862–1927), ethnology was an intrinsically comparative science as it investigated the world’s various ‘peoples’ or ‘nations’ in the totality of their environmental and socio-cultural settings.¹⁰ While the prime subject matter of Kunstwissenschaft, according to him, was to study the systematic relationship between ‘art and culture’ crucial to the understanding of any art form – for which comparative studies of all cultures of the world were needed in order to avoid the trap of theorizing on the basis of a few selected examples from Western Europe – these were methodological contributions only ethnology could provide.

Proponents of a Weltkunstgeschichte argue that all cultures or peoples produce ‘art’: objects earlier designated as curios, trophies, idols, are now all subsumed under the category of art and seen as scientific data requiring documentation according to taxonomic principles. In Anfänge der Kunst (The Beginnings of Art), Grosse recognizes art or aesthetic sensibility as a human universal, a criterion to distinguish humans from animals. Universalism goes hand in hand with cultural relativism, that is, the differences in taste, development and aesthe...