Circulations in the Global History of Art

Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Catherine Dossin, Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Catherine Dossin, Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317166146
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

The project of global art history calls for balanced treatment of artifacts and a unified approach. This volume emphasizes questions of transcultural encounters and exchanges as circulations. It presents a strategy that highlights the processes and connections among cultures, and also responds to the dynamics at work in the current globalized art world. The editors' introduction provides an account of the historical background to this approach to global art history, stresses the inseparable bond of theory and practice, and suggests a revaluation of materialist historicism as an underlying premise. Individual contributions to the book provide an overview of current reflection and research on issues of circulation in relation to global art history and the globalization of art past and present. They offer a variety of methods and approaches to the treatment of different periods, regions, and objects, surveying both questions of historiography and methodology and presenting individual case studies. An 'Afterword' by James Elkins gives a critique of the present project. The book thus deliberately leaves discussion open, inviting future responses to the large questions it poses.

1

REFLECTIONS ON WORLD ART HISTORY¹

Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann

Global art history engages scholars in many places throughout the world.² Conferences in Europe and Asia have considered aspects of global (or world) art history, and scholarly involvement with cross-cultural approaches to art is on the rise.³ In the US, issues of world or global art history have featured in many sessions of recent meetings of the College Art Association of America, including an extraordinary special centennial session devoted to globalism, and of the Renaissance Society of America as well. The session chosen to initiate the meetings of the international congress of the history of art devoted to “Converging Cultures” held in Melbourne in 2008 focused on the idea of world art history.⁴ While the international congress held in Nuremberg in 2012 responded to the “challenge of the object,” the challenge of global or world art history sparked discussion in many different sessions, and the topic is on the agenda of the 2016 international congress in Beijing. Longer-term research projects and groups have been formed in Taipei, Berlin, Zurich, Heidelberg, São Paulo, and at the German Institute in Florence to deal with global art history, and have already begun to yield results.⁵ The publication of numerous books and compendia of essays in recent years evinces continuing and growing interest.⁶

James Elkins has claimed that world art history presents far and away the most pressing problem for the field, and its biggest challenge.⁷ Terry Smith has also asserted that accounting for the ways in which the modern became the contemporary throughout the world is the greatest challenge for historians of contemporary art.⁸ To date however the only truly comprehensive account of such art is a book by Smith.⁹ Much current debate still remains related to considerations of contemporary art, perhaps because, as Hans Belting has claimed, the idea of global art history in its present sense has been formulated in response to the development of the global art market.¹⁰ However, some discussion has also been devoted to consideration of earlier periods of art history.¹¹

But critics have contested the possibilities of global art history. They have challenged its bases and assumptions. Ironically, however, some of the very scholars who have envisioned writing world art history have also expressed some of the strongest doubts about it.¹²

This chapter answers some theoretical objections. In a Lockean spirit it attempts to clear the ground for future efforts. It then turns from theoretical questions to present a brief practical proposal for a way to approach writing a global history of art before the nineteenth century, in part because so much discussion of globalization has hitherto concerned history after c. 1800, although the argument can certainly be extended.

Clearly, the project of conceptualizing a more general world art history, not just of modern or contemporary art but one that might encompass all places as well as all times, presents an enormous challenge. All kinds of questions may arise when we actually start to think about how to write such a huge history. How may we as individuals claim to control knowledge of or even passing familiarity with all the products of humankind throughout the world? How is it possible to forge a coherent narrative that would encompass all eras and areas of human production of material and visual things, actual and virtual, as well as their reception and thinking about them? How can we speak meaningfully to more than our own immediate milieus? How can we lay foundations for future studies throughout the globe?

In the light of the real, substantive, practical issues that must be tackled before we can envision writing a new world art history, it is understandable that the very possibility of conceptualizing a new world (or global) art history has sparked much debate. Practically speaking, we may begin by agreeing that writing a world art history is a huge and daunting task. To give an account of all the art and architecture found all over the world in all times and places might at first seem to be impossible.

An attempt to do so moreover runs against a strong tide of opinion, which informs some recent objections. The tide flows from a more general attack upon efforts at finding or creating coherence; such efforts now may be misprized.¹³ Post-modernist, post-structuralist tendencies of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are still present in such critiques. Categories of space and time (attributed to Enlightenment epistemological models for history writing) have also increasingly come under assault. Anachronism, long considered one of the greatest mistakes a historian could make, is now revalued under the cloak of the anachronic.¹⁴

The current also springs from a more general retreat from narrative in the Humanities that has taken place during recent decades. When in 1983 Hans Belting announced the “end of art history” as it had hitherto been known he signaled the beginning of this withdrawal within the discipline of art history.¹⁵ What Belting seemed to announce was in fact already adumbrated in the 1970s, when the New Art History began to take art history in different directions than it had previously pursued. A tendency to avoid telling large stories began that accompanied an increasing avoidance of larger narratives, including an evasion of metanarrative.¹⁶ In any event, a large-scale retreat from all but the most particular and personal accounts, ones that eschew broader stories, has occurred along with the surrender by some scholars of narrative, coherence, the principle of anachronism, and logical categories in art history. A vogue for microhistories is related to these trends in historiography, and this is evinced in art history too.¹⁷

However we may evaluate specific theoretical arguments pertaining to telling larger stories about the past or their epistemological foundations, histories (narratives of past events or stories about the past, among them some that include accounts of art) nevertheless continue to be written. Furthermore, they concern not only our own supposedly globalized moment in which the need for such stories would seem to be obvious. A large international audience eagerly responds to the appearance of books (in whatever form) that offer such broader stories of past events and people. At least some authors are ready to answer the demand. Some academics have answered the call for global or world histories, and done so very successfully. The large favorable public reception of their books demonstrates that there exists a general interest in broader histories of the world and its cultures.¹⁸

Moreover, just because the task may seem huge and special problems may attend the conceptualization of large narratives, the possibility of writing a world history is not to be ruled out a priori. It is mistaken to think that we can ever offer a complete account of events in writing histories, be they small or large. To argue that historiography, the writing of history, is intended to give an account of all events of the past is not just unfeasible. This belief also appears to reflect a frequently held assumption that our knowledge of the external world holds up an accurate mirror to nature. It may be noted, however, that several philosophers have forcefully argued against this view of epistemology, averring that the exact reflection of reality is not what knowledge is.¹⁹

As far as history writing is concerned, historiography contrasts with the composition of chronicles,²⁰ in that the writing of history always involves a process of selection, a matter of emphases and choices, the posing of hypotheses, and the construction of theories of causality and development, all of which are involved in the construction of a narrative. This process is found as much in the writing of world or global history, or world art history, as it is in the composition of microhistories, histories of individuals or individual events, or indeed biographies. The act of writing history, we may say art history, or for that matter any other kind of story, thus suggests a basic reason why there may be no one single story of art that may ever be told. Of course there are many such stories.²¹ We always write from a point of view that is by definition limited. This observation does not preclude writing history, nor does it assume that history lacks some objective referent.²² We need to remain aware that what we write does not exclude other attempts, and not regard it as the ultimate account.

Furthermore, the existence of different possible accounts does not mean that it is impossible to write a single, individual world history of art, even though it might be only one of several or many possible histories. Previous efforts, however imperfect they may have been, have in fact been made to write an art history that encompassed the globe, and they continue to be made. In the past these sorts of large stories were articulated in the formulation of what was earlier called universal history (Universalgeschichte), that is, histories that treated the art of all times and places. Universal history in this sense does not mean a history of the universe or cosmos, but cosmopolitan history. The meaning of cosmopolitan is conceived here in the sense of a history of human beings in all parts of the oikumene, the inhabited world. To mention a few familiar cases, universal history is implicit in some major trends in the historiography of art as it was written from Giorgio Vasari in sixteenth-century Florence through Franz Kugler in nineteenth-century Berlin, and beyond.²³ Recognition of the existence of this tradition as it was emphasized in the historiography of the Enlightenment and its immediate forerunners has been noted in recent discussions of the possibilities of intercultural history.²⁴

Earlier European writings on art that claimed to be universal no doubt often circumscribed the conceptualization of oikumene, much as they frequently restricted discussion of art to a European perspective. Even within the historiography of European art discussion has often been further constricted to a limited number of periods and parts of the continent (ancient Greece, Renaissance Italy, medieval, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France, painting in the Low Countries from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, sometimes early sixteenth-century Germany) deemed worthy of attention. The universal history adumbrated for example by Vasari, who however concentrated on Tuscan art, and of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who glorified ancient Greece, suggest that as far as what might be called art was concerned, universal history in effect thus often collapsed into a history which elevated the art of certain selected areas in Europe at certain times, and ignored others, along with much of the rest of the world as well.²⁵

World art history must thus deal with the problem of point of view and inherent bias. Frequently this bias is characterized as Eurocentrism. Eurocentrism is indeed very much in the sights of many critics of world art histories. But it is perhaps little known that writers on the theory of history have already tackled this problem and provided answers to it.²⁶ Regardless of their counter-arguments, we must still take recent critiques seriously. The most trenchant of these is James Elkins’s response to David Summers’s Real Spaces.²⁷ In this magnum opus Summers offered a monumental account of the history of the world’s art in one volume.²⁸ One of the very few recent comprehensive world art histories to date, his book is also a harbinger of recent debates: it has thus become a lightning rod for critical thunder. Independent of the merits or demerits of Summers’s theses, Elkins and other critics decry the Eurocentrism they find in it and also in surveys (textbooks), which are also taken as exemplary of attitudes towards world art history. They mean by this critique the alleged privileging of Western developments and methodologies found in such surveys.²⁹ The attack is directed against the way that the West stands as it were not just in opposition to but as the same in essence as the Rest.

Regardless of his critique, Elkins provides a very useful outline when he suggests some of the ways in which a world art history might be constructed.³⁰ In reverse order, Elkins suggests that art history can disperse as a discipline; that it can attempt to avoid Western i...