eBook - ePub
Horizontal Art History and Beyond
Revising Peripheral Critical Practices
Agata Jakubowska, Magdalena Radomska, Agata Jakubowska, Magdalena Radomska
This is a test
Share book
- 224 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
Horizontal Art History and Beyond
Revising Peripheral Critical Practices
Agata Jakubowska, Magdalena Radomska, Agata Jakubowska, Magdalena Radomska
Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations
About This Book
This book is devoted to the concept of horizontal art historyâa proposal of a paradigm shift formulated by the Polish art historian Piotr Piotrowski (1952â2015)âthat aims at undermining the hegemony of the discourse of art history created in the Western world.
The concept of horizontal art history is one of many ideas on how to conduct nonhierarchical art historical analysis that have been developed in different geopolitical locations since at least the 1970s, parallel to the ongoing process of decolonization. This book is a critical examination of horizontal art history which provokes a discussion on the original concept of horizontal art history and possible methods to extend it. This is an edited volume written by international scholars who acknowledge the importance of the concept, share its basic assumptions and are aware both of its advantages and limitations.
The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, art historiography and postcolonial studies.
Frequently asked questions
How do I cancel my subscription?
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlegoâs features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan youâll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, weâve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is Horizontal Art History and Beyond an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access Horizontal Art History and Beyond by Agata Jakubowska, Magdalena Radomska, Agata Jakubowska, Magdalena Radomska in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Art & Art Theory & Criticism. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
Part I Practicing Horizontal Art History Democracy
1 The Critical Museum Debate Continues
Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius
DOI: 10.4324/9781003186519-3
The concept of the critical museum, which had been launched by Piotr Piotrowski during his directorship of the National Museum in Warsaw between August 2009 and October 2010, proved not only the most daring of his projects but also his most far-sighted intervention into the contemporary cultural field.1 What Piotrowski had proposed was an entirely new model of an art museum which, questioning its time-sanctioned celebratory formula, would use its collections, space and institutional authority to engage, consciously and unreservedly, in struggles for social justice and for a new art geography, marginalizing the established centres of art while empowering the peripheries.2 The critical museum principles formed part and parcel of Piotrowskiâs campaign against the universalist discourses of mainstream art history, and it was devised specifically for, although not reducible to, art museums in post-communist East-Central Europe. In spite of an unprecedented international resonance of the projectâs flagship exhibition Ars Homo Erotica, the critical museum strategy was rejected by both the museumâs curators and the Board of Trustees, to be hastily buried by a prominent section of the Polish art world as an academic reverie, motivated by ideology.3 Almost exactly ten years later, however, the very notion of the museum as the agent of democracy has become the basis of a new definition of the generic museum institution which, proposed by the ICOMâs steering committee, emphasized precisely inclusivity and a critical dialogue.4 This chapter argues that the critical museum was the product of both Piotrowskiâs conceptualization of the critical art geography and his curatorial practice, but it also provides an extended reflection on its continuing significance after Piotrâs untimely death in 2015, especially at the time of the decolonization movement. What follows is written from the position of the participant observer since my own biography is inextricably tied to the National Museum in Warsaw. I had grown up there as an art historian, and I returned there from my university post in London for the duration of the critical museum battle, invited by Piotr to act as his deputy. The tug of war between art history as a âpositiveâ and as a âcriticalâ discipline, as well as that between West and East, has been part of my professional makeup.5
From Museum Exhibitions to the Critical Art History of East-Central Europe
Deemed as utopian, as built on theory rather than practice, the critical museum project had been, in fact, grounded in Piotrowskiâs extensive curatorial experience, gained both in Poland and at diverse art institutions of the world. The museum was for him both the target of critique and a powerful medium of scholarly discourse, capable of disseminating the ideas worthy of public debate. Indeed, as Jan BiaĆostocki, my former museum boss and teacher, Piotrowski belongs to the rank of the world-famous art historians in Poland, who merged their academic careers with museum practice. For both, museum experience served as an important tool of their art histories as well as a catalyst of their exceptionally prolific dialogue with the international community of scholars. And both of them repositioned the arts of East-Central Europe towards the western canon.6 Certainly, there are significant differences regarding the political eras in which they operated, the periods they focused on, and the aims of their art histories.7 Differences could be multiplied: BiaĆostocki worked at the Department of European Art of The National Museum in Warsaw throughout his professional career, from 1945 until his sudden death in 1988 just before the end of Polish Peopleâs Republic. By contrast, Piotrowski kept the post at The National Museum in PoznaĆ for five years, between 1992 and 1997, in the early days of so-called post-communist transformation, and was in charge of Polish post-WWII art. BiaĆostocki was holding for decades a prominent position in the Warsaw museum but never aspired to manage the whole institution. Piotrowski, in turn, when invited to run it, not only took on the task of managing the whole of the establishment but went much further, embarking on the mission of changing it.
If BiaĆostocki undertook all the areas of museum activities: overseeing and researching the collections as well as curating, what mattered for Piotrowski were, first and foremost, exhibitions. Quoting Jean-Marc Poinsot, Piotrowski conceded that âstaging an exhibition is essentially art history writingâ, adding however that one must be aware of the consequences.8 And, indeed, the reflection on the exhibition as the strategic medium of art historical expression would accompany much of his writing, foregrounding its two fundamental concepts, the critical art geography and the horizontal art history. But it also gave rise to the project of the critical museum, which turned out as both the product and the platform for implementing the first two.
Contributor to numberless exhibitions all over the world, from Los Angeles to Ljubljana, Piotrowski was well aware of the advantages of museum display and the visibility it attracts. In contrast to an article in a scholarly journal, or a book read by a narrow constituency of fellow art historians, the same ideas staged as exhibitions, including their catalogues, are disseminated among much larger and wider audiences and stand a chance of contributing to social difference. As he stressed laconically, the first programmatic Women Artists 1550â1950 exhibition in Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1976 had a much larger resonance than Linda Nochlinâs famous article âWhy have there been no women artistsâ of 1971.9 And accordingly, the exhibitions Piotrowski curated were always devised as arguments, constructed in relation to material evidence as well as theoretical concepts. Their aim was to realign the field, and never to celebrate genius, or a movement.
His first show at The National Museum in PoznaĆ, The Thaw, in 1996, went against the grain of the triumphant narrative of Polish post-WWII modernism, arguing that the experience of socialist realism led ultimately to the petrification of the autonomy of art as a new dogma. It also claimed that the ensuing âconservatism of Polish cultureâ was perceivable âmainly in museumsâ.10 While the traditionalism of the latter was a recurrent trope in Piotrowskiâs writing at that time, by contrast, the catalogue of his last exhibition in PoznaĆ, Zofia Kulik: From Siberia to Cyberia, 1999, brought his first conceptualization of the museum as a critical institution, predicated on the belief in the redemptive power of contemporary critical art. âThe critical art needs a museumâ, he wrote, and vice versa, the museum needs critical art, thus mutually saving themselves from the fallacy of the spectacle.11
Clearly, the environment which proved most stimulating for Piotrowskiâs were the large exhibitions of East-Central European art, staged after 1989 by various museums in the West. They provided for him the fertile ground to rethink the interpretive strategies in this newly emerging field of studies.12 One of the strongest impulses came from the monumental Europa, Europa which, staged by Ryszard StanisĆawski and Christoph Brockhaus in Bonn in 1994, strived to insert the art of East-Central Europe into standard art history books.13 Piotrowski disagreed forcefully with the application of the âuniversalâ, i.e., western aesthetic categories to the art produced in different political, social and cultural circumstances of the Other Europe. As he claimed, the exhibition âdid not modify the paradigm of the artistic geographyâ, as the act of adding the names of missing European artists to the canon formulated by western art history would not challenge âthe hierarchical interpretive models of art historyâ. The point was âto change the analytical tools so that they would allow us to discover the meanings of cultures of âotherâ geographical regionsâ.14 This was just a prelude to his model of the critical art geography, formulated within the framework of âthe spatial turnâ in critical studies, and to his most resonant idea of a âhorizontal art historyâ, which would focus emphatically on exchange and circulation outside the centres, the key approach of the rising global history of art.15
When he joined the Advisory Board setting up the first Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw in 2005, Piotrowski turned his attention from exhibitions to the strategies of the museum institution per se. He proposed expanding the âgeographical interest of the museum ⊠in terms of both the collection as well as the exhibition programâ to include modern and contemporary art of the whole region of Central Europe. Instead of following the western model, the matrix of this museum would be provided by the complex history and politics of the region, not avoiding its communist heritage.16 The idea of such an institution was directly related to his ground-breaking book on the avant-garde âin the shadow of Yaltaâ, which was about to appear in Britain.17 It was also informed by his belief in political responsibilities of art, art history and its institutions. The idea was too compelling to be forgotten. Very soon, the invitation to take over the National Museum in Warsaw presented another opportunity. As Piotrowski admitted to the editors of the Polish radical journal Krytyka Polityczna, âThe concept of the critical museum stems directly from the work on the concept of the Museum of Modern Artâ.18
The Art Historian between Museum and Academia
Piotrowskiâs appointment as Director of the National Museum in Warsaw resulted, typically, in a series of lectures and conference papers, digging up the new field and articulating new issues. So far, Piotrowski had been drawing his ideas, including the critical art geography and the horizontal art history, from the reflection on contemporary art worlds and their inherent critical relationship to the contemporary world.19 Entering the largest art institution in Poland, of 150 years of history and the collection of over 800 000 objects in diverse media, from many regions of the world and periods, not to mention its 500-strong staff, Piotrowski was moving into a very different territory. He was fully aware that âthe injection of the criticality to a historical museum has no precedenceâ and requires nothing less than redefining the mission of the generic museum altogether.20 In the Polish context, it meant also re-opening to public scrutiny the conflict between the two models of art history. In his paper given at the Annual Conference of Polish Art Historians in the Autumn of 2009, barely a couple of months after his nomination, Piotrowski mapped this new territory, outlining the rise of museum critique, the rise of the New Art History, and the ensuing clash between the museum and the university.21 The critical museum was an outcome of this disciplinary shift, with an added awareness of the pulling power of the issues related to East-Central Europe, which by that time had already led to the formulation of his concept of the horizontal art history.
Museum critique, as old as the institution of the museum itself, has been practised both on the left and on the right of the political spectrum, for over 200 years, from QuatremĂšre de Quincy to Walter Benjamin and Pierre Bourdieu.22 At the beginning of the twentieth century, it was taken over by artists. It featured prominently in manifestoes of the historical avant-garde and, in the post-WWII period, in diverse actions performed by the Institutional Critique conceptualists and feminist artists, now challenging museumâs association with imperialism, colonialism, racism, patriarchalism and sexism.23 In the 1980s, the criticism of museums migrated again, this time from the field of art practice to that of art history. Moreover, it metamorphosed into a new sub-discipline of the New Museology.24 It has successfully entered the university curricula, acting now arm in arm with the New Art History. If the latter questioned the methods, scope and canons created by the old discipline, revealing its alliance with power-knowledge, the New Museology likewise, aimed to denaturalize the mechanisms of the museum-work, to investigate the practices of exclusion, implemented under an apparently apolitical surface of aesthetics. The museum, perceived by radicalized university departments as a besieged fortress of the old-fashioned art history, tended to assume, in turn, the role of the bastion of the civilized society, rebuking the New Art History for abandoning the aims of the discipline and accusing the New Museology as an onslaught of Marxism-fed âmuseophobiaâ.25 The conflict reverberated throughout the western world, but neither the New Art History nor the New Museology paid attention to the issues faced by art institutions in East-Central Europe.
In Poland, the conflict was ignited within the field of art history rather than museum studies. A series of methodological conferences organized by young scholars at the Department of Art History at PoznaĆ between 1973 and 1981, who had invited the radical West German art historians Martin Warnke and Wolfgang Kemp, marked the formation of the revisionist and Marxist-inspired approach to studying art. As reported by Andrzej Turowski, this was seen at the time âas an attack on the history of artâ.26 Piotrowski, then Turowskiâs student, was the participator of those conferences, and hence, the earliest intellectual stimuli leading to the critical museum idea reached back to the heydays of the âPoznaĆ school of art historyâ. It took over 30 years to re-ignite the battle in the Polish art world, centring it on the functions of art and its institutions in contemporary society. If the PoznaĆ debates were confined to a narrow group of professionals, Piotrowskiâs model of the critical museum and its social functions were brought to the centre of public attention when he became Director of the National Museum in Warsaw.