Art History in a Global Context

Methods, Themes, and Approaches

Ann Albritton, Gwen Farrelly, Ann Albritton, Gwen Farrelly

• Editore: Wiley-Blackwell
• Anno: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781119127840
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Arte
• Categoria: Storia dell'arte contemporanea

Presents a clear and comprehensive introduction to the evolving discipline of global art studies

This volume examines how art historians, critics, and artists revisit art from ancient times through to the early modern period as well as the ways in which contemporary objects are approached through the lens of global contact, exchange, networks, and trade routes. It assists students who actively seek to understand "global art history" and the discipline beyond the founding Western canons.

The first section of Art History in a Global Context: Methods, Themes and Approaches explores how themes related to globalization are framing the creation, circulation, reception, and study of art today. The second section examines how curators, scholars, artists, and critics have challenged the Eurocentric canon through works of art, writings, exhibitions, biennials, large-scale conferences, and the formation of global networks. The third section is designed to help students look forward by exploring how art history in a global context is beginning to extend beyond the contemporary condition to understand the meaning, conditions, and impacts of exchange across borders and among artists in earlier periods.

• Presents a historiography of global art histories in academic, museological, and exhibition projects
• Written by a collection of authors from different linguistic, cultural, geographic, generational, and disciplinary perspectives
• Aids students in understanding "global art history" and the discipline beyond the founding Western canons
• Provides a set of case studies to bring to life methodologies being employed in the field
• Features contributors from the program of the Getty Foundation and the College Art Association International Committee's project

Art History in a Global Context is an ideal choice for upper-level undergraduate and entry level graduate art students. It can also be used as a teaching tool, or as models for case studies in different formats.

Part I
Themes in Global Art History

1
A Porous Iron Curtain: Artistic Contacts and Exchanges across the Eastern European Bloc during the Cold War (1960–1980)

Cristian Nae

In the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, art produced on both sides of the Iron Curtain increasingly shared an experimental ethos. In capitalist societies West of the curtain, experimental art began to occupy a privileged position; while on the East, in socialist countries experimental art was repressed or, at best, tolerated under controlled circumstances. During this period, Eastern Europe was not a homogeneous artistic territory and, as such, the region defies the very idea of a unified, linear art historical narrative.¹ The economic disparities of the territories of the Eastern bloc, combined with various degrees of international cultural openness in different periods of time configure an uneven territory with multiple, asynchronized temporalities. A topographical analysis of connected localities² is, therefore, necessary in order to understand how and why experimental art in a certain region converged with, but also diverged from its counterparts. Spatial art history, as a critical art historical instrument, can thus engage in a “translocal”³ analysis of artistic relations realized not only via state‐supported channels of distribution, but also at a micro‐scale between individuals who invented new types of mobility in order to connect practices across borders and boundaries.

Today, it has become increasingly obvious that the Iron Curtain was more permeable than one could have imagined. Artistic contacts and even collaborations within the Eastern bloc, but also between artists from Eastern Europe and their Western, Latin American, Japanese and Middle Eastern counterparts, were established on numerous levels. Points of contact included exhibitions organized either by the state apparatuses, or those invented by the experimental artists that often established their own self‐institutionalized spaces and networks – artist‐run publications and mail art exchanges, or collaborative events that allowed for artists to construct temporary forms of transnational solidarity. These contacts were crucial for artists who were engaged in critiquing dominant culture on both sides of the curtain, despite acting in different economic and political systems.

Methodologically, I suggest that the study of artistic circulations, exchanges, and contacts during the Cold War may benefit from the actor‐network theory advocated by Bruno Latour.⁴ For Klara Kemp‐Welch, it designates a networked structure, where “the many letters, photographs, and publications exchanged between experimental artists were akin to ‘connectors’ and were instrumental in the production of a social field: artistic propositions were what Latour calls ‘the cables, the means of transportation, the vehicles linking places together’ – they were a way of ‘launching tiny bridges to overcome the gaps created by disparate frames of reference.’”⁵ It is, thus, compatible with the “horizontal” approach advocated by Piotrowski, for whom geographically defined spaces should no longer be differentiated according to a division between “centers” and “peripheries,”⁶ in an attempt to “provincialize the West.”⁷

Nevertheless, I believe that the examination of artistic contacts and circulations could also describe the artistic field as a site of tactical alliances, where the manifold relations constituted at the same time within and across its boundaries are transnational and transregional at once, and operate at multiple levels of artistic agency not as “structures,” but rather as “constellations.”⁸ Such a perspective takes into account how such relations of power were actively being challenged and new lines of communication were constructed through artistic contacts and through the circulation of objects, images, printed materials, and private letters.

Informed by these methodological principles, in this chapter I map some of the material routes and nodes of contact in these networks of institutional agents and individuals, and I examine the extent to which these cultural contacts and artistic interferences were multidirectional rather than a mere adaptation, import, and appropriation of a Western‐based model of contemporary artistic practice. I claim that transnational artistic contacts during the 1960s and 1970s provoked incomplete and sometimes incongruent translations between distinct forms of modernism, among Eastern and Western European, North and Latin American, and Japanese artists.

Private Connections: Exhibiting Eastern European Artists Abroad

Acting in parallel and sometimes in tacit complicity with the official channels of cultural communication,⁹ artists and theorists from Eastern Europe established informal networks that materialized in connections with Western European, South and Central America, and the United States counterparts, but also with a different type of cultural agents such as art gallerists. Individual international connections that were questioning geographic and ideological boundaries were crucial for the promotion of experimental art practices across the world and for enabling the presence of Eastern European artists in Western Europe.

Although in the 1960s the balance of cultural power shifted toward New York, Paris remained the city in which artists from Eastern Europe were exhibited by both state museums and private galleries. An important connection with the developing mail art was established through Jean Marc Poinsot, organizer of the Envois section of the Paris Biennale in 1971.¹⁰ In the same year, being allowed to travel eastwards, Georges Boudaille, the director of Paris Biennale, invited Romanian conceptual artists Șerban Epure, Ana Lupas, Paul Neagu, and Horia Bernea in the main section of the Biennale, bypassing the reticence of official Romanian art institutions.¹¹ Another important connection with the French art scene was established through Pierre Restany, theorist of Nouveau Réalisme, who maintained close contacts with Czechoslovakian artists and critics, facilitating after 1964 the development of the local “New Figuration”¹² as a form of rupture with dated abstract modernism and ideologically compromised socialist realism.

An important promoter of Eastern European art in Western Europe was Richard Demarco, organizer of the Edinburgh Arts Festival, who attempted to counter the overwhelming presence of Western European artists in major exhibitions of the 1960s such as the Venice Biennale or Documenta by inviting artists from Eastern Europe to “compare their work with what they had come to respect as the New World complement to their own.”¹³ Demarco organized major exhibitions of art from Romania (1971) and Poland (1972), before presenting in 1973 Eight Yugoslav Artists, after an extensive nine‐day research trip to five Yugoslavian cities undertaken in 1972. He also allowed Foksal gallery to exhibit Polish artists in Edinburgh in 1972 and 1979.¹⁴

Beyond Europe, Jorge Glusberg facilitated the presence of Eastern European conceptual...