FIGURE 2.1 Gustave Courbet, Origine du monde, 1866, oil on canvas, Musée d’Orsay.
Christopher Reed
Far from a unique and heroic vanguard of individuals, the avant-garde, from this demystifying perspective, is recognized as participating within and among other collective forms of alienation that call for historical acknowledgment and structural analysis.
Lines often treated as boundaries that separate identities conceived as binaries might better be seen as cables linking various contingents as they trace the contours of religious conversion, class consciousness, environmental activism, gender politics, sexual orientation—all complex formations of alienation that have provoked dynamics of identification and appropriation around the globe.
Doing triple duty as a noun, an adjective, and (uncommonly) a verb, “alien” denotes, respectively, a foreigner, foreignness, and the act of estrangement. “Alienation” is thus central to the idea of the “global,” a rubric defined by the juxtaposition of people and places conceived as alien to one another because of their different positions on the terrestrial globe and/or united on a planet made coherent by the imagined perspective of “aliens” from outer space. As deeply imbricated as conceptions of the alien and the global are, ideas of “alienation” may be even more embedded in definitions of modernity and modernism. A recent guide to “key concepts” in cultural theory defines alienation through Marx as “the estrangement of humanity from its society, and its essential or potential nature” because of “the division of labour under capitalism,” and therefore as one among other unhappy affects (along with powerlessness, meaninglessness, and isolation) supposedly characteristic of modern life. This guide offers another “less precisely defined” use of the term associated with “the condition of modern society.” Here alienation is said to invoke “the metaphorical association of being a foreigner, outsider or stranger in one’s own land” with the result that “alienation may be readily associated with the experience of exile as in some sense paradigmatic of the experience of the twentieth century.”1
If alienation—both the specific Marxist dynamic and the broader phenomenon it attempts to explain—is characteristic of modernity, it is central to modernism. Renato Poggioli’s canonic Theory of the Avant-Garde posited “the state of alienation” as the fundamental condition of the avant-garde artist, whose alienation is so total it comprises antagonism toward the current moment and toward tradition, toward the mass public and toward elite patrons, and toward any idea of ethics beyond “the negative and destructive principle of art for art’s sake.”2 For him, to be modernist was to be alienated.
More specifically, the Brechtian “alienation effect” (Verfremdungseffekt) was closely linked to sensations evoked by strangers and foreignness (the twinned meanings of fremde) through its similarities with Chinese theater, which Brecht saw in Moscow and wrote about for an Anglophone audience.3 Refusing audiences the comforts of conventional forms of identification with actors, characters, and the overall performance and by implication its author(s), Brecht’s formulation of theater as an encounter with the strange/foreign offers a paradigm for avant-garde art in general. From romantic exoticism, through modernist primitivism, to the multiculturalism of today’s global art market, alienation is key to the aesthetics of an avant-garde that casts its innovations as invocations of elsewhere.
Common explanations that modernist alienation “reflects” the alienation of modern society fall short of acknowledging that the alienation of industrialized labor and the forced migration of generations of laborers create the conditions that allow such middle-class formations as the avant-garde and academia to thrive. Anxieties about that dependence may explain the reluctance of artists and academics to acknowledge, let alone theorize, the workings of alienation as a site of profit and pleasure in those settings. Academic affects that signify critical acumen by negativity register avant-garde alienation as loss or as weary but necessary work, ignoring the substantial rewards—emotional, intellectual, authoritative, sensual, and financial—that make participation in and analysis of the avant-garde among the most coveted and competitive professions in the global economy. The fact is that, although many moderns had (and have) migration thrust upon them, many others—especially modernists—eagerly sought out geographic displacement, from the provinces to the city, as from the hegemon to exotic elsewheres. The myriad memoirs of the avant-garde in cities from Paris and London to New York and Shanghai, or in pilgrimage points like St. Ives in Cornwall or Taos in New Mexico, offer ample proof of the pleasures of this mode of alienation. To be alien is, among other things, to be free from the constraints of one’s home culture and, because foreignness can serve as an alibi for many forms of deviance, free, too, from many of the constraints the host culture imposes on locals.
One salutary effect of the rubric “global modernism” is to disrupt the comfortable conventions of modernist discourse around aliens and alienation. In addition to raising the issues just introduced, the rubric challenges the imperialist dynamics built into common modernist vocabularies of an “avant-garde” and its “movements,” two terms derived from military theory during an era when European armies were primarily engaged in imperial conquest and domination.4 In this paradigm, the modernist European (later American) artist gains acclaim by pillaging elements from alien cultures, a mode of global engagement conceived from a Euro-American perspective and quite compatible with the basic bourgeois value of competitive, acquisitive individualism. This analysis goes a long way toward explaining the apparent conundrum of an avant-garde that supposedly provokes the bourgeoisie drawing its agents and audiences overwhelmingly from that class.5 My first task in analyzing ideas of the alien, then, is to demystify claims for avant-garde alienation as a form of artistic individualism by examining its status as a convention that links the vanguard artist with his (and occasionally her) capitalist patrons. A second task is to tease out the importance of alienation where it has been less recognized in histories of modernism. Together, these projects, quickly sketched in this essay, complicate assumptions about the status of the alien and alienation in art and academia today.
Enactments of alienation are ubiquitous in both the canons of modernism and the lifestyles associated with modernity: Pablo Picasso’s citations of African masks, Ezra Pound’s use of Chinese and Japanese poetry, the innumerable movements associated with borderless spiritualisms from Madame Blavatsky to Baha’i, to name just a few. Not unique to visual culture, these conventions take on particular clarity and force in media for which the processes of cross-cultural identification and emulation commonly muddled under the term influence (which Michael Baxandall called the “curse of art criticism” for its “wrong-headed grammatical prejudice about who is the agent and who the patient”)6 play out without even the rudimentary disciplines of vocabulary and grammar associated with written or spoken languages, which require practice and engagement with knowledgeable interlocutors to translate. Audiences looking at artifacts from abroad or artists “borrowing” motifs (with no intention of returning them) experience a sense of understanding that is impossible when confronting words in an unknown language. Calling art the “esperanto of European hegemony,” Donald Preziosi cites the “museographic practices” associated with vision and display as fundamental to creating the “imaginary space-time and a storied space” where modern ideas of history and subjecthood are constituted.7
As important as ubiquitous modernist practices of exhibition and encounter may be, their ideological underpinnings are paradoxical. The aestheticization of individualist alienation that defines the modernist artist is achieved by invoking one group—an “Other” culture—in order to claim a place in a second: the avant-garde. In modernism’s heyday, this system guaranteed both the protean individualism of the avant-garde artist and the subindividual status of those whose aesthetics were invoked. The importance of this dynamic is registered in the energy poured into debates over who was the first japoniste or the first European artist to use African forms. In the illogical logic of modernism, to “discover” and draw from Japanese prints or African carvings is to be original; to discover and draw from other Western artists is to be derivative. The double standard by which modernists’ citations of the Other signified both Western individualism and non-Western collectivity was notoriously epitomized by the blockbuster 1984 Museum of Modern Art exhibition “Primitivism” in Twentieth Century Art, where labels and catalog illustrations compared dated art by individual European and (nonnative) American artists with undated works identified by “tribe.” As the anthropologist James Clifford noted, the exhibition was structured to present Picasso as the “hero, whose virtuoso work, an exhibit caption tells us, contains more affinities with the tribal than that of any other pioneer modernist.”8
These modernist dynamics continue to structure the art market (and have their analogs in academia). To achieve gallery representation or space in text book and museum surveys, artists identified as alien (a highly charged concept that, as debates over immigration in Europe and the United States show, need not mean foreign-born) are expected to perform those identities in ways that are legible to the global marketplace. Artists from the dominant culture who invoke marginalized identities and art forms, in contrast, must be careful not to appear “political,” a common but largely untheorized category that, in practice, means appearing to speak for or with—rather than critically or ironically about—collective manifestations of alienation, be they ethnic, economic, or sexual. Art presented as collective (as distinct from art authorized by a single figure, even if produced by assistants or contractors) finds little purchase in the art market even as avant-garde accolades accrue to artists who perform critical or ironic alienation from collective social movements such as feminism.9 Thus the art market continually reinscribes a hierarchy in which alienated individualism characterizes those in the dominant culture while politically engaged collectivity stigmatizes and subordinates.
One measure of the strength of these modernist tendencies is their persistence in the face of strenuous critique through an era that styles itself “postmodern.” Incisive analyses of Orientalism and primitivism—the overlap of these concepts reflects the modernist construction of the Occident as comparatively advanced or civilized—have contested the dynamics by which the avant-garde invokes the Other in ways that claim the prerogatives of progress and civilization for itself. The deep ideological and financial investments of prominent art institutions in modernist practices of art making and collection, however, render the implications of these critiques unassimilable. The catalog of the Museum of Modern Art’s 1984 “Primitivism” exhibition offers one example. Acknowledging that “the words Primitive and primitivism have been criticized by some commentators as ethnocentric and pejorative,” the chief curator, introducing the catalog, defended his use of the term, which he asserted was “comparable” to japonisme with “implications that have been entirely affirmative.”10 Three decades later, in 2015, the opening wall text for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition China: Through the Looking Glass acknowledged that “the fashions in this exhibition . . . belong to the practice of Orientalism, which since the publication of Edward Said’s seminal treatise on the subject in 1978 has taken on negative connotations of Western supremacy and segregation” before going on to explain:
While neither discounting nor discrediting the issue of the representation of “subordinated otherness” outlined by Said, this exhibition attempts to propose a less politicized and more positivistic [sic] examination of Orientalism as a site of infinite and unbridled creativity. Through careful juxtapositions of Western fashions and Chinese costumes and decorative arts, it presents a rethinking of Orientalism as an appreciative cultural response by the West to its encounters with the East.11
Similar forms of evasion characterize art-historical writing. The entry for “Primitive” in the anthology Critical Terms for Art History (first published in 1996 and reissued in 2003) acknowledges the colonial power dynamics of primitivism but focuses on the “positive valances” of the category of the primitive “when Western culture itself was thought to be ‘overly civilized’ and thus in need of rejuvenation through contact with societies in an earlier stage of development.”12 Readers are also assured that “primitivism among the modernists also sometimes expressed an artist’s political concern with the plight of exploited and oppressed native populations,” citing Picasso and Paul Gauguin as examples (229). Like the Met’s vague allusions to “appreciative cultural response,” the fuzziness of the formulation “political concern” in relation to the ideologies and identifications of these highly canonic—and, in their sociopolitical relationship to their non-European sources, highly problematic—avant-garde artists is matched by the vagueness of the scare-quoted category “overly civilized” to allude to forms of alienation that sent modernists to seek extra-European conventions of thought and representation. These evasions were matched by another. The first edition of Critical Terms for Art History, as Jaś Elsner observed in the second, “studiously avoided” the word “influence” (104). Rather than analyzing this ubiquitous term, both editions of this authoritative guide simply replace “influence” with “appropriation” “so as to emphasize personal agency” of “the maker or receiver” (162–163). But by then focusing on intra-European “appropriation”—from ancient Greece or within English pastoral art and literature—the analysis shies away from issues of global interchange, offering as a rationale the observation that “the full force of multiculturalism has yet to be felt in the broader areas of art history” (168).
If art history delayed feeling “multiculturalism,” one explanation is that still-sacrosanct equations of avant-garde alienation with individualism resist analysis of aesthetics as collectively produced or experienced. Study of specific links between antipathy toward middle-class sex and gender norms and attraction to non-Western cultures, for example, reveals the avant-garde as one among many interrelated urban subcultures (including ethnic, political, and sexual subcultures) that emerged in Western cities around the turn of the twentieth century. Far from a unique and heroic vanguard of individuals, the avant-garde, from this demystifying perspective, is recognized as participating within and among other collective forms of alienation that call for historical acknowledgment and structural analysis.
Productive inquiry along these lines has been discouraged, however, not only by the ongoing dependence of scholarly discourse—for both financial sustainability and cultural authority—on the individualist rhetorics of the avant-garde but also by the terms in which critiques of Orientalism and primitivism were and are often articulated. These, too, often inhibit analysis of the complex relationships between alienation and identification as between the avant-garde and other constituencies. For examples, I return to two alreadycited essays proposing to guide critical thinking about art. The essay on “Appropriation” in Critical Terms for Art History, despite disavowing “multiculturalism,” concludes by invoking postcolonial critique: “As Edward Said has long understood, in every cultural appropriation there are those who act and those who are acted upon, and for those whose memories and cultural identities are manipulated by . . . appropriations, the consequences can be disquieting or painful” (172). This oversimplified binary of actors versus acted-upons, whose options are limited to a choice between disquietude and pain, is further homogenized in Preziosi’s The Art of Art History (first published in 1998 and reissued in 2009). Describing the ideological power of modernist “museographic practices,” Preziosi asserts that “there is no ‘artistic tradition’ anywhere in the world which today is not fabricated through the historicism and essentialisms of European museology and museography, and (of course) in the very hands of the colonized themselves.” He characterizes “the brilliance of this colonization” as “quite breathtaking” in the way it “makes colonial subjects of us all” (493). Such theorizations of postcolonialism lurch between an identity politics structured through simplistic binaries (exploited vs. exploiter, East vs. West, black vs. white, pained vs. empowered, etc.) and an equally reductive overgeneralization of “us all” as “colonial subjects.” Both approaches forestall analysis of the complexities of identifications and alienations within and across cultures even as they seem to foreclose any kind of principled response in an era when Internet access and global travel for trade, tourism, and teaching push us constantly beyond the precincts of the local—itself a concept that requires for definition an internalized idea of the alien. Put another way, it is hard to imagine any cultural actor who has not made imaginative use of some exoticized—often self-exoticized—Other. Righteous condemnation and blasé resignation are both inadequate responses.
Correctives to such oversimplifications from within postcolonial studies have stressed the historical heterogeneity of Orientalisms—including “reverse-Orientalism”13—and offered models of what Mary Louise Pratt calls “transculturation” and Homi Bhabha calls “mimicry” as ways of registering agency among those Said cast as “acted upon.” Ideas of alienation are central to these models of colonized subjects’ hybridity, which have been theorized in a general way using Jacques Lacan’s idea of the mirror stage, in which the self is constituted as an image that is at once I and not-I: an alienation invoked at the moment of the subject’s constitution. But much remains unexplored about the dynamics of alienation and creativity for specific cultures and individuals, even—or especially—when these cases affect received histories of modernism and the historiographies through which modernists constituted their primitive/Oriental Others.
Scant attention is paid in art history or postcolonial studies, for instance, to Khalil Bey (Khalil Sherif Pasa, 1831–1879), an Ottoman diplomat, educated in Egypt and France, who was an important patron and collector in the Parisian avant-garde of the 1860s. Khalil cannily deployed Orientalist tropes to channel his hybridity into prestige. One Paris journal celebrated him as “a prince from an Oriental tale . . . who remained Turkish through his lavish generosity and taste for women and gambling, but became Parisian through his wit, his elegance, his love of the theatre and the arts.” Although he collected a wide range of European paintings, journalists focused on his penchant for lesbian imagery and related claim to have a villa in Lesbos. When Khalil commissioned Gustave Courbet’s famous Le sommeil (The sleepers), his second painting of sex between women, one paper reported, “No need to tell you that it is just as indecent as the first. After all it’s for a Turk!” Khalil also owned a version of J. A. D. Ingres’s famous Turkish Bath—an orgy of naked women—and, most notoriously, Courbet’s L’origine du monde, an image of female genitalia, which was later acquired by Lacan. Both men kept the painting concealed—Khalil behind a curtain, Lacan behind a screen painted with an abstract version of the composition—allowing them to reveal it for maximum effect in performances of identity that figured them as ambassadors to an exotic elsewhere (the Orient, the psyche) figured by the sign of woman. Issues of sex and sexuality, complex in themselves, are further complicated in Khalil’s case by national, geographical, and cultural dynamics of alienation. He is reputed to have met a French head of state’s comment, “Mr. Ambassador, you must find things here very different from back at home,” with the response: “Not at all, we are just as backward as you are.”14 Even if this anecdote is apocryphal, its attachment to Khalil reveals how his cosmopolitan hybridity could be forged as much through compounding alienations as through the multiple identifications emphasized in postcolonial theory.
Related issues are raised by the men who in Western accounts of the avant-garde incarnate Japanese exoticism. The Book of Tea by Oka kura Ka kuzo (also known as Oka kura Ten shin, 1862–1913) was—and is—often seen as an articulation of Japanese authenticity. But it was written in Boston, in English, in 1906 by a man who, raised and educated among expatriates in Japan, was literate in English before he could read Japanese. Okakura’s sense of Japanese identity incorporated the nostalgia of his Western mentors—Ernest Fenollosa, Edward Morse, and other Bostonians—for an “authentic” premodern Japan, so much so that when, with the advocacy of his Western patrons, he was appointed to head Japan’s government-sponsored art academy he designed archaic uniforms for the students and faculty to wear. When competing contingents eager to embrace ideas of Japan’s modernity ousted him from that position, his Boston patrons arranged for him to come to the Museum of Fine Arts. There his curatorial authority contributed substantially to newly gerrymandered canons of East Asian “art”—a Western concept awkwardly applied to global visual culture—that favored aristocratic antiques over the popular prints and modern pottery and textiles relished by the Victorians. Okakura’s affirmation of what he cast as Japanese “tradition,” long understood as a mode of identification with Japan, invites analysis as a manifestation of alienation from modern Japan.
Similar dynamics followed a different trajectory for the dancer and choreographer Michio Ito (1892–1961), who turns up in histories of the avant-garde that recount the development of W. B. Yeats’s 1916 “play for dancers” At the Hawk’s Well. There Ito figures as a personification of Japanese tradition: a samurai Noh dancer “discovered” by Ezra Pound poverty-stricken in a London garret.15 In fact, they met in London’s fashionable bars and salons, and Ito’s dance training was in Delacrozian eurythmics, which he studied in Germany. By Ito’s account, when Pound first asked for help, he responded that all he knew was “there’s nothing more boring than Noh.” When he nevertheless arranged for other expatriate Japanese to perform Noh steps for Pound and Yeats, however, Ito found himself astonished that “anything that good could come out of Japan!” His choreography and performance for At the Hawk’s Well—the avant-garde accomplishment of which was entirely credited to Yeats—and subsequent long career as a modernist dancer and choreographer in the United States and Japan grew from this moment of surprised recognition born of the low expectations associated with his cosmopolitan alienation from Japan. For both Ito and Okakura, in sum, alienation as much as identification motivated their construction of Japanese tradition, with significant results for ideas of the Orient in both East and West.
To ignore the dynamics of alienation and identification among those the avant-garde cast as Other perpetuates definitions of the avant-garde as exclusively Euro-American and oversimplifies the positions of those outside the hegemon. Making East and West (or North and South) opposing monoliths obscures the varieties of interactions between them and overlooks cross-currents within those categories, including instances when those cast as exotic appropriate that designation or internalize that perspective on their home culture for profit, pleasure, or the related aesthetic effects recognized as modernist. Lines often treated as boundaries that separate identities conceived as binaries might better be seen as cables linking various contingents as they trace the contours of religious conversion, class consciousness, environmental activism, gender politics, sexual orientation—all complex formations of alienation that have provoked dynamics of identification and appropriation around the globe.
The power that Said’s Orientalism gained by subsuming such complexities into binaries of East and West was purchased at the cost of overlooking such complexities. That cost was clear to those who approached his book from the perspective of visual culture. Reviewers noted the fissure between the argument of a text that makes no reference to art and the painting chosen for the book’s cover (and maintained through its twenty-fifth anniversary edition): Jean-Léon Gérôme’s The Snake Charmer (ca. 1879). The image shows the elderly “charmer” playing a flute that points directly at the genitals of a naked boy whose body is dangerously wrapped in a phallic snake. In the picture, an audience of older men stares at the boy’s frontal nudity while the audience of the picture is presented with his taut buttocks. Thus the painting seems to support the book’s argument that the West created an idea of the Orient to buttress its own moral superiority as a way of justifying its domination. While this artwork, much reproduced today, may represent what colonialism is imagined to be now as the object (or target) of postcolonial studies, however, the history of its reception during the century after it was painted suggests that it served no such straightforwardly reassuring or empowering function for Western viewers. The painting steadily lost value as it moved from French to American owners until the son of its second American owners bought it as a souvenir of his childhood in 1942 for just five hundred dollars. This plummeting value is invariably explained by reference to the triumph of impressionism and subsequent modernist styles over academic painting. But this raises broader questions of why the Oriental motifs prevalent in eighteenth- and early-to-mid-nineteenth-century visual culture gave way to the appropriations of non-Western styles that constitute the story of modernism from the japonisme of the impressionists onward (a parallel case can be made for texts, as the romantics’ evocations of the Near East gave way to Pound’s “hokku” or Marcel Proust’s japoniste effects). Disturbing paintings such as The Snake Charmer or Courbet’s L’origine du monde still trouble—in much more obvious ways than debates over perspective and abstraction—Western consensuses around issues of religion, class, industrialization, gender, and sexuality, inviting debate over the kinds of issues arbiters of modernism avoided as “political.”
The potential of The Snake Charmer to challenge Western consensus is related to its power to compel attention—a quality that no doubt motivated its selection to attract readers to Said’s book. That power, originating as shock at the representation of what had seemed unrepresentable, engages varieties of alienation that cut across boundaries between East from West: alienation as disgust at the artist or milieu that created this image or, conversely, alienation as exhilaration at the flouting of rules that prohibit such representations. These reactions might be focused on the Eastern culture depicted, the Western artist doing the depicting, or—most likely—on the intersection of the two. Hence the ongoing fascination with the intersection marked by the terms “global” and “modernism.” Similar dynamics undoubtedly attended the stylistic Orientalisms and primitivisms of the avant-garde in their original disruptive iterations, before the repetition and theorization of these works absorbed them into comfortable Western canons. But in academic art they play out much more clearly and for audiences that include those outside the bourgeois forums of museums and universities where repetition and theorization assimilate the output of the avant-garde into Western power structures.
If the habits of academic fields organized around the study of the avant-garde overlook the cross-cutting trajectories of alienation, so too do historiographies of Orientalism and primitivism conceived in binary terms. Scholars such as Billie Melman and Mary Roberts have challenged Said’s inattention to gender and the difference it makes within and between categories of Orient and Occident. Others have questioned Said’s erasure of sexual identity. “Many of the Orientalists Said takes up were homosexual, or rumored to be. But that is a circumstance that intrudes on Said’s argument only at its edges,” John Treat observes, before arguing that postcolonial scholars following Said, by denouncing what they present as Western “fantasies of illicit sexuality” set in the East, end up repeating the attitudes of “missionaries of a scandalized West.”16 If postcolonial theory has been reluctant to engage the alienation from Western gender and sexual norms that characterized many of those who were attracted to the East, it has altogether ignored the complementary dynamic, acknowledged in passing by a study of ukiyo-e imagery that observes that in Tokugawa Japan “the links between those who studied the West and those who favoured nanshoku [sex between boys and men] are oddly close.”17
To take seriously the role of alienation from Western norms of gender, ethnicity, and religion in constructing knowledges of the East would mean rewriting the history of Orientalism and primitivism to account not only for how subalterns such as Okakura and Ito forged a modernism grounded in ambivalent alienation from their home culture but also for the ways Euro-Americans forged ideas of the East in response to their alienation from the West. From the expatriate American painter J. A. M. Whistler to the Parisian writer Edmond de Goncourt, alienated aesthetes pioneered the japonisme that became the signature of Aestheticism. Other Parisian japonistes, such as Henri Cernuschi and Hugues Krafft, both doubly alienated as bachelors from non-Gallic families, channeled their outsider status into scholarly interest in the Orient (the Musée Cernuschi remains today as the City of Paris’s East Asian art museum, a legacy of this history). Other figures whose alienation significantly inflected Western understandings of the East include the Bostonians William Sturgis Bigelow and Percival Lowell, whose studies of Buddhist reincarnation and Shinto spirit possession respectively were fueled by fascination with lineages of men that could serve as alternatives to bourgeois family structures. Bigelow’s lavish patronage furnished Boston museums with the antiques that became exemplary of the canons of Japanese “art,” and he encouraged the display of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts’s Japanese collection in galleries ranged around an ersatz Buddhist temple, establishing a paradigm followed by other Western museums. Lafcadio Hearn, Oscar Wilde, Gary Snyder, Roland Barthes—the role of all these figures (and many more) in the Western construction of Japan might all be narrated as manifestations of alienation, the specifics of which helped shape modern ideas of Japan.
My point is not to mitigate or excuse the exploitations associated with Euro-American interactions around the globe. There is plenty to criticize in the history of re-presentations of non-Western culture in Western institutions. But it is time to move past the oversimplifications of the actor/acted-upon binary to acknowledge and analyze the dynamics of oppression and opportunity that characterize that history and continue to condition understandings of East and West today. There is no reason to assume that contemporary practices of global engagement are untouched by the heady mixtures of pleasure and coercion that characterized earlier episodes of global modernity and modernism. At the very least, attention to alienation as a way of understanding crosscurrents of exploitation and empathy, expulsion and adoption, collusion and transgression, pain and pleasure may head off contemporary tendencies toward self-righteousness grounded in an exclusive focus on identity and identification, which all too often becomes an alibi for the replication of the dynamics of primitivism and Orientalism under other names. Ultimately alienation and identification are inseparable and complementary. Our historical understanding of global modernism and our ethical assessments of our positions in the world today require us to recognize and engage this complex dynamic.
Notes
1. Andrew Edgar and Peter Sedgwick, Cultural Theory: Key Concepts (London: Routledge, 1999), 18–20.
2. Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde (1962), trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), 127.
3. Now commonly referenced as “Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting,” Brecht’s essay was originally published in a London journal as “The Fourth Wall of China: An Essay on the Effect of Disillusion in the Chinese Theatre,” Life and Letters 15, no. 6 (1936): 116–123. Although Brecht wrote in German, his biographer describes the essay as “written for the English-speaking world where he increasingly saw his future. Stephen Parker, Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 352.
4. Both terms came to English from French. The Oxford English Dictionary cites a first usage of “avant-garde” as an English word in 1910. According to the OED, the word “movement,” rarely used before the eighteenth century, came into common parlance as military terminology (this is the OED’s second meaning, with a first citation from 1762 and a definition quoted from a military dictionary of 1876: “the regular and orderly motion of an army for some particular purpose”). The OED’s sixth meaning—after the “movements” of watches and so forth—is a “course or series of actions and endeavours on the part of a body of persons, moving or tending toward some special end.” The example given is the “Oxford Movement.” The OED, originally compiled in the second half of the nineteenth century, gives no examples of “movement” specifically applied to groups in the arts, which were referred to as “schools,” a term with very different connotations. The first Anglophone uses of “movement” in relation to art I have found concern the Pre-Raphaelites. An article in Tinsley’s Magazine 8 (1871): 392, mentions “the growing Preraphaelite movement”; an 1894 book is titled Dante Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite Movement. But “Pre-Raphaelite school” was also common. By the twentieth century, “school” was rarely used to describe artistic contingents, and when it was it carried pejorative implications of pretentious or old-fashioned rule following.
5. My analysis is grounded in Raymond Williams’s incisive explication of the avant-garde as a bourgeois “class fraction.” Raymond Williams, “The Bloomsbury Fraction,” in Culture and Materialism: Selected Essays (London: Verso, 1980), 148–169.
6. M. Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985), 58–59.
7. Donald Preziosi, “The Art of Art History,” in The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, 2nd ed., ed. Donald Preziosi (1998; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 489, 493.
8. James Clifford, “Stories of the Tribal and the Modern,” in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 191.
9. See, for example, the discussion of Nicole Eisenman in Christopher Reed, Art and Homosexuality: A History of Ideas (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 242–243. The difference between the avant-garde and the counterculture is discussed by Elissa Auther and Adam Lerner in the introduction to the anthology West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965–1977 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1912), xvii–xxxvi.
10. This argument was sustained through a long and vitriolic public exchange between an editor at Artforum and the curators of the exhibition, reprinted in Bill Beckley, ed., Uncontrollable Beauty: Toward a New Aesthetics (New York: Allworth, 1998), 149–260.
11. The exhibition ran July 22–September 7, 2015. This wall text also appeared on the webpage for the exhibition. http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2015/china-through-the-looking-glass/exhibition-galleries.
12. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff, eds., Critical Terms for Art History, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 219. Further references are cited in the text.
13. R. A. Miller defined “reverse Orientalism” in Japan’s Modern Myth: The Language and Beyond (New York: Weatherhill, 1982) to describe “the ideology of sociolinguistic exclusiveness.” Miller explains: “It is rather as if the Japanese were, in this instance at least, determined to do it to themselves and to their own culture before others can do it for and to them—the ‘doing’ in both instances being the creation of an image in terms of which other cultures or traditions will consist of something radically different—what Said calls establishing the Other” (209). Although Miller’s focus is on the Japanese language after World War II, he traces manifestations of “reverse Orientalism” to “the period of the Meiji Restoration when the spectacle of a prostrate China being picked to bits by the predatory Western powers was understandably a matter of concern” (210). His paradoxical conclusion is that this constructed authenticity is authentically Japanese: “something truly unique, a genuine innovation of Japanese society and culture” (211). Yuko Kikuchi uses “Reverse Orientalism” to analyze the presentation of Japanese crafts in the West after World War II. Japanese Modernization and Mingei Theory (London: Routledge Curzon, 2004), 197.
14. Francis Haskell, “A Turk and His Pictures in Nineteenth-Century Paris,” Oxford Art Journal 5, no. 1 (Spring 1982): 46.
15. See, for example, Richard Ellman, Yeats: The Man, the Masks (New York, Macmillan, 1948), 212. This respected study has been much reissued, most recently in 1999. Descriptions of Ito as a Noh dancer who “performed the play” rather than as a modern choreographer who collaborated in creating the performance persist; see Karen E. Brown, The Yeats Circle: Verbal and Visual Relations in Ireland, 1880–1939 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 64.
16. John Whittier Treat, Great Mirrors Shattered (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 86, 199, 209.
17. Timon Screech, Sex and the Floating World: Erotic Images in Japan, 1700–1820, 2nd ed. (London: Reaktion, 2009), 287.
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