Long the provenance of art criticism, contemporary art history has recently become a field in its own right. As art historians traditionally focused on art of the past, many American art history departments cautioned against such insurrections against the “objectivity” presumably necessary to the work of the field, only recently allowing, for example, students to write dissertations on living artists. The expansion of the contemporary art world since 1989 has generated an incredible growth in contemporary art history. This is most apparent in North American universities, where the professionalization of the discipline has progressed rapidly. With an increasing number of participants attempting to make sense of the recent past, the vast subject of study has been divvied up into particular case studies, extending a more conventionally accepted model of the monographic project. Still, a host of methodological questions have arisen, as practitioners become more self-reflexive about the challenges of analyzing historical events that are still unfolding. This is the impetus behind Our Literal Speed’s contribution “Our Literal Speed,” which emphasizes both the reclaiming of the supposed uselessness of art-historical work as well as the importance of studying the space and movement between art and non-art, what they call “the bleed.”
Through their essay as well as the others in this chapter a number of questions arise: Is contemporary art history just another form of criticism? What constitutes scholarly work when a contemporary art-historical study is the first sustained work on an artist? How does one determine if a living artist is of historical significance? Is contemporary art history a general field, or is it divided into specialties like contemporary Chinese art history, contemporary Latin American art history, etc.? This latter question is central to Chika Okeke-Agulu’s essay “Globalization, Art History, and the Specter of Difference,” in which he argues, using the example of contemporary African art, that the field of art history in its attempts to be a global discipline must attend to the methodological challenges non-Western art provides, making it clear that a comparative kind of art history is necessary.
There are also broader issues about the relevance of contemporary art history to the wider contemporary art world; whether or not, for example, it participates in its discourses? For Carrie Lambert-Beatty, as she stakes out in “The Academic Condition of Contemporary Art,” it resoundingly does. The university with all its attendant complications is nevertheless a place that supports a kind of art writing given to sustained reflection, and not immediately pressured to be timely, or put another way, contemporary. It is often suggested, somewhat naively, that the university is a refuge from the machinations of the culture industry. This is obviously no longer the case, and in this realization comes the need to re-evaluate what it means to write the art history of the present.
This event took place in an art gallery at Fabbrica del Vapore in Milan, Italy, November 3, 2010.
Two actors ascend a shallow gray stage, a stage that had been treated heretofore as a sculpture within the gallery. John Spelman (JS) plays an artist. Abbey Shaine Dubin (ASD) plays an art writer. They hold papers that one assumes are the scripts for the performance. They occasionally refer to them for guidance, but not too often. They begin.
ASD [politely laughs, makes sweeping gesture with hand]: So, John Spelman … thanks for being here. I know this is a bit awkward, I mean, as an artist to be asked to present your contribution to a volume on contemporary art in this way. [gestures with hand]
JS [politely smiles]: Yes, it’s nonstandard, but it’s really my pleasure.
ASD: Just to start with your recent artist’s statements. You say that the discourse around art, the words, inflections, tones, things like that, the marginal attributes that make art feel, well, like art, all those things are, um, more important than the art itself. Is that right? Is that fair to say?
JS [with a serious expression]: Yes, I guess that’s fair to say, though what I really said was that the demarcations between art and the non-art that surrounds art have grown so ambiguous over the last twenty years that it’s really the bleed that you analyze now, not so much the art gestures themselves.
ASD: The bleed? That sounds like what you mean is the “trickling-over” of non-art into art.
JS: Well, um, you know, in music recording, bleed refers to a sound—usually undesirable and hard to control—that happens when one instrument is picked up by a microphone dedicated to another instrument. Maybe we could say that the art world had been set up to “record” art through one “microphone” and non-art (curators, critics, historians, etc.) through another. Sure, those sounds were sometimes intentionally mixed together after they were recorded—think conceptual art or institutional critique—but what happens with art and non-art in the 1990s is a lot like recording engineers discovering feedback in the 1960s. Undesirable and hard to control “noise” around the intended sound began to seem raw and sexy, even a lot more interesting than the sound itself—same thing with art over the last two decades: The non-art reverberations around the art started to be channeled, controlled and directed by artists like Rirkrit Tiravanija and Anton Vidokle, or enterprises like Bernadette Corporation. You could say that Tino Sehgal’s This Progress on the ramps of the Guggenheim was the art version of In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, a big explosion of raw feedback.
ASD [hesitantly]: Okay, uh … Okay, I see. So you’re saying that the artist’s talk in Walid Raad’s work is not an additive to the art, it is art itself or for Sehgal, museum employees play more important roles than any objects created by the artist …
JS [cuts in]: Right. There are no objects.
ASD: Or in Tania Bruguera’s art, openings and presentations become performances, though she does not necessarily notify anyone of this fact beforehand.
JS: So we can say that stuff near art …
ASD [cuts in]: … that is not art…
JS [cuts in]: … began to be treated as if it were art. As a result, the professional and discursive framing that allowed us to rapidly, almost automatically, distinguish art from its near-art, yet non-art surroundings, has been transformed in challenging ways. So, what I mean is, uh, that you cannot say that the art is HERE [points to the ground] and the non-art is over THERE [points away]. What this means, I think, is that the stuff around the art, especially all of the curating, writing and talking about art, but not only the curating, writing and talking—all sorts of different aspects of the art situation in general—they waver between just pure and simple decoration and [raises hands as if holding something in front of him] meaningful extrapolations, disruptions, affirmations, or negations. [hands go down] Or maybe all of that wrapped together in one package.
ASD: According to you, then, you have to analyze the bleed from one area to the other, from the clearly marked out ART area to OTHER areas, and vice versa. And as an art spectator—or, for me, as an art writer—you judge whether this bleed exhibits the density, complexity and vitality that we attribute, or at least traditionally have attributed, to artworks.
JS: Exactly.
ASD: To me, this sounds like relational aesthetics, right?
JS: It’s not far off. The thing about relational aesthetics is that there’s never any honest to God uncertainty about the art and non-art—art becomes a social interstice, as Nicolas Bourriaud says, it opens up, but the producers remain the producers and the consumers remain the consumers. Art just ceases to be self-contained in rigidly obvious ways.
ASD: But there’s more?
JS: Right, there’s more. What I am saying is that at the same time that you had art colonizing all of these practices that had not been part of conventional art experience, activities and situations that no one ever thought were art started to seem kind of artful. They started to seem to be art in a backdoor kind of way.
ASD [quizzically]: So anything near art began to glow from the radiation cloud of relational aesthetics and the aftermath of conceptualism and institutional critique? [pause] So non-art near art started to become art-like by accident?
JS [searching for exact words]: Yes, more or less, um, yes. I mean some people will say, “Oh Duchamp did this a century ago,” but this is different, I think. I’m not talking about an artist pulling non-art into the art zone. This is not the Readymade here. I’m talking about situations in which it really, literally became hard to say where the “edges” of the art might be, uh, where you could comfortably shut down the analytical tools that you use for coming to terms with art, uh, experience and, you know, switch on other tools. Surfaces, textures and relationships already present in the culture, yet not recognized as artful—were assuming a sense of artful “form”—producing “new edges.” Like all of the non-art near-art effects connected to things like Utopia Station, Rainer Ganahl’s photographs, and Jackson Pollock Bar’s “theory installations”—or Hila Peleg’s film A Crime Against Art—all of these would be examples of this process of edge-formation in action.
ASD [slowly and deliberately]: So if you place these “newly edged” forms in juxtaposition to each other—they then “vibrate”—in your words, they [scare quotes] “bleed,” creating odd psychological atmospheres, professional expectations, and collective assumptions—the pedagogical unconscious of art, so to speak.
JS: Right.
ASD: Because later this situation will be analyzed. You then produce “new edges” around the bleed—and THEN you analyze the bleed from the NEWLY edged thing, and so on. In the process the viewer or reader experiences zones of opacity that demand new analytical criteria, but all of this happens outside the constraints of any overarching goal. Is that right?
JS [a little confused]: Yeah. I think that’s right. It’s not a matter of convincing people of something. [shaking head and gesturing with arms]
ASD [with slight sarcasm]: Criteria for criteria’s sake, then?
JS: More like complex interpretations as a means to grasp complex forms. You know, so, uh, for example, [looks out at audience, addresses audience] what you are looking at right now, is this art? I mean it looks and feels like something near art but probably not exactly art art, as Allan Kaprow would say. Like, this is an interview situation, but not an interview as art.
ASD: Well, I don’t know—what are you saying? That we have to pump up the affective intensities for it to be art-like? Sensationalize it or numb it? Produce some obvious drama or something? I mean …
JS [cuts in]: What we have here are two people talking about art in an art situation, but that situation is mediated by a lot of traditionally non-art signifiers. To me, this [scare quotes] “reads” as a legitimate non-art situation near art.
ASD: But some people are seeing this in a gallery in Milan on the third of November 2010. They are seeing this as a performance or something like a performance. And they probably think this is some kind of really mannered, decadent, self-reflexive art-thing thing, you know?
JS: Sure. And it kind of is. But the idea is that some people are going to read this conversation in a book on contemporary art?
ASD: Yes, that’s the idea.
JS: Good luck with that. To me, I have to admit, the contemporary academic is, as they say, [scare quotes] “the businessperson without a business”—someone who sincerely believes that he does something valuable, but who rarely convinces anyone that he produces anything of much value.
ASD [nodding her head]: It’s true. Every art scholar now plays the role of a middle manager who just happens to know a few facts about Agnes Martin’s brushstroke—a person who is informed at regular intervals that he is ripe for termination in the university curriculum; a person who is informed that, in fact, the stuff being produced in the business schools and law schools is serious, and that the academic who knows about Agnes Martin’s brushstroke should be grateful he gets a paycheck at all. And, just to be clear: Agnes Martin’s brushstroke is important and the scholar who writes about it is doing something valuable. We’re just doing a rotten job of proving it.
JS: Logically, the right move here would not be to make scholarship more “relevant” or more friendly to law and business—the best approach would be to make it …
ASD [cuts in]: Stranger. Stop trying to justify our worth and just emphasize that what we do has no worth and never will.
JS: You don’t convince people of the value of the forest by turning it into a Denny’s parking lot. You don’t convince people of the value of the arts and humanities by making them [scare quotes] “more relevant, more accessible.” People go out of their way to go to the forest because it’s alien to them, not functional, not familiar, not useful in any way. [pause] The sad truth: People don’t care about the guy who knows about Agnes Martin’s brushstroke …
ASD: … because they presume that he has no balls (figuratively speaking). Who cares what he thinks?
JS: Right. So those people who buy (or, let’s face it, download for free) this contemporary art volume are going to be reading this as a transcript, this stuff on these pages [waves script], and thinking: Hey, out of bounds, this is totally self-indulgent, uh, you know, crap. Not informative at all. Just …
ASD [nods head vigorously, cuts in]: Yeah, it’s, I mean, a totally valid criticism. I just want to point out, that up to now, academics have secretly hoped that they were more talented than the business, marketing, communications, or legal people—but they were always afraid to act on that feeling.
JS: Rappers succeed by pointing to their own success.
ASD: And academics would too. It’s a circular model of production. You know, a businessperson gets to drive a Mercedes and stay at the Ritz-Carlton, but he has to be on guard against competitors. The market has cycles.
JS: Such are the vagaries of capitalism.
ASD: Every tenured professor in the United States should say loud and proud (and preferably in rhyming form): I am obligated to work maybe four hours a day for maybe three days a week and I get four months of vacation. Arts and humanities professors should brag about doing whatever they want and not working.
JS [somewhat irritated]: Isn’t that exactly the wrong approach? I mean you’re drawing attention to what everyone already hates about academics … non-tenured people will get fired or have their workloads increased. It sounds, well, stupid.
ASD: You just have to abandon the conception of the arts and humanities as an underperforming branch office in the corporate culture and view them for what they really are: an easy lifestyle that millions of young people would envy if they only knew how it worked. Rich kids know that academia is a pretty good deal for the talkative, lazy and dreamy, middle-class kids generally don’t. That’s why the arts and humanities have no problem existing at elite schools, but are collapsing for the middle class everywhere. But if middle-class kids got the message …
JS [cuts in]: You get to do whatever you want within reason, have no boss, can’t get fired without a raft of lawsuits, and are surrounded by smart, attractive young people …
ASD [cuts in]: And on top of that, my guess is that field would be a pretty popular university major.
JS: If rappers whined about cruising around in Honda Accords and working afternoons at Taco Bell, while complaining that their chances of getting rich were pretty slim, they would probably move fewer units. Right now, people look at the arts and humanities and they see these frightened, cowering people begging administrators and legislators to have pity on them.
ASD: Therefore we—the academics—are moving fewer units. Look, I can go to just about any city in the United States and convince that city to build a $150 million art museum. Why? Because people seem to think art museums are important, even though they have no idea why. Cities around the country build modern and contemporary art spaces even though most people have no idea what modern and contemporary art are. Why? Because they are acting unconsciously on the repressed awareness that the art in those museums expresses something wild, free, crazy and self-involved that they don’t experience directly in their daily lives. Just like those art museums, universities should be filled with discursive provocation and glamorous uselessness in the service of absolutely nothing. The future of the arts and humanities is the arts and humanities.
JS: I don’t know … it seems like corporate culture today trades on the myth of “wild, free, crazy and self-involved” lives. It’s the dominant aesthetic of capital.
ASD [cuts in]: Yes, but in museums people glimpse something, or at least THINK they glimpse something “wild, free, crazy and self-involved” that is not entirely reducible to consumerist myth-making. They perceive this stuff in museums as useless and inscrutable, not intoxicating or empowering. It’s like a product that you can’t imagine how to use. Anything can be in a museum for any reason, [pause] or that’s how it seems, despite forty years of Pierre Bourdieu and Hans Haacke. There’s no obvious motive, [pause] no easily trackable motives. The same way that we don’t expect teachers to be selling us something in the classroom. We expect museums and teachers to be, you know, in some other psychic space.
JS: Then maybe the figure of the scholar promises something other than more consumerism?
ASD: So far, not really. Art writing today is like art around 1900. We are living in the Age of the Scholar-Bouguereau, of Salon scholarship. Academia is still tied to a completely obsolete model of production and consumption, a one-size-fits-all situation of timeless standards and shared cultural assumptions about value, quality, and pedagogical propriety.
JS: So now it’s time to drive illusionistic space out of scholarly activity?
ASD: That’s one way to put it. It’s a matter of making things more difficult, not easier. For example, right now—you have to admit there’s a paradox working here, because what you are looking at in front of you, in the book or on the screen, I mean, if you are reading the book and not here at this moment in the gallery, then those book pages or scans or computer screen images are definitely not art. They are non-art near art.
JS: Obviously. It’s a contribution on contemporary art in a book on contemporary art.
ASD: But that contribution, you’d have to admit, is also crucially not not art.
JS [slowly]: … Okay, right. It’s too involved with art-like stuff to be obviously not art … like, this all feels as if it might be art, but, all the same, it is not art. So the bleed, then, to me, maybe, is the space in which not not art lives.
ASD [with growing enthusiasm]: I think so, yes. So this bleed, this zone of not not art, is something like looking at art’s entrails. Like a mystical, pagan thing—outwardly arbitrary, yet still somehow convincing. Like “This lamb’s heart looks like it has bad news for me.” Am I going to ignore that lamb’s heart? No. But do I really comprehend its message? Also no. And you know the inevitable punchline here: [pause] The most compelling art today probably makes you feel like it’s not not art.
JS [smiling]: That has to be right.
ASD: But let’s get back to the main thing: What about your ongoing art projects?
JS: Well, in Pretoria, down in South Africa, I just built a 73,000 gallon, uh… waterfall … that circulates water gathered from all the lakes and rivers in South Dakota with Native American names. We worked for three years with a whole cadre of great people, all local tribes, up there in South Dakota to collect it. It’s called water-fall, with a dash between water and fall.
ASD: Nice title.
JS: So the water. Well, we pumped it all into a tanker docked in Duluth that had been registered to the North Korean government—we sent out a call to former North Korean nationals—mostly living in South Korea—who had some experience with the merchant marine—and then we had a documentary film crew that had worked with Allan Sekula interview all of them about their experiences back in North Korea and on the sea, you know, about their lives on the water and under totalitarianism. So, that’s how we got the water to South Africa from South Dakota. With a bunch of South Korean–North Korean sailors.
ASD: But there’s more?
JS [nervously, but smiling]: Yes, there’s more. We built a combination solar/hydroelectric power plant and a warehouse at the top of the waterfall. The warehouse has 32 projection rooms that show the documentary films of the sailors, all shot with old Bell & Howell 8 mm cameras. You can watch the interviews anytime, night or day, translated into 157 languages and dialects. And then over the warehouse and the waterfall, there’s a huge, really massive neon sign, made by skilled artisans in Volgagrad, in Russia. It used to be Stalingrad, but now it’s Volgagrad—in, um, uh, an old tank factory we had three whole workshops building this neon sign for two years. It’s 60 meters tall and 300 meters wide and it flashes continuously—I mean it is bright for a minute, then it goes dark for a minute. Then bright again for a minute. So 12 hours a day bright/12 hours a day dark. At night, you can see it 15 miles away.
ASD: 365 days a year?
JS: Yes, absolutely. And the neon is blue. The color is called Profound Ocean Blue.
ASD [under breath]: Profound Ocean Blue.
JS: Yes, and you know what phrase the neon flashes above that waterfall in Pretoria, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
ASD: What does it say?
JS: It says [raises his hands above his head and his left hand moves to punctuate each word]: HUMANITY WILL TRIUMPH NO MATTER WHAT THE CAPITALISTS DO BECAUSE HUMAN NATURE IS A LOT BETTER THAN THEY THINK IT IS. [lowers right hand, keeps left hand aloft, forming a balled fist which he shakes slightly] And there’s an extra bold period at the end of the phrase. The period is in a different color. It’s called Sundrenched Saffron. [lowers left arm]
Actors hold their final poses a long second, then exit the stage.
The great challenge for twenty-first-century art history is how to come to terms with previously underrepresented texts, scholars, artistic traditions, and artworks. Motivated, as Arjun Appadurai would argue, by rampant forces of globalization, it has become fashionable within Euro-American art history of the last ten years to speak of a global art history. I am concerned with two immediate problems that the global turn raises: The first regards strategies of normalizing difference; the second involves the prospects of art history as a parochial discipline with aspirations for global relevance. Moreover, my anxiety about the motivation for and goals of a global art history stems from what Shelly Errington calls the “intertwined history” of art history, European national consciousness, and colonialism.1 To what extent might a global art history represent the triumph of the darker side of globalization, the homogenization of world culture?
My experience of teaching an art history survey in an American university informs my anxiety about the nefarious potential of a global art history, especially as it pertains to contemporary art. Before I taught this course, which normally begins with prehistoric art and ends with the present, my colleagues—all from Euro-American art history backgrounds—skipped the few chapters of Marilyn Stokstad’s book that dealt with non-Western artistic traditions, maintaining instead the normative Egypt–Greece–Rome–Paris–New York genealogy. I agreed to teach this course with the understanding that I would include African art; but I also added the sections of Stokstad dealing with pre-Columbian art, Asian, Islamic and African Art, as well as a few supplementary texts. Initial enthusiasm quickly dissipated because, as some colleagues pointed out, students were missing key materials on northern Renaissance, Dutch, and Rococo periods as a result of these non-Western introductions. My experiment, in other words, had disrupted the normative narrative, and had to be shelved.
Despite the professed desire for a more inclusive survey, an art history long-premised on the idea of an extant family tree can expand on the condition that new members justify their inclusion without disrupting the genealogical narrative. This obsolete model of art history still maintains conditions utterly insensitive to the realities of our historical pasts and the present day.2 As Basil Davidson suggests, in his review of Martin Bernal’s Black Athena, the purification of Europe’s culturally complicated history coincided with the onset of modern European nationalism and imperialism from the eighteenth century onwards.3 This returns us to the problem of art history’s originary links to national myths and imperial ideologies, and the urgent need of rethinking its deeply embedded disciplinary assumptions.
The task of recent art history is not just to develop an inclusive history of art, but also to take stock of the methodological and historiographical challenges African art, for example, brings to the discipline as it grapples with the realities of contemporary art (especially of the last thirty years). In teasing out some of these difficulties it will become clear that I suspect that, whatever form this global art history takes, its practitioners might see in this art history an effective replacement for the bewildering multiplicity of practices, each informed by peculiar historical, intellectual, and political conditions of our contemporary world. I suggest that Africanist art history—with all of its peculiarities—offers useful ideas for reframing the work of art history in the present.
To be sure, Africanist art history poses numerous challenges. Western art-historical accounts narrate the succession of artistic events through time, and the recuperation of texts illuminating this history constitute art-historical research—but not for most Africanist art history. With the exception of parts of Northern Africa and Ethiopia, where writing in Arabic and Amharic respectively were established before the arrival of Portuguese explorers in the fifteenth century, the cultures of the rest of the continent developed without systematic writing as we know it.4 Genealogies and historical events were mostly transmitted instead through oral traditions, and although there are rare instances where such oral histories maintain remarkable fidelity centuries back in time they are often limited to accounts of distinguished kings and lineage ancestors. Even among the Yoruba, who have ritual poems called oriki, some of which mention the work of dead artists, such information is fragmentary, mytho-poetic, and resistant to biographical interpretation. The result is the absence of a narrative historical memory of African visual cultures.
African art history’s apparent resistance to chronological narration stems from the very nature of the art’s forms. The majority of African art and design in museum collections date no earlier than the mid-nineteenth century largely because they were rendered in wood, textiles, and other organic materials ill-suited for survival in the humid tropics. But also only very rarely were objects kept and valued for their age by their owners; in fact, the quest for iconographic novelty and stylistic innovation, or the need to retain ritual efficacy, often meant that aging sculptures were replaced by new ones. It also reflects changes in the economic status of the owners or the impact of newer aesthetic ideals. The seeming lack of respect for old works of art is tied to cosmological systems characterized by a view of life and time as a cyclical continuum of birth, death, and rebirth. Thus the uniqueness of the arts of nonliterate African societies as subjects for art-historical inquiry is all too obvious.5
While this scenario calls for and has provided occasional opportunity for fresh approaches, it often leads to what the archaeologist Peter Garlake described as “the frustrations of African archaeology and art history.”6 Except in the few cases, such as Benin, where some written records exist in European archives of centuries-old interaction of value to art historians, Africanist research depends on ethnographic methods, rather than archival research—except if one thinks of human beings as living archives (as the Malian writer and ethnographer Hampâté Bâ asserted with his much-cited claim at a UNESCO 1960 conference that the death of an old man in Africa is equivalent to the burning of a library).7
Indeed, the arrival of African-born scholars in Western universities has highlighted the necessity for the introduction of native discourse into African art-historical scholarship to counter obfuscation of indigenous ideas when Western terms are used to describe them. And, it was not until the work of these scholars thoroughly versed in languages and cultural practices of their native societies that scholarship began to mine the rich resources lodged in oral traditions.8
The forms and patterns of art-historical research in African universities reveal further the considerable differences in what constitutes art history within and outside the continent. European and non-African courses or materials are absent from curricula in Ghana and Nigeria; an art history student might complete his/her education through the doctoral level with little knowledge of Western and Asian art. At the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, home to the oldest art history program in Nigeria, at the graduate level, there are course topics on seventeenth- to nineteenth-century Western art; twentieth-century Western art; African American art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and African American art of the twentieth century. There are also topics in Japanese, Chinese, Oriental art, and such, but these are more or less merely cosmetic, since all of the program’s instructors have always been strictly Africanists. So, to Nigerian art history students names like Wölfflin, Riegel, Michael Fried, T. J. Clark, Gombrich—the staples of the American historiography class—are likely to be read second-hand, without much significance placed on the specific intellectual contexts of their work, if they are known at all. And, in the case of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi in Ghana, another important center of humanistic studies in West Africa, its MA/PhD in art is strictly focused on “African Art and Culture.”
This raises the question of how to explain the apparent absence of Western (or any other non-African) art-historical studies in the programs at Nsukka and Kumasi? Practically, why teach art the students will most likely never see in the original? If art history has depended on the close encounter between the scholar/observer and the artwork, it makes little sense to pretend to engage with the works of European artists lodged in collections guarded by impossible visa regimes. Of course, there have been rare occasions when some minor works by European modernists, such as Picasso and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, were respectively presented in small exhibitions in Senegal and Nigeria during the 1960s. But for the most part, Euro-American art comes to Africa only in reproduction. Although libraries on the continent could import art books and texts in the early post-independence period, the imposition of Structural Adjustment Programs (SAP) by the IMF and World Bank in the early 1980s effectively decimated university resources, including the capacity of libraries to maintain foreign journal subscriptions, and compromised the ability of scholars to participate in overseas conferences and workshops.9 Starved of foreign exchange many African governments insisted on locally manufactured products since imports were either prohibited or totally impossible to obtain. For their part scholars (and artists) were forced to turn further inwards. This constriction of the little pre-SAP access to Euro-American scholarship resulted in virtually autonomous development of scholarship.
But there are ideological factors, too, related to Anglophone African political decolonization movements.10 Artists and intellectuals working within the realm of culture frequently re-engaged and identified with indigenous African cultures threatened by the imposition of Western-style education and Christian missionary doctrines by colonial regimes. More broadly, early nationalist movements often sought to resist the imposition of European cultural ethos on the colonial peoples. This is evident in the support of polygamy and native dress by the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Lagos nationalist elites bent on differentiating their vision of an African modernity from that promoted by the colonial administration and the church. Indeed this counter-Western ideological practice was important to the rhetoric of pan-Africanism and black affirmative movements in Africa; it would later inspire the complex anti-Europeanism of such postcolonial dictators as Mobutu Sese-Seko of Zaire/Congo, who promulgated a national authenticité program emblematized by the state-sanctioned changes of both given names and surnames, from European to Congolese to reflect ancestral lineages, for all citizens in the 1970s. While this represents one of the more extreme manifestations of the politics of anti-Westernism, it underscores the idea that the absence of serious Western art studies in the curricula of Ghanaian and Nigerian universities was not always determined by the availability of material resources. Rather the focus on national and continental art histories is justified by the need to write the self into, and to make up for, lost history. It moreover reminds us of the complex ways ideology and national imaginaries determine the direction of scholarship.
To be sure, the attainment of political independence in Anglophone West Africa beginning in the 1950s coincided with the establishment of new universities and the autonomy of colleges formerly affiliated with British universities. This commonly was followed by the replacement of European faculty with African scholars and, more crucially, the development, in the spirit of pan-Africanism, of Africa-focused curricula with intensive research on indigenous artistic forms, practices, and cultural traditions. At the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, for instance, virtually all research-based undergraduate honors theses as well as graduate dissertations written in the school’s art/art history program are based on primary research in the traditional and contemporary arts of southern Nigeria. At some level the narrow focus on African or even, for the most part, national arts in these post-independence art history programs fulfill the need to generate substantial scholarship where none existed, especially in the modern and contemporary field.
Like so-called traditional African art, contemporary African art—which in the past decade or so has emerged as a distinct sub-discipline in Africanist scholarship—presents significant challenges to any conversation about possibilities of globalized art history today.11 It seems to me that the crisis variously imagined as the “end” of art or art history by scholars as diverse as Arthur Danto and Hans Belting, might not only be symptomatic of a wider anxiety about the decline of Euro-American political hegemony as Noël Carroll has suggested.12 Rather it is the consequence of the disorientation caused by the rupturing—by art, artists, and artistic knowledge from outside of the West—of centuries-old art history practice built around a unitary history of Western art as the history of art. That is to say, what has more or less ended with contemporary art since 1989 and inaugurated by the exhibition Magiciens de la Terre at the Centre Georges Pompidou, are insular traditions of Western art. And this is where, faced with the heterogeneity of contemporary art, continuing attempts to make sense of the chaos simply by homogenizing the troubling difference, or forcing it into narrative order based on the evolution of form over time, are doomed to fail.
What is more, there is the ever-present danger of reducing the work of African artists—and artists from the so-called “Third World”—to the mimicry of Euro-American models, when close attention to the complex intersections of local and international formal and conceptual sources in global twentieth-century art can, as the art historian Ikem Okoye has argued, suggest new ways of thinking about the history of art as such.13 Allied to this attitude is the tendency to assume that the quality of art history outside of the West must be measured by the extent to which it approximates the structure of and trends in Euro-American scholarship.14 I am reminded of James Elkins’ suggestion that the absence of Baxandall and other canonical Western art historians in South African art history curricula represents a case of collective amnesia, as if to say the intellectual investments of South African art historians must align with those of their American counterparts. But also, while it seems logical to bemoan the apparent lack of mastery of the texts of the Western art historical canon—and thus the insufficiency of African or Asian scholars as respectable players in the global field—the tendency by Western scholars to ignore extant work of their African and Asian counterparts is indicative of the one-sidedness of globalist art history transaction.
To take but one example: American art historian Rosalind Krauss published a brilliant essay on the work of South African artist William Kentridge in 2000, thus bringing an African artist, arguably for the first time, into the rarefied intellectual orbit of October—and into the (Western) art history mainstream. Yet a cursory inspection of her references revealed a surprising absence of any text by the African art historians and critics who had written already quite extensively and compellingly on the artist’s work.15 Krauss’s essay gives the impression that critical discourse on Kentridge only started in the late 1990s, and in the West. This highlights the revelation of what could be the underlying motivation for the now desirable consolidation of the islands that constitute the world of art history: the quest for new materials and digestible subjects for Euro-American art history. The crucial question is whether the new-found curiosity for art from outside of Euro-America is matched by interest in scholarship generated by this same art in their inaugural sites, for without the latter there cannot be a truly mutual exchange and transaction of ideas that ought to form the basis of a global art history.
Granted, the quality of art-historical scholarship, say, in Nigeria, has suffered from the general malaise in that country’s educational system in the wake of economic decline and brain drain precipitated by the Structural Adjustment Programs of the 1980s. Yet I am not convinced that it is enough to wield the hammer of “quality”—which for long had been used to keep out women, black, and minority artists and scholars from entering the castle of white, male, Euro-American art history—in order to justify the lack of meaningful, critical engagement with scholarship produced or circulating outside the Western academic network.
My concern is how art history as a field today can effectively accommodate the multiplicity of narratives, methods, and ideological positions that inform the different manifestations of the discipline in many parts of the world and resist the impulse to homogenize not just the methods, but also the subjects of art-historical inquiry. The overhaul of the idea of contemporary art inaugurated by Jean-Hubert Martin’s controversial Magiciens de la Terre show, and the subsequent restructuring of the geographies of contemporary art by third-generation (3G) international biennials (Havana, Dakar, Johannesburg, Istanbul, Gwangju for instance) signaled the end of (art) history, and the impossibility of genealogical narratives that supposedly provided the most compelling accounts of art across time and cultures. For whereas Martin successfully challenged the Eurocentrism of twentieth-century modern/contemporary art by dispensing with the hierarchical system of evaluating art from different parts of the world, the 3G biennials dispelled the idea that the most ambitious contemporary could only be seen in New York, Paris, and London, or at Venice and Documenta. The biennials not only shook up the center/periphery paradigm; they dramatically expanded the field of contemporary art, made us aware of its global dimensions, and of the diverse cultural, political, and socioeconomic histories from which it is constituted.
In the given scenario, it becomes clear that the methodologies I have ascribed to African art studies can suggest ways of dealing with global contemporary art without recourse to the unworkable regime of genealogical narration. Where Africanist scholars, forced by the nature of their subject and material, developed ingenuous, complex methodologies, but without the anxieties of establishing genealogies of art forms, historians of contemporary art must also overcome apprehensions of constructing a unitary history of contemporary art, and imagine new ways of comprehending its multitudinous nature.
The globalization of contemporary art and art history ought not simply conduce to a universal approach to the study of art; rather it must draw primarily—though not necessarily exclusively—from local intellectual traditions, and speak to each other from those locations. Moreover, the problem of imposing patently Western perspectives on art from other world cultures is no longer intellectually defensible, especially when theories developed “elsewhere”—such as postcolonial theory—are never tested for their universal applicability by the same Western advocates of a global diffusion.16
The recognition of the multitudinous nature of art, cultures, and art histories—as well as the discrepant intellectual traditions subsisting in sites of knowledge production across the globe—calls for the re-mapping of the landscape of world art and disciplinary art history’s approach to it. Haunted as it is by the specter of its own self-induced obsolescence, the revitalization of art history will require recovery of the essence of multiculturalism: the recognition of varieties of cultural (and artistic) experiences and histories without the hierarchical assumptions of post-Enlightenment european knowledge systems. A multiculturalist approach would strengthen rather than flatten out difference; it would also serve as a bulwark against neo-imperial tendencies of globalization.
Methodologically, this process calls for the development of comparative art history. Despite the criticisms that have been leveled against the discipline of comparative literature, its recognition of the validity of multiple literatures and literary traditions that can be studied relationally provides a model for contemporary art history, criticism, and theory. Unlike positivist art history, comparative art history demands familiarity with multiple contexts, histories, and geographies of art, as well as the willingness to step outside of the confines of an increasingly untenable and parochial Euro-American canon. A comparative art history will equally mean replacing standard units of art-historical analyses tied to the enduring notion of fixed borders, nationalities, and regions, with ones that emphasize contact zones and the polycentricity of contemporary artistic production and traffic, and the experience of history. The ultimate shape this project might take must be different from old regime art history.
Notes
1 Shelly Errington, “Globalizing Art History,” in James Elkins, ed., Is Art History Global? (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 417.
2 Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, “Narrativizing Visual Culture,” in Nicholas Mirzoeff, ed., Visual Culture Reader (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 29.
3 Basil Davidson, “The Ancient World and Africa: Whose Roots?” Race & Class 29: 1 (1987), pp. 1–15.
4 There are countless syllabaries, sign systems and scripts, including nsibidi of the Efik and adinkra signs of the Akan, as well as the Vai and Njoya scripts of the Mande and Bamun peoples respectively.
5 Michel Leiris, “Preface,” in Jacqueline Delange, The Art and Peoples of Black Africa, trans., Carol F. Jopling (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1974), pp. xv–xvi.
6 Peter Garlake, Early Art and Architecture of Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 113.
7 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amadou_Hampâté_Bâ.
8 Babatunde Lawal, The Gelede Spectacle: Art, Gender, and Social Harmony in an African Culture (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996).
9 To be sure, the problem of circulation of publications has been significantly ameliorated by online resources in the past few years.
10 At the University of Khartoum, its archaeology program is focused on Sudanese and Middle Eastern archaeological history. On the other hand, at the American University in Cairo, the three-year art history survey is strictly modeled after the standard (Western) art history survey one finds in Euro-American universities. The transformation in the early 1960s of the Ecole des Beaux Arts, Casablanca curriculum from its earlier focus on Western art traditions to studies of Arabic, Islamic, and Berber arts once Farid Belkahia and his colleagues took over leadership of the school is part of this postcolonial ideological imperative operative, I believe, in Ghana and Nigeria.
11 To clarify, “Contemporary African art,” as used here refers to work discussed and circulated in the same spaces one might encounter international contemporary art.
12 Noël Carroll, “Illusions of Postmodernism,” Raritan 7 (1987), pp. 154–155; Hans Belting, The End of the History of Art, trans. Christopher S. Wood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Arthur Danto, “The End of Art,” in The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 81–115.
13 See Ikem Stanley Okoye, “Tribe and Art History,” Art Bulletin 78: 4 (1996), pp. 610–615.
14 Steven S. Nelson, “The Map of Art History,” Art Bulletin 79: 1 (1997), p. 37.
15 I am thinking here of the various writings of the South African art historian Michael Godby and Okwui Enwezor on the work of William Kentridge during the 1990s.
16 One needs only look at the contents of October and Third Text, for instance, to appreciate the discursive distances separating scholarships in contemporary art produced for the Euro-American and the Third World.
Art historians are always apologizing. Phrases like “I’m sorry you can’t see it in this slide, but …” and “if you were there, you’d see that …” are no less a feature of art history lectures in the age of digital archives, QuickTime, and PowerPoint than they were in the days of magenta-hued 35 mm. In fact, when it comes to relatively recent art, we probably voice more and more complicated versions of these disclaimers now. Older media like painting and drawing at least share their two-dimensionality—and sculpture its stasis—with the photographic media of art-historical presentation. The characteristic formats of contemporary art, like installation, video, or performance, exceed it by design. Temporally closer than other art historians to the art we study, contemporary art historians wind up doubly contrite about distance.
Of course, the more space between art and academia the better, many people would say. A gallery website that mentions the interest in history of one of its artists quickly adds that “her art avoids any kind of academic approach.”1 When a Brecht-quoting video artist won a major prize recently, an art critic worried that “artistic values may be becoming so submerged in academic values that it’s difficult for many people to make out the difference.”2 He didn’t explain what he thought that difference was—he didn’t need to. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries “academic” referred to art sanctioned by the national academies, adhering to hierarchies of genre and strictures of style that modernists aimed to disrupt. But “academic” continues to be a slur. Now, as then, the adjective connotes sterility, predictability, and a general lack of sexiness. The academy is where art goes to die.
If so, we have a problem, because art and academia do seem closer all the time. Artists pursue PhDs in art-making, and art historians dissertate on living artists. But most obviously, academia and art draw closer as a new place is made for contemporary art in departments of art history. In the last decade universities have rapidly added courses, accepted graduate theses, and created faculty lines in “contemporary” as opposed and in addition to “modern” or “twentieth-century” art. In fact, there are consistently more job openings each year in contemporary than any other art-historical subfield.3
Within the academy, some worry that committing resources to contemporary art represents a disregard for historical precedent and a diminishing commitment to the deeper past. Outside academic walls the concern is exactly the opposite: that contemporary art will become more historical. Veteran critic Donald Kuspit envisions an adversarial relationship in which art history tries to control the “heterogeneous and fertile” contemporary, reducing art “to sterile homogeneity.” Under historical care art “withers on the contemporary vine.” A multiplicity of critical interpretations keeps recent art “in contemporary play,” but an historical approach would have it “reified into some historical milestone on the road of a predetermined narrative of artistic progress.” Such ossification, Kuspit continues, is “no doubt academically satisfying, but it is far from the complex reality.”4
Fertility versus sterility, predetermination versus complexity, unanimity versus plurality, reification versus play, and, finally, academia versus reality itself: Kuspit’s resistance to historical approaches is more undisguised than most, but it captures aspects of a wider discomfort with the art historicization of contemporary art. This is the case even among art historians. Though in many ways quite different from apologizing for a faded slide, this view of art history’s dysfunctional relation to recently produced art is a form of art-historical contrition, stemming from the same, seemingly commonsensical assumption: Criticism is done in the presence of art, art-historical presentation in its absence. Art criticism is contemporaneous with the objects it keeps in play; art history is always after them. Art history, though, need not be conceived as adjunct to and inherently failing the object of its study; experiencing art and historicizing it need not be understood as opposing operations. What is needed is a shift in attitude about the art historicization of contemporary art, which requires rethinking the assumption that contemporary art is in and of the last five minutes, on the one hand, and on the other entertaining the possibility that, like galleries or biennials, art history’s journals, conferences, and classrooms are primary avenues for art’s dissemination.
Sharon Hayes recites transcripts of the kidnapped Patty Hearst’s 1974 phone calls. Mark Tribe restages speeches by Cesar Chavez and Angela Davis. Jeremy Deller does a full-scale reenactment, on the original site, of the violent culmination of a 1984 labor strike. Matthew Buckingham makes thousand-year time capsules and recovers a forgotten inventor of cinema. Marcelo Brodsky finds all the classmates from his 1967 school picture who were not “disappeared” during Argentina’s dictatorship. Amie Siegel reshoots, in post-unification Berlin, cold-war era films set in the GDR side of the city. Michael Blum creates a historical museum in tribute to a Turkish feminist who may or may not have been the lover of Mustafa Kemal. Shimon Attie projects historical photographs of Jewish neighborhoods on their original sites in Berlin and Rome. Zoe Leonard and Cheryl Dunye meticulously create the archival record of a forgotten black lesbian movie star. Carola Dertnig constructs a character to narrate Viennese actionism from the women’s perspective. The Atlas Group (Walid Raad) displays the archives of an invented historian of the Lebanese civil wars. These projects represent a wide range of artistic approaches, take very different forms, and stem from a variety of art-historical legacies. What they share is the understanding that a principal task for contemporary art is to recover and rethink connections to the past. Each work is deeply invested in particular histories; each considers historical research to be an artistic tool; and each sees historical understanding as something complex, nonlinear, open-ended, and of paramount importance in the present.
Not all contemporary art is “about” pastness, of course. But the argument can be made—and has been, in one of the most ambitious attempts to theorize and historicize this field—that the defining feature of contemporary art is its foregrounding of an “awareness of the coexistence of different ways of being in time.”5 For Terry Smith in What is Contemporary Art?, this is what contemporeneity means—the question of “what it is to be with time,”6 in a postcolonial condition, under globalized capitalism, and through networked information technologies. Though his argument is oddly totalizing, it’s helpful to have his view of “immersion in multiple temporalities”7 as the very essence of contemporary art. Though one assumption in the way of an unapologetic vision of the relation between art history and contemporary art is the seemingly reasonable idea that contemporary art is art “of the present,” it would seem that an uncomplicated sense of the present tense is the one thing not available in contemporary art. Other fields of art history should get their due in resources and attention, of course, but not because historical thinking as such is threatened as more students congregate at the near end of art history’s timeline. To teach, write, or talk about contemporary art is to pressure presentism.
Art forms that are site-specific or time-limited, like installation or performance, have been the norm in art since at least the 1970s, while maintaining an air of rebellion relative to traditional media of visual art. But these temporary, localized forms are structurally invited by the reigning paradigm now, which is the temporary exhibition. This is in part a function of a changing museum culture. Collections are now rearranged to make new thematic or historical connections (as MOMA famously did when it was renovated in 2002–4). Collections are increasingly conceived as fungible, with challenges made to old, patrimony-based rules mandating that artworks could not be decommissioned to cover operating costs.8 Museums’ newer civic functions—regional branding, tourism, and trade—are arguably best served not by guarding a collection of masterpieces, but by staging artistic events, particularly those specially oriented to the site of display.
Most dramatically, however, the tendency toward the temporary has been powered by the proliferation of biennials and art fairs around the world since the 1990s. It’s easy enough to see how this has affected art reception. “I have been fortunate enough to be able to experience contemporary art as it first appeared to its publics in many parts of the world, on most continents, and do so, in recent years especially, at a constant rate.”9 So Smith gives his credentials, at the beginning of What is Contemporary Art?. He is describing his research process, and establishing his expertise for readers about to follow him through a couple of hundred pages of argumentation. That is to say, as a capsule description of the way an expert looks at art, his statement describes a normative form of viewership today. The transnational mobility of arts professionals—artists, curators, critics, and now, art historians—escalated sharply in the 1990s, of course, as it did in fields like finance or technology. This travel is a kind of gilded-mirror-image of labor migration and emigration in the same period, and they are not unrelated: The boom in temporary, recurring, international art exhibitions is part and parcel of economic and cultural globalization. The proliferation of these exhibitions then contributes to an event-culture mentality in the artistic sphere. And when the temporary exhibition becomes the basic form of art experience, expertise becomes, in part, a matter of mobility.
It is a question of being in the right places; and it is also a question of being there at the right times. Or rather, the right time: Notice the value Smith places on experiencing contemporary art as it first appeared to its publics. Elsewhere he stresses the need to “convey the sense of this art as it happened, to evoke the sites and spaces of its occurrence, the aura of its arrival, the qualities of its incipience, its present tension.”10 Smith’s book argues for multiple, discordant, nonlinear temporalities and sees being together in time as the problem on which contemporary art turns. Yet here, in a little aside about his own experience, artworks unproblematically occur. They have a singular moment of origin, and this is the point of their maximal meaning and value. If you encounter a work as it appears not first, but second, you are presumably not quite as fortunate—or expert—a viewer. Smith isn’t responsible for this condition, but his words reveal an implicit class structure in contemporary art spectatorship. If you do not have the resources for constant travel, or if you have commitments that don’t allow it, you cannot be a first-class citizen of the global art world.
You don’t see contemporary art, you catch it. As art zips by, the practicalities of the global economy meet an ingrained philosophical privileging of the original, the primary, and the immediate. Walter Benjamin described the auratic value possessed by the singular art object before reproducible media sent its images proliferating around the world. This condition seems paradoxically reinvented when the paradigm of the art object gives way to the art event. This is not to biennial-bash: There are many reasons to preserve an optimistic view of the potential of the large-scale, temporary, international exhibitions, not least because they can serve historical memory. Sociologist Maurice Roche describes perennial sports mega-events like the World Cup as “resources for sustaining personal time structure in contemporary conditions that threaten this,” and something similar could be said art historically.11 For example, referring to the 1993 Whitney Biennial situates us in relationship to the moment at which debate about critical race politics in art came to a head. But, the scale, speed, and sheer preponderance of biennials and the like, the semi-exclusivity and glamour of their openings, and their utility in identifying the next new thing for the market combine to make them agents of a problematic acceleration in art reception—one that I would argue is related to, but does not well serve, the important work art is doing. If the phrase “contemporary art” implies presentism, it is not the fault of the art but its system.
But can you separate art from its system of distribution? The last thing I would argue for is “the art itself,” a phrase that recurs like a conceptual tic in conversation about art and art history, expressing the undying assumption that art could somehow be pried out from among the crisscrossing vectors of situation, context, and reception. Rather, I am arguing that effective alternatives to the biennial model already exist; that through these alternate means of distribution art functions differently; and that academia is prime among them, precisely because it is a medium defined by delay, displacement, and mediation.
If art is event, art historians are essentially performance scholars. Researchers who study dance, plays, and especially performance art have spent decades pinpointing the unique value of ephemeral art experience, but they also have articulated a series of critiques of the idea that the essence of performance is its liveness. These have been built in part on the writing of Jacques Derrida, in which Western philosophy’s attraction to the idea of presence came to look like a kind of reaction-formation. Amelia Jones used his idea of the supplement—which not only augments, but reveals the lack in the thing supplemented—to argue that “seemingly acting as a ‘supplement’ to the ‘actual’ body of the artist in performance, the photograph of the body art event or performance could … be said to expose the body itself as supplementary …”12 Kathy O’Dell reminded us that there is a phenomenological experience of the document; that looking at an image is as much a present-tense experience—and as much an experience of absence—as encountering a performing body.13 Philip Auslander made the more historically direct argument that it is only when recordings, broadcasting, and mass media come into play that a special value is put on performances happening “live.”14 In this kind of thinking, liveness and embodiment are functions of—or at least inextricable from—mediation and representation.
In other words, performance studies taught us to be careful about the assumption that meaning resides primarily in the moment of the live performance. Since around 2004, when Marina Abramovic enacted new versions of historical performances at the Guggenheim Museum, there has been a renewed discussion about this as artists and museums have experimented with performance artworks of the past. Some diehards continue to find this a travesty; others see nothing wrong with the proliferation of supplements over the extended life of an artwork already invested in the supplemental. What the debate as a whole indicates, however, is that the dialectic of event and image, original and representation, presence and lack, present and past is what performance art now is.
Academic art history is to biennial culture as photography is to performance. Just as the critique of presence in performance studies brought out the complexity of the relation between a performance and its document—and the importance of that complexity in the structure of “the art itself”—so the role of contemporary art history in relation to art’s production and dissemination must be reassessed.
Art history always misses the opening. It shows up at the biennial the day after it closes. By the time an art historian’s article is researched, written, peer-reviewed, and published by an academic press, anything simplistically “contemporary” about it is over. But because of this condition of delay, art history can challenge the ideal of contemporaneousness itself. It can tangle the unreeling timeline of trendiness, and this can give art a chance to do its work with viewers—even if they are viewers of a slide in a lecture hall, or of an essay in a course reader. In an era when art slips by, academia offers traction.
For a few centuries, art as it was being produced didn’t have its own art history, but something called criticism. Perhaps “contemporary art” needs art history instead precisely because of the rushing, expanding, global system it has become. Art history is characterized by delay, decontextualization, and mediation: seeming weaknesses that we might instead celebrate as correctives to a condition of art as event. This means, among other things, that the difference between contemporary art criticism and contemporary art history might turn out to be a question about conditions of production; a matter of resources and time. Along with a renewed appreciation for the stipends, salaries, and sabbaticals that at least make our relationship to market forces indirect, would come a valorization of the tools of academic art history: the darkened lecture hall or seminar room, the seated students, and the projected images of works of art. While I am arguing on the one hand that the belatedness of art history is of value for contemporary art, on the other I want to rethink the after-the-factness of the art-historical apparatus. Certainly, in the classroom works are scale-less, flattened, and pixilated. They are mediated for the students by technology and by the professor, and they are removed from the context of exhibition. And yet these works of art are being experienced. Students and professor are perceiving, feeling, thinking, talking, learning, and working with art in ways impossible under other conditions. This IS an exhibition context; one that situates its viewers as subjects in and of history.
The experience is in no way the same as the one in the gallery where the work “first” appeared. But it has some advantages, if you think of art as having, and want it to have, a cultural function. Art as a system has impact economically. Works of art should have different abilities: to enforce or alter commonsense, to shape ways of seeing, expose unexamined beliefs, retune our senses, provide images and experiences through which to think the worlds we live in.15 There are certainly other ways to conceive of and defend art’s value, but personally I am interested in art exactly to the extent that it has this culture-shaping function. The system of art events diminishes the possibility for art to affect culture, through individuals and audiences, in this sense. While I am sure such work gets enacted in biennials and art fairs, I will say, unapologetically, that as things are currently configured it happens at least as powerfully in classrooms, libraries, lecture halls, panels, conferences, and journals. The art historian’s job in relation to contemporary art is not to tuck it away into Kuspit’s “predetermined narratives” but to give it a chance to do its indeterminate work. To say so isn’t to devalue the other kinds of art experience, but to reinvest in one that is misunderstood, both inside the academy and out.
If this is self-aggrandizing (a working title for this essay was “reasons to get up in the morning”), it is also a statement of responsibility. It should affect our choices about what we teach, and to whom; how we write, and for which audiences. An important objection to a re-valorization of academia in relation to contemporary art is the limited, elite audience art history reaches. It shouldn’t be forgotten, though, that art history does not belong only to ivy-covered bastions of privilege but happens at a whole range of institutions (at least until the next round of budget cuts). It involves people who are the first in their families to go to college, or who are working their way through, or who are getting into impossible debt, as well as the stereotypical, dabbling scions. (Besides, the fact that most of the people who experience art history are relatively privileged, or are becoming so in getting the education of which it is part, would be a strange reason not to take its culture-shaping role seriously.) Yet I accept the objection in the sense that my position makes it incumbent upon us to broaden access to higher education—an imperative now more urgent, and less feasible than ever. This raises a political question: In this period of budget slashing and standardization of education worldwide, a time of danger particularly for the humanities, including art history, whose side is “the art world” going to be on?
What I am advocating is simply an attitudinal shift in academic endeavor related to contemporary art, one that stresses the potential in art history’s relationship with the art world, rather than apologizing for its encroachment. This shift means that while continuing to take advantage of opportunities for students to see art “live,” we invest in the kind of extended, situated, social, and dialogical art encounter academic spaces can cultivate. It means thinking more about how to model the experience of an artwork as an ongoing, conversational process, and less about how to dazzle with virtuosic interpretations and art-historical expertise. It means inviting artists and curators into class to launch conversations that a spin through a biennial doesn’t allow; or doing what’s possible to get audience questions more than a harried few minutes at the end of a conference panel. It means resisting the culture of being there “first,” and embracing the unfashionable just-past, for, far from rushing art into an art-historical grave, our job is to give it time to work. None of this is different from what art historians and teachers are already doing, all the time. It just means doing it from the conviction that under current art conditions such work is part of, and not an add-on to, the main event. Do I sound like a therapist, or cheerleader? Is this becoming a manifesto? No matter. No more apologies. Academia isn’t contemporary art’s funeral parlor. It is its current address.
Notes
1 “Tacita Dean” at Frith Street Gallery website, www.frithstreetgallery.com/artists/bio/tacita_dean/.
2 Sebastian Smee, “Foster Prize Winner Looks at Film with a Critical Eye,” The Boston Globe (December 16, 2010). The artist is Amie Siegel, a colleague of mine at Harvard.
3 College Art Association, “Online Career Center Job Statistics,” CAA News online (c. 2010), www.collegeart.org/features/jobstatistics (accessed December 16, 2010).
4 Donald Kuspit, “The Contemporary and the Historical,” Artnet (April 13, 2005), www.artnet.com/Magazine/features/kuspit/kuspit4-14-05.asp. From the Venice Biennale to the “trendy magazines,” Kuspit feels art institutions are trying too hard to predict what will be art-historically important, rather than representing as much of the vast spectrum of contemporary art as possible. It must be mentioned that the critic’s example of premature historicization is the fame, to him undeserved, of artist Ana Mendieta relative to her teacher and romantic partner Hans Breder—a charge so problematic that it raises the question of what political opinions the use of “academic” as an epithet might encode.
5 Terry Smith, What Is Contemporary Art? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 3.
6 Ibid., p. 4.
7 Ibid., p. 198.
8 Recent cases have involved the Fisk University Stieglitz Collection and the National Academy Museum, for example. See Robin Pogrebin, “Museums and Lawmakers Mull Sales of Art,” New York Times (January 14, 2010).
9 Smith, op. cit., p. 3.
10 Smith, op. cit., p. 2.
11 Maurice Roche, “Mega-events, Time and Modernity: On Time Structures in Global Society,” Time & Society 12 (March 2003), pp. 99–126.
12 Amelia Jones, Body Art: Performing the Subject (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 34.
13 Kathy O’Dell, Contract with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art, and the 1970s (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).
14 Phillip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, 2nd edn. (London: Routledge, 2008).
15 This does not mean that all the ways it shapes and changes culture are for the good, nor that it is self-evident or predictable how this function is enacted, nor that what the artist intends the function to be is the function it winds up having, nor that this function is set once and forever at a certain historical moment. Note also, though this requires more argumentation, that what I am calling function is not the same as instrumentalization.