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Decolonizing Art History

2020; Oxford University Press; Volume: 43; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/1467-8365.12490

1467-8365

Catherine Grant, Dorothy Price,

Cultural Heritage Management and Preservation

Abe Odedina, Beulah's Garden, 2018. Acrylic on plywood, 122.2 x 122.2 cm. London: Collection of the artist. © Abe Odedina. Photo: Ed Cross Fine Art/Alan Roderick. When, in 2015, students at the University of Cape Town in South Africa demanded the removal of a statue of British colonial and diamond merchant Cecil Rhodes from their campus, they initiated what was to become a global call to ‘decolonize the university’. In the same year, students at University College London began to ask the question: why is my curriculum white? Other public sector cultural institutions soon joined the chorus in an overdue acknowledgement that unspoken colonial legacies had for too long upheld and promulgated white privilege. The role of public sculpture as a catalyst for political debate and change has a long tradition within art's histories. It serves to remind us of the centrality of the discipline in promoting and maintaining dominant cultural values; and yet it also enables us to interrogate them as historically located and subject to inevitable temporal mutation. Whilst postcolonial studies and critical race studies have been informing and challenging the shape of art history for several decades, new generations of students, scholars, critics, curators, collectors, artists and audiences are seeking radical re-evaluations of the academy and those cultural institutions who hold themselves up as standard-bearers of our collective cultural heritage. But, what, if anything, is specific about the current moment's demands to reassess how universities, museums, and galleries teach, research, collect and exhibit? How can art historians, curators, collectors, museum directors, artists and writers respond to the call to decolonize art history? How can we draw from the rich legacy of postcolonial, feminist, queer and Marxist perspectives within art history, and what are the new theoretical perspectives that are needed? Writing these questions within the context of the UK, the backdrop of Brexit cannot be ignored, along with the impact of austerity and precarity in the university and museum sectors, and the rise of nationalism and xenophobia in response to both economic and political migration. There is a sense of instability in the political landscape, and conversations are often harder to hear than accusations, condemnation or dismissal. This is coupled with an increasing sense of art history being an embattled discipline, an unnecessary luxury for many students faced with tens of thousands of pounds of student debt. Yet conversely some of the loudest voices in the conversations around decolonizing art and its histories have been from young artists, scholars, curators and students, demanding that the institutions from which they feel excluded start to listen. For many of us working within (and alongside) the discipline of art history, these calls have asked us to reckon with what we do as teachers, scholars and curators. In order to continue this conversation, we have asked a range of art historians, curators and artists to respond to a series of questions that consider some of the recent calls to ‘decolonize art history’. The responses vary in format, length and focus. We offered some guidelines regarding length but otherwise were open to the ways in which the questions were addressed. Continuing the vision for Art History set out by Price in her inaugural editorial in February 2018, the following seeks to give space to some of the conversations that many of us are having within and between our institutions. The questionnaire format indicates that there is not one way to ‘decolonize art history’, but rather it is a debate that the editorial board of Art History, alongside many of our colleagues in the discipline, feels needs public discussion. We publish the questions and a selection of the responses below. What is the historical specificity of current calls to decolonize art history? How are they different from previous challenges to the discipline (such as postcolonialism, feminism, queer studies, Marxism)? What is your understanding of decolonizing art history now? What does a decolonized art history look like? How should it be written/practised? How might the decolonization of art history impact upon your own area of research/practice? What would be produced from it? Might anything have to be jettisoned? Where should decolonization in relation to art history happen? What strategies might different spaces for decolonization demand? What is the historical specificity of current calls to decolonize art history? How are they different from previous challenges to the discipline (such as postcolonialism, feminism, queer studies, Marxism)? I think that it is important to break down the idea of ‘decolonizing’ into how this emerges in the form of movements. I am from a generation or movement of artists, writers, theorists and activists who came together in the 1980s to take control of discourses of both race and art production. In my case this meant becoming a guest editor for key magazines and journals such as Ten.8 or curating major shows in institutions such as the ICA, Whitechapel and Hayward Gallery. In the publication Shades of Black (a project with Sonia Boyce and Ian Baucom) we try to historicize a moment that called for and changed infrastructural and epistemological ways of looking at a British art practice. I think what we are seeing now is how a new generation of people, or in other words ‘another movement’, are taking on and at the same time learning about this history. So I think it's about describing specific formations of various moments that have emerged in relation to this question. What is your understanding of decolonizing art history now? What does a decolonized art history look like? How should it be written/practised? I think a decolonized art history should always include multiple narratives so that it's about different histories and not a story that becomes the canon. When I was working on the Harlem Renaissance exhibition Rhapsodies In Black in the 1990s (with Richard Powell and Roger Malbert for the Hayward Gallery) our main concern was not to write and curate a counter black art-historical narrative but to produce one that was cohabited by multiple and diverse artists – black and white. How might the decolonization of art history impact upon your own area of research/practice? What would be produced from it? Might anything have to be jettisoned? I have to say I never went into this field or arena with the idea of decolonizing in any way. When we did the Frantz Fanon project Mirage at the ICA in 1995 its aims were to think and explore how diasporic twentieth-century thinkers and activists could be curated intellectually through a visual and moving installation practice. Since the 1980s my practice in the area you are describing has always been to support and develop new institutions which then produce multiple areas of research and practices that support new narratives such as Autograph, Iniva and more recently ICF (International Curators Forum) and the Stuart Hall Foundation. Reflecting on this, the reason I did it was that in the past there were virtually no infrastructural and institutional support systems. There were no extant long-term initiatives that were able to succeed over a period of time, which is why so many came and went. Where should decolonization in relation to art history happen? What strategies might different spaces for decolonization demand? For me decolonization can only happen with in a discourse that has a real and lasting relationship with practice. For example, in my own practice, since 2005 I have been working with the organization Platform in collaboration with the artist Sokari Douglas Camp. We have produced a living memorial sculpture for the Nigerian artist and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa. In order to fund, gain support for and produce this work we had to challenge various artistic communities and contest the role, nature and aesthetics of public art in a twenty-first-century context. We also had to think about how to decolonize the history of memorial sculpture in the UK via a body of work that incorporated an address to environmental racism, figuration and kinetics in relation to sculpture. David A. Bailey is Director of the International Curators Forum. What is the historical specificity of current calls to decolonize art history? How are they different from previous challenges to the discipline (such as postcolonialism, feminism, queer studies, Marxism)? While the term ‘decolonize’ art history has significant rhetorical power, it is founded upon a misconception. Art history can decolonize itself only to the extent that it acknowledges that Euro-colonial art and our discipline itself are themselves products of empire. Powerful symbols of racial oppression such as the Rhodes statue, or the naming of a Yale residential college after John C. Calhoun, are legitimate targets for contestation and removal. But even if such emblems are erased, the history of art cannot deny its own intellectual inheritance: it has developed as an academic discipline since the eighteenth century with racialized concepts at its core. It is a dissimulation to behave as if art history were a colonized territory fighting for independence and a return to an indigenous condition innocent of ideological corruption. Art history is never innocent. That said, the field is absolutely capable of self-reflexivity: indeed, if art history is not a radical practice, a site of dissent, a provocation, it is worthless. Teachers and students of art history, and museum curators, can and must read their objects of study, their archives, and their inherited methods, against the grain. We can formulate critiques of art-historical legacies and lexicons, and of colonialism itself as manifested in the visual and material. Art history can and must take a critical approach to empire and colonialism, and can use the privileges of its position to undermine the assumptions implicit in an imperial subject position. What is your understanding of decolonizing art history now? What does a decolonized art history look like? How should it be written/practised? A key to moving ahead is to diversify the voices at the heart of the discipline. Art history departments in the UK still overwhelmingly focus on art in the Western tradition. While most programmes in the US attempt a more global spread of coverage, there is still a great disparity between the ways the arts of Africa, for example, are taught, usually by a single faculty member, and the arts of Europe, often broken down into many chronological and regional sub-fields, each taught by an individual scholar. The arts of the Islamic world, covering vast territories and periods, are likewise frequently deputed to a single individual. As it is unrealistic to expect a massive increase in staffing, as occurred between the 1960s and the 1980s, we need to consider training doctoral students to work with wider fields and areas of expertise, in order to be able to teach – say – across the Mediterranean basin in the early modern period, including Eastern and Western European traditions, Islamic art and other arts of north Africa. Such a training would take longer and would require more investment in terms of languages and archives, and additional support for research travel. Perhaps the most crucial question in settler-colonial environments such as the Americas (and most especially the United States under the presidency of Donald Trump), Australia and New Zealand is the status of Indigenous people and their cultural production in the discourses of art history. Until recently Native American art history has been marginalized within the academy. Collections of Native American art are often positioned within an ethnographic rather than a fine art museum context (as still now at Yale). Yet pioneering work of Maori scholars in New Zealand and Aboriginal scholars in Australia, alongside that of Indigenous art historians in the Americas, indicates that the structures of art-historical thought can be disrupted, reconfigured and ultimately strengthened if Indigenous art and the related intellectual and cosmological perspectives are placed at the centre of our teaching and research. This means that a plurality of voices, including many Indigenous people (and not a single token person), must occupy the centreground of art history – art history departments, curatorial and management positions in museums, media outlets new and old. If, and when, art's histories are studied, taught and disseminated by people of truly diverse origins, the conversation will be vastly enriched. How might the decolonization of art history impact upon your own area of research/practice? What would be produced from it? Might anything have to be jettisoned? The study of British art, as supported by institutions such as the Tate Gallery/Tate Britain, the Paul Mellon Centre and the Yale Center for British Art was, until the late twentieth century, unthinkingly limited to the work of white, male and mainly metropolitan artists. The identity of those writing largely matched that of those about whom they wrote. While this is implicitly a nationalist and even imperialist strategy, questions of empire were largely absent from debates in the field – a conspiracy of silence of sorts, which took place under cover of the notion of ‘quality’. Explicit reference to questions of empire and race, so the argument went, were only brought forth by ‘bad art’. Historiographically, a first stage was to identify empire as a major force in the emergence of art in the modern world, indeed as in many ways coterminous with modernism itself. Geoff Quilley, Douglas Fordham and I formulated such an argument about British art in the introduction to our 2007 collection Art and the British Empire. Such a project is fraught: the Daily Mail, for example, welcomed Tate Britain's ill-conceived and hastily thrown-together exhibition Artist and Empire (2015) as a celebration of Empire's achievements, which was probably not the curators’ intention: ‘no reasonable observer can deny’, wrote Dominic Sandbrook, that the British Empire ‘often represented a tremendous force for good’.11 Dominic Sandbrook, ‘The Empire Strikes Back’, Daily Mail, 22 July 2015. Histories of the African diaspora and of the material and visual cultures of slavery and its legacies have received belated, but crucially important, interest in recent decades, inspired by the theoretical positionings initiated by Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy. These debates have emerged in dialogue with the artists of the African diaspora whose work itself constitutes an intervention into art history. The work of Kara Walker, Kehinde Wiley, Yinka Shonibare MBE, and Isaac Julien, among many others, constitutes a significant reinterpretation of the art-historical canon. An art history placing people of African descent at its core has the potential to reconfigure existing narratives. The twenty-one contributors to Victorian Jamaica (2018) argued that the serious study of Jamaican visual and material culture under colonialism is significant not only as an art history of the Caribbean but as a part of a larger history of the period across an Atlantic interculture that included the United States and Great Britain. Rejecting a centre–periphery model, we insisted that Jamaica is central to understanding British culture in the age of empire. Major arbiters of the canon of British art, such as the Tate, included very few works that explicitly engaged with empire and until recently, almost none were on display from before 2000. The Yale Center for British Art reconfigured the hang of its permanent collection under the title Britain in the World as recently as 2016. Currently in its early stages is a reconfiguration of the field, to include at its core artists such as William Hodges, Marianne North or Edward Lear, but also figures such as the Indian painter Gangaram Tambat who collaborated with James Wales and Thomas and William Daniell to produce innovative representations of the cave temples of the Deccan, the Mahara or Tupaia, the Ra'iatean high priest who joined James Cook's ship in 1769-70, adopting European artistic conventions to articulate religious and cultural concepts of the South Pacific islanders; to move beyond painting to look at drawings, aquatints and engravings; to engage seriously with material culture; to reintegrate the discussion of buildings and material environments with those of fine art. Crucially this must be achieved without sacrificing the intensity of analytic engagement. A classic reactionary response is the argument that an art history that moves beyond the Western canon must be inattentive to aesthetic questions, to ‘quality’. The only way to counter this is by employing our skills as practitioners of art history to reveal the power, complexity and, on occasion, the beauty of objects traditionally banished from the canon. Such a strategy has been largely successful in the rehabiliation, for example, of Victorian art. Where should decolonization in relation to art history happen? What strategies might different spaces for decolonization demand? Unlike many academic disciplines, the history of art embraces a remarkably pluralistic set of practices and discourses. Museum exhibitions and collections are seen by millions; television programming and websites engage large numbers of interested viewers. The contemporary art world has performed a spectacular transformation from self-imposed exile at the margins of cultural discourse to mass spectacle. Debates and controversies about contemporary art spill over into the popular press. Yet we as a profession have not been effective in shifting the opinions of a larger public away from certain core concepts: a heroic history of Franco-American modernism, long abandoned even by its most retardataire academic exegetes, lives on as a zombie ideology among museum goers; the celebration of historical art is still entangled with nostalgia for the glory days of aristocracy (as in the National Trust's presentation of country houses); assumptions about the linear nature of historical development still identify historical agency exclusively with white, male, Euro-American actors and exclude people of colour. While it is tempting for academic art historians to concentrate on academic audiences, university press monographs, tenure dossiers and REF submissions, it is incumbent upon us all to engage with wider debates and discourses, disrupting and challenging inherited ideas. Although a ‘decolonized’ art history, or at least an art-historical practice alert to issues of race and empire, thrives in some classrooms, it is a greater challenge to bring such ideas to a wider audience. While the crass requirements of the British government's system of funding have given the term ‘impact’ a bad name, communication with a wider, and thus more diverse, public through digital media, exhibitions, public programmes, and through collaborations with living artists offer us a platform for debate available to few other disciplines. Crucial, here, is the identity of the person addressing a wider public. The days of Kenneth Clark, Sister Wendy Beckett and Andrew Graham-Dixon are (or should be) long past. If the faces and voices of art historians on the screen are as multifarious as those on the streets of the post-colonial metropolis – from Cape Town to Sydney to Toronto – then art history will have more chance of engaging with a wider world. In terms of museums, we need to broaden the canon and erase the distinction between ‘fine art’ museums (Tate, National Galleries in London and Washington), ‘decorative art’ museums (V&A/Cooper-Hewitt), and ‘ethnographic’ museums (British Museum in London, Natural History Museum in New York). Within universal survey museums, such as the Metropolitan, departmental boundaries and hierarchies likewise need to be broken down. Curatorial work can achieve a shift in perceptions and public discourse that even a multitude of peer-reviewed articles will struggle to match. Tim Barringer is Paul Mellon Professor in the History of Art at Yale University. Notes What is the historical specificity of current calls to decolonize art history? How are they different from previous challenges to the discipline (such as postcolonialism, feminism, queer studies, Marxism)? Current calls to decolonize art history seem to me to be different from earlier disciplinary challenges. Decolonization must respond in some way to histories and contemporary realities of Indigenous dispossession. It requires creating spaces to learn from and it must allow the subjects of colonization/decolonization and others historically underrepresented to ‘appear’ (in Nicholas Mirzoeff's terms).11 Nicholas Mirzoeff, ‘Empty the Museum, Decolonize the Curriculum, Open Theory’, Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, 53, 2017, 6–22. These concerns cannot be adequately addressed only by incorporating types of radical theory into my primary areas of European, especially German, modern/contemporary art and historiography training. While my own teaching/research are strongly inflected by aspects of social and feminist art history, visual studies, and postcolonial theory, these do not provide all of the necessary tools. From my perspective, the response to Indigenous dispossession seems particularly urgent, as I recently began teaching in a Native American-serving institution.22 For readers outside of North America, ‘Native American-serving institution’ comes from the term ‘Minority Serving Institutions’, defined as ‘institutions of higher education that serve minority populations’, with an active support programme in North America; see ‘Minority Serving Institutions Program’, available at https://www.doi.gov/pmb/eeo/doi-minority-serving-institutions-program. In addition, in my small department, I am one of three professors all trained in European areas, and I am responsible for modern/contemporary periods. What is your understanding of decolonizing art history now? What does a decolonized art history look like? How should it be written/practised? My understanding of decolonizing art history now is that it requires responding to historical and contemporary issues of decolonization, whether that be with students, through collaborative study with colleagues, research, and/or activism. For my teaching, this has meant addressing white supremacy and histories of violence against Indigenous peoples; teaching modernity as ‘multiple’; teaching modern art through histories of colonialism and decolonization; teaching modernism as a multimedia phenomenon emphasizing radical production methods and addressing climate change/environmental issues, among other issues and strategies. Undertaking all of this in my teaching necessarily involves jettisoning or marginalizing some content that I previously taught or that was taught by my department and thought of as essential. How might the decolonization of art history impact upon your own area of research/practice? What would be produced from it? Might anything have to be jettisoned? The decolonization of art history affects my research/practice by requiring me to think modern/contemporary art history in more transcultural and networked ways, as well as pushing me to research new areas. This has involved drawing more deeply on methodologies of key postcolonial scholars, including those who provide ways to connect visual studies, postcolonialism, decolonization, and contemporary culture. Where should decolonization in relation to art history happen? What strategies might different spaces for decolonization demand? I believe that decolonizing art history has to take place in the classroom, through research, and in broader art-historical discourse. The practices of teaching modern art history as interconnected, successive movements, in a timeline chronologically linked to industrial modernity, within national frameworks, as well as emphasizing certain iconoclastic values, are impediments to carrying out the above goals.33 For one response to the latter concern, see Helen Molesworth, ‘Only Connect’, Artforum International, 55: 4, December 2016, 236–239. Open source materials innovating curricula and methodologies are particularly helpful, just as they are a key platform of decolonization, and something that art history scholarly organizations could aid in developing. The availability of even one textbook on global modernisms has been a great resource (Modern Art in Africa, Asia and Latin America edited by Elaine O'Brien et al.). Priyanka Basu is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Minnesota, Morris. Notes What is the historical specificity of current calls to decolonize art history? How are they different from previous challenges to the discipline (such as postcolonialism, feminism, queer studies, Marxism)? The best instincts of current efforts to decolonize, in my opinion, ask succinctly for structural change in pedagogy and curatorial work. Though certain previous challenges (including those listed in the question) did agitate for structural changes, for the most part they were interpreted within institutions as calls for diversity and inclusivity. We now see that playing a mere numbers game – bringing in more women or people not identified as white – does very little for both power structures or the stories we tell about art. Decolonization seeks to get to the root of the problem, not just the results. What is your understanding of decolonizing art history now? What does a decolonized art history look like? How should it be written/practised? I can only answer this question personally but for me it means several things: working with the broadest definition of art (remembering that multi-disciplinary practice is the norm); questioning definitions and accepted terms (sometimes ‘artist’ wasn't a label that someone could apply to themselves); trusting the anecdotes and stories of those not yet included in the canon; and, above all, seeking to abolish the notion of a canon altogether. How might the decolonization of art history impact upon your own area of research/practice? What would be produced from it? Might anything have to be jettisoned? We would have to jettison the notions of hierarchy first: the valorization of painting over found objects, or the academic over the inspired, for instance – and we would have to keep context alive at all times. Not only to consider what was happening in the social world to make certain forms and practices possible, but also to remember that those things that live in cultural memory didn't arrive in our consciousness by accident, or by virtue of some notion of quality, but by a series of deliberate moves by folks with power, voices, and resources. Where should decolonization in relation to art history happen? What strategies might different spaces for decolonization demand? Decolonization can happen now and in every classroom. I can't talk to pedagogical practices specifically but I can insist that a decolonized curriculum is as applicable to the colonizer as it is to the former colonized. We have to de- and re-construct notions of whiteness as power as much as we think afresh about the representation of those we want included in the historical record. Naomi Beckwith is Manilow Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. These are all difficult questions but we should begin with what we have inherited. The problem we have in the history of art is that it is strongly rooted in national narratives. When asked, we all identify ourselves as working predominantly in, say, British, French or American art. This means that the transnational tends to be marginalized, but it can also be an excuse for ignoring the colonial. It may well be very difficult to avoid national specialization but it can be turned to art history's advantage by regarding the nation as encompassing its empire, so that, say, the study of Spanish art includes the slave colonies of Latin America, and British art the slave colonies in the Caribbean. In a sense we need to re-colonize the history of art. This would require a much stronger grounding in history, not as background but as integral to the subject. All medievalists should, for instance, be aware of connections with African kingdoms, the influence of Islamic art and architecture, just as those working on the Italian Renaissance need to be aware of connections with the Ottoman empire. In terms of the discipline there needs to be more emphasis on the power of images to construct ideas of nationality and race. We need to investigate the visual construction of other peoples, for it plays a decisive role in naturalizing ideas of difference that can result in social action. This will involve a broadening of experience to include the study of all forms of visual culture along with the art of the museums. David Bindman is Emeritus Durning-Lawrence Professor of History of Art at University College London. I am not sure a truly ethical ‘decolonized’ art history can exist, at least not for the study of Renaissance and early modern art as it is normally understood – painting and sculpture with significant financial value. The institutions of art are so tied to the market and often, especially in the case of old master painting, serve to shore up hierarchies of inherited wealth and social power. In my experience, publishing, curating exhibitions, even access to our materials, necessitates ethical compromises that make me increasingly uneasy. Old master painting and the notions of ‘history’ and ‘culture’ are used to justify, covertly, and even overtly, structures of inequality that have a real effect on people's life chances. It has been increasingly striking to me over the last few years that I ma