TADH.pub (Read-Only) - Association of Art Historians

Teaching
Art & Design History
21st-Century
Art History:
Global
Reception
Contents
Janet Tatlock
Preface
2
Catherine King
Introduction
3
Conventional and New Approaches to Art
History in India
5
š Devangana Desai
Crispin Branfoot
Where on Earth is South Asia? Studying the
arts of India in 21st-century Britain
11
Natasha Eaton
Art History, Globalisations and Sly
Multiculturalism in the Academy
16
Michael Moore
The Secret History of Ceramic or
The reluctant history of an applied art
20
Emma Loosley
Art History and Cultural Belonging in
Contemporary Syria
24
Thomas A Dowson
Teaching the Art of Africa
30
Stephanie Koerner
The ‘End of Art' or Iconoclash:
‘Crises of Representation’ and Attempts to
Globalise the ‘New’ Art History
34
Preface
T
his publication is the result of collaboration
between the Association of Art Historians and
the ADM-HEA at the Association of Art Historians’
2005 Annual Conference Conception: Reception held
in Bristol. I am grateful too for the financial
contribution of the Archaeology section of HCAHEA that resulted in the inclusion of colour
illustrations on the cover.
The session that Cath King and I convened
represented a desire to offer the opportunity to
explore how recent attempts to ‘globalise’ art history
had impacted on research and on teaching and
learning strategies. The sponsorship of our keynote
speaker Devangana Desai by ADM-HEA enabled us
to present the issues from an alternative global
perspective and we were honoured to have her
contribution.
The papers and abstracts included here offer just a
snapshot of some of the much wider debates that are
being undertaken in our discipline, many of which
were stimulated by the GLAADH project.
In addition, there is a paper from Michael Moore,
who was not able to attend the conference. His
paper explores some of the implications of what he
terms ‘practorians’.
Finally, my thanks to Jannet King, who has been so
patient as the material for this publication has been
brought together.
JANET TATLOCK
University of Manchester
Art & Design History Subject Co-ordinator
ADM-HEA
© copyright the authors
Published in 2006 by the Association of Art Historians and
ADM-HEA.
Copies available free on request from:
ADM-HEA
University of Brighton
68 Grand Parade
Brighton BN2 9JY
UK
[email protected]
Copy editing, design and layout: Jannet King
[email protected]
Printed by The Print House, Brighton, Tel: 01273 325667
2
Cover photographs
Top: Devangana Desai – Apsaras or surasundaris, celestial
female figures, Vishvanatha Temple, Khajuraho, CE 999
Bottom: Thomas Dowson – Leopards carved in ivory with
copper inlay. On display in the British Museum, London
Introduction
Only when a multiplicity of perspectives exist, in
dialogue, but with none granted in advance any
particular priority, can we talk of art history as
having become globalised, as a discipline.
Globalisation requires an insight into the local
nature of meaning, which rules out the
possibility of a panoptic mastering viewpoint’.
David Clarke,
‘Contemporary Asian Art and its Reception’,
Third Text, 16, 2002, pp237–42 especially p241.
minority. However, our experience with Glaadh was
that about a quarter of the institutions teaching an
art history degree in the UK were in a position to act
as mentors and encouragers in the enterprise, while
roughly another quarter were interested in making
experimental changes to their teaching programmes.
So, by 2003 half the departments in the sector had
either shifted or were in the process of altering their
policies to look beyond traditional geographical
boundaries.
he purpose of the session held at the
Association of Art Historians’ annual
conference in Bristol, April 2005, was to continue the
debate that had been the focus of the recent Higher
Education Funding Council project Globalising Art,
Architecture and Design History (Glaadh). That project
had taken place between 2001 and 2003 and aimed
to encourage art history departments to increase
their consideration of issues of cultural congruencies
and diversities in the curriculum. The project was
led by Professor Craig Clunas, who was then at the
University of Sussex. He invited Middlesex
University and the Open University to join Sussex in
a consortium to run the project. I became involved
in broadening the curriculum with reference to
issues of cultural similarities and differences
through the work I had done as editor and author of
an Open University teaching text entitled Views of
Difference: different views of art (Yale University Press,
1999 ). This represented one sixth of a 60-credit point
course at level 2, which was an introduction to some
approaches to art history. As a consequence, I had
some experience of the benefits of widening the
teaching programme.
One problem voiced during Glaadh conferences was
the worry that core concepts and methods in the
curriculum might be squeezed out of the timetable if
new fields were explored. Yet, including new
perspectives in cultural terms can arguably enhance
teaching of core issues in historiography as two of
our papers (those by Desai and Eaton) demonstrate.
Equally, basic studies, such as techniques, genres,
patronage, collecting, the art market, and display,
could valuably include research concerning
traditions other than the more conventionally taught
European ones (as discussed by Branfoot and
Dowson).
T
At the final Glaadh Conference we agreed that we
would keep the momentum going, by holding
occasional sessions at our annual conferences. This
was the first such session. I should emphasise that
we used the ambiguous term ‘globalising’ in the
project title solely because it made a good acronym.
But in actually running the project, we preferred to
talk in terms of encouraging the introduction of ‘a
less Eurocentric curriculum’. The aims of this
session therefore drew on the aims of the Glaadh
project:
• To carry on encouraging the introduction of less
Eurocentric teaching and research programmes;
• To carry on discussing the problems and benefits
linked with broadening the field of study
It is often assumed that an interest in widening the
curriculum to include discussion of cultural
congruence and diversity is the interest of a small
One question addressed in this publication,
therefore, is that of how art history is taught in areas
outside the context of the UK. In this respect we are
able to hear the views of Devangana Desai on
‘Teaching History of Art in India with particular
reference to Ancient Art’. Desai is Visiting Professor
at the Ananthacharya Indological Research Institute
at the University of Mumbai. Desai stresses that
teaching art made in Ancient India means
explaining the complex interactions between ancient
texts on aesthetic responses, and data about
religious beliefs, dance, music and yogic practices.
While colonial and nationalist historians have
interpreted ancient art as relatively static and
produced by anonymous artists, researchers
working since independence have increasingly
employed inscriptions and other texts to question
these assumptions and to chart changes in the role
of religious art and in the relationships between
artists and patrons. This methodology requires
rigorous socio-historical studies, which should
inform an object-based approach, teaching the
paramount value of scrutinising buildings and
sculptures, and making deductions about them on
site.
As a complement to Desai’s paper on Indian
historiography, Natasha Eaton scrutinises the way
in which different academic traditions in the UK and
the USA have pursued research into the arts of the
Indian subcontinent. Eaton, who specialises in the
3
21ST-CENTURY ART HISTORY
study of Indian and Colonial Culture, entitled her
paper ‘Art History, Globalisations and Sly
Multiculturalism in the Academy’. She suggests that
UK pedagogy has not yet freed itself from certain
post-colonial assumptions. This paper highlights the
importance of encouraging reflexivity in the study
of art histories.
In ‘Where is South Asia. Studying the arts of India in
21st century Britain’. Crispin Branfoot explores how
studies of Indian art can make an ample
contribution to many core issues in the art history
curriculum in the UK. Branfoot specialises in the
history of Hindu temple architecture and sculpture,
in Tamil Nadu, from the fourteenth century
onwards. However, in his paper he explores a much
wider field to demonstrate how a great diversity of
examples of art made in India could be used in
theme-based courses dealing with approaches to, for
instance, portraiture, narrative or landscape. He also
shows how they could be employed in a more
concentrated way to examine change over time in
one broad tradition, and to analyse the way art and
architecture functioned in particular societies.
Branfoot shows that the consideration of core issues
can be expedited effectively by sampling a variety of
traditions.
Tom Dowson complements Branfoot’s paper in his
consideration of ‘Benin Art and its reception in
Britain Today.’ Specialising in research in the field of
archaeological approaches to art, Dowson has
studied the rock arts of Southern Africa, North
America and Western Europe. This paper, however,
focuses on exploring the ways a study of the Benin
bronzes has multi-faceted value for the enterprise of
broadening the curriculum. The history of the
contestation over who owns the Benin sculptures
and their meanings, is just as important as the
reconstruction of the interpretations of their makers
and first viewers.
The two final papers look at the benefits (Loosely)
and the problems (Koerner) of widening the
curriculum.
Emma Loosley’s paper, ‘Art History and Cultural
Belonging in Contemporary Syria’ analyses the
benefits for the local communities of the new
narratives of cultural and political identities that
arise from research into ancient monuments.
Loosley’s research field comprises Oriental Christian
Art, Architecture and Archaeology. She explores the
ways in which the excavation of early Christian
Aramaic churches in Syria means giving Christian
communities in the area new understanding of their
ancient roots. While art history may sometimes be
thought of as a decorative activity enhancing leisure
pursuits, or underpinning elite collecting policies,
research in this field could have profound religious
4
and political import for local societies whose
ancestors had made the buildings and who still
worshipped in some of them .An understanding of
such consequences could in turn inform students’
responses.
In contrast, Stephanie Koerner, probes some of the
problems entailed in the term globalisation to
describe new directions in the curriculum. Koerner
researches in the field of Archaeology and the
History of the Philosophy of Science, and her paper
’The “End of Art” or Iconoclash: “Crises of
Representation” and Attempts to Globalise the
“New” Art History’ uses examples drawn from
teaching a new MA course entitled ‘Debates in PreColombian and Latin American Visual Culture
Studies‘. She asked how ideologies have legitimated
the oppression of ‘minorities’. The last decade has
seen an increase in interest in images of
‘globalisation and multi-culturalism’. However,
there are considerable pitfalls facing any attempt to
globalise the field of art history. What are these
challenges and how does the notion of ‘iconoclash’
bear on these problems?
CATHERINE KING
šConventional and New Approaches to
Art History in India
DEVANGANA DESAI š
I
n this paper I will briefly examine trends in the
teaching of the history of Indian art in some of the
Indian universities, before going on to make
suggestions on the way it could be taught.
š How Indian art is taught
Ancient and medieval art is taught under the
auspices of the departments of History, Archaeology
and Ancient Indian Culture, as well as Art History
and Aesthetics. There is an emphasis on study of
style and form, attribution of works to schools and
regional styles. Iconography is an important subject
and will remain so in India as numerous images of
gods and goddesses are found in temples. In recent
times, miniature painting, tribal, folk, popular and
modern art have found a place in the curriculum,
while ancient art and architecture have lost their
earlier importance.
Recently, I had an opportunity to visit the Art
History and Aesthetics Department of the M S
University of Baroda in western India. The history of
Indian art is taught here, along with western art
history and applied arts of sculpture and painting.
Professors and students are familiar with the living
traditions of arts and crafts. Rural and tribal arts are
incorporated in the curriculum. Classes are offered
at the undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate
levels. This department has a grounding in Sanskrit
language and ancient textual sources of sculpture
and architecture, as well as in modern art and art
criticism. There are art history specialisation courses
as well as classes for general students. The time
period of the studies on sculpture, painting and
architecture is vast; the studies begin with the
Harappan culture (2300 BCE) or the protohistoric
period, and give considerable importance to
contemporary arts. Modern Indian art as well as
South East Asian art are included in the curriculum.
There are 22 lectures a year on each of the subjects.
Seminars are regularly held and proceedings
printed. There is an Art History Archive, consisting
of 60,000 photographs and colour plates and about
30,000 colour transparencies of works of art from
various cultures of the world, which include special
documentation of Indian painting, sculpture and
architecture. This visual material is used during the
lectures.
In the Baroda art history department there is a
growing interest in questions of caste, class, gender,
sexualities, and socio-political dynamics. One
notices a shift in the approach to the discipline of art
history from the conventional art-object oriented
approach ‘entailing issues of authorship,
connoisseurship, attribution and chronology to a
framework-oriented approach, which shift[s]
attention to political, social, economic structures that
under-gird the production of art’.1 The Baroda art
historians are moving towards a New Art History.
Some other universities in India teach the history of
Indian art, including the Punjab University at
Chandigarh, Chitrakala Parishad, Bangalore,
Chamaraja University, Mysore, the National
Museum Institute, New Delhi, Calcutta University
and Banaras Hindu University. The Shantiniketan
University in eastern India teaches mainly history of
world art, without specialisation in Indian art. The
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, offers a
wide range of topics for dissertations, both
traditional and contemporary, which include
popular, mass-produced art, modern architecture,
films and digital art.
I saw the syllabus for the MA in the History of Art
taught at Banaras Hindu University under Ancient
Indian History, Culture & Archaeology. Historical
background and basic teaching on Ancient Indian
architecture and sculpture are taken care of with a
conventional approach. Town planning, stupa
architecture, temple architecture and sculpture are
included in the curriculum. Students are taken out
to visit sites, for instance to Sarnath, to see the art of
the Gupta period.
The Mumbai University does not have a separate
department of Art History, but teaches Indian art
under Ancient Indian History, Culture and
Archaeology. More recently, since 1999, an
interesting curriculum is offered in the Art and
Aesthetics (diploma) course under the Department
of Philosophy. Aesthetic and religious background
is emphasised in this course. ‘An understanding of
the philosophical and religious tenets of the period
and ages forms the backbone of this study’, as its
website (www.aesthetics-rashmipoddar.com) states.
The Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, Islamic, colonial and
modern arts are included in the curriculum. Classes
are held in the premises of the Prince of Wales
Museum in Mumbai, and students have opportunity
of visiting museum galleries.
Without giving further details of teaching art history
in different universities of India, we can say that
broadly speaking there are two approaches:
5 š
š 21ST-CENTURY ART HISTORY
1 The conventional, associated with indology,
archaeology and museology, focusing on stylistic
analysis of art, dating of works, iconographic and
narrative studies, and
2 What is called New Art History, with a
framework-oriented approach to art, seeking ‘to
raise questions about the economic, political and
social implications of art that enable the resituation of Art History among the Social
Sciences’, as Shivaji Panikkar, Parul Dave
Mukherji and Deeptha Achar of Baroda
University mention in their Introduction to
Towards New Art History.
š How Indian art could be taught
Since the 19th century, when the history of art and
architecture was written by archaeologists and
engineers of the East India Company, it has been
dominated by ideas of the superiority of Greece and
the western standards of perspective.2 This
approach has now been abandoned. In recent times
Indian terminology of ancient architectural texts is
being employed to describe monuments.
Interpretative studies of texts by architectural
historians in co-operation with practising traditional
architects (sthapatis) have played an important part
in identifying the terminology of various
components of the temple, from the plinth to spirefinial.
While I do not completely disregard the writings on
Indian art by colonial writers such as Sir Alexander
Cunningham, because they provide detailed
accounts of the sites and monuments, I would
certainly disagree with colonial historians in their
views of Greek superiority to Indian art and other
value judgements. The work done by colonial
historians has been generally archaeological and
historical, discussing chronological problems. This is
useful, but one-sided, in that they have not taken
into consideration aesthetic and symbolic aspects of
Indian art, and its socio-cultural background.
On Indian Aesthetics
As Partha Mitter writes in his Preface to Indian Art,
‘The interesting question is not what Indian art
shares with western art, but how it differs from it.’
This point of difference in arts of diverse cultures is
important to bear in mind while teaching Indian art.
Ananda Coomaraswamy, nationalist historian of art
in the first half of the 20th century, differentiated the
approach to art as manifest in Indian culture from
that of the West on the basis of their differing
relationships with nature. His exposition of the
Indian view of art helps us to understand the
disregard or lack of scientific perspective in Indian
art. His study draws attention to the hold of ‘types’
in the presentation of an object. The traditional artist
would present a tree in painting or sculpture in
š 6
accordance with the convention of presenting a tree
rather than according to what he actually sees or as
it is in reality.3
The ancient Indian approach to the human body is
influenced by the discipline of Yoga, yogic breath,
and by the perspective of dance. There is no
depiction of muscles and anatomical details. The
interrelationship of arts – performing and visual – is
emphasised in ancient Indian texts. One of the wellknown Sanskrit treatises, the 6th-century
Vishnudharmottara Purana, states that in order to
learn visual arts (painting and sculpture), the
student should learn dance and music, for the
principles of these arts govern visual arts.
Similarly, the theory of Rasa, aesthetic emotion,
considered to be the essence of art, and mentioned
in the Natyashastra of Bharata of the 3rd century CE,
needs to be taken into account while teaching Indian
art, which is, to some extent, being done in Indian
universities. Professor B N Goswamy’s exposition of
Rasa in relation to visual arts is interesting.4
However, it should be remembered that originally
the concept of Rasa applied to literary and dramatic
arts and that not all categories of visual art arouse
Rasa or aesthetic emotion. Religious icons are not
‘Rasa-producing’. ‘The aim of the artist in creating
an icon is not to elicit Rasa but to aid the devotee in
a religious experience, a personal union with God’,
as Doris Chatham clarifies in her article, ‘Rasa and
Sculpture’.5
Recently, Richard Davis in an article ‘Devotional
Aesthetics and Temple Icons’, has drawn attention
to devotional aesthetics of medieval south India,
which considers the emotional experiences of
devotee-poets in order to understand ‘how Indian
audiences would have seen and responded to all the
objects we designate as Indian art’.6
In its identification of the icon with a divine
presence that extends beyond the object and its
advocacy of a deeply interested interaction with
the object, devotional aesthetics distinguishes
itself from the Kantian aesthetics of ‘art-as-such’
that has dominated modern Western
understandings and institutions of art.
Social history of art
In the beginning of the art history course, some
lectures can be organised to give an idea of the
social history of art, or of a socio-historical approach
to art. Students should be familiar with the basic
social background of art. Art activity is a social
process in which the artist, the work of art and the
art public are interacting elements. The social
history of art explores the dynamics of the
relationship between the patron and public, the
artist and the work of art in the context of the social
formation of a given period of history.7
ART HISTORY IN INDIA š
Recently, historians, in particular Professor R N
Misra and his colleagues, have researched ancient
Indian artists and their institutional set-up, based on
epigraphical and textual material.8 Their study gives
us an actual or concrete situation as regards the
ancient artists, and their status in society. This
material would help us to comment on the
ahistorical and ideal picture of artists portrayed by
nationalist historians such as Coomaraswamy and E
B Havell, who said that the traditional artist was not
interested in self-expression and remained
anonymous. Instead of accepting a static and ideal
picture of artists from the Brahmanic texts, we need
to study texts in their historical contexts.
The ancient Indian society was not static, as was
generally assumed by colonial and nationalist
historians. In post-Independence India, social
historians Professor R S Sharma9 Professor Romila
Thapar10 and others have drawn attention to
different stages or periods in Ancient Indian history
based on differing socio-economic conditions. The
three broad periods in which the social milieu of
ancient Indian art can be examined are11:
c. 300 BCE – CE 500
c. CE 500 – 900
c. CE 900 – 1300
Thus, in the period c.300 BCE – CE 500, the period of
heightened trade, commodity production and urban
prosperity, the position of craftsmen improved
considerably and money could be invested with
their guilds, as we know from inscriptions. The
urban or nagaraka class, consisting of merchants,
traders, and artisans as well as common people and
royal families, mainly patronised art. But in the
period c. CE 500 – 900, when trade and commodity
production was on decline, the samanta or feudal
culture replaced the urban nagaraka culture. In the
period CE 900 – 1300, the craftsmen could be
pressurised to forced labour, though some of them
were honoured with feudal titles and joined the
feudal order. The inscriptions on numerous temple
walls eulogise the might and prowess of patrons.
The study of the social background of medieval
temples reveals their affluent patronage. Templebuilding activity on a large scale is reflective of the
social set up of medieval India. Numerous landowning wealthy patrons – kings, queens, military
chiefs, ministers, merchants – built temples for fame
as well as religious merit. There was a competitive
spirit in the building of larger and more magnificent
temples, which certainly influenced the art of the
temple. The temple increased considerably in height,
expanded in its size, and became a prosperous
organisation, holding big estates and with a large
number of functionaries in its service. The temple’s
role to dazzle the public is clear in the content and
form of its art.
The changing relationship of patrons and artists in
different periods, and the influence this had on the
creation of art, its form and contents could be
examined. Similarly, the use of art as a tool in the
hands of the ruling power (a subject of study in art
history of the West) could be considered when
researching and teaching art under royal dynasties
of medieval India.
I have, in my work, Erotic Sculpture of India, a SocioCultural Study (1975), employed the social historical
approach, rather than stylistic or aesthetic, which
helped in understanding this phenomenon in the
cultural context of India. I have examined the
historical development and changes in the depiction
of erotic motifs in the three above-mentioned
periods of ancient India. I continued the social
historical approach in my various articles on
Ancient Indian terracottas, situating their art in the
context of the urban cultural milieu.
The classification of art in textbooks
The classification of art based on Buddhist, Hindu
and Indo-Islamic categories is still carried on in
books, including Partha Mitter’s Indian Art, which
deals with these broad divisions. This can continue
until books on classification based on socioeconomic periods of history are written. One should
recognise that these categories are not monolithic
divisions, for within the Buddhist period, the Hindu
temples were built, and similarly, within Hindu
period, the Buddhist artistic activity continued.
J C Harle in his Pelican History of Art, divides his
chapters into: Early Indian Art, the Gupta Art, the
Post-Gupta Art, the Later Hindu Period, Painting,
Indo-Islamic Architecture, and so on. There are
classifications of art according to ruling dynasties
under which art was produced, for instance,
Maurya, Kushan, Chandella. Though this is a
convenient nomenclature still used in discussions on
art, we can see that regional nomenclature has to
some extent replaced dynastic labels in architectural
history. The Encyclopaedia of Indian Temple
Architecture, several volumes of which are published
by the American Institute of Indian Studies, New
Delhi and Gurgaon, has taken a lead in this
direction, as their publications as well as archives
are based on classification by region and period.
The gender in art
Representing the Body; gender issues in art, edited by
Vidya Dehejia, is a significant book in Indian art
historiography, which throws light on the way the
human body, both female and male, is treated in
Indian art. This approach can help us when teaching
sculptural art, replete with figures of shalabhanjika,
or woman and tree motif (fig 1).
7 š
š 21ST-CENTURY ART HISTORY
in sculptural art of temples from the 8th century
onwards.13 In this context it is noteworthy that the
text Shilpa Prakasha of Orissa in eastern India
describes 16 types of female figures in various
activities as looking into a mirror, holding a branch
of the tree, and so on. This treatise ordains the
carving of such female figures for the sake of fertility
and fruitfulness.
While the symbolism of sensuous female figures can
be explained in the context of fertility and their luckbringing function, their actual rendering in art, their
form, can be understood on the basis of the
knowledge of yogic body and the perspective of
dance.
The female figures, while they fulfil the role of
auspiciousness and good luck, are also used as an
allegory, for instance, to represent characters of the
philosophical play Prabodhachandrodaya, staged in
the Khajuraho region. On the juncture wall of the
Lakshmana (Vishnu-Vaikuntha) temple of
Khajuraho (CE 954), the sculptured female figures
represent characters of the Holy Lore, Peace,
Wisdom, and also Error. 14
Fig 1 Shalabhanjika, woman and tree motif, Sanchi,
Central India, 1st century BCE.
Shalabhanjika is shown as sensuous because she is
meant to be so for fertility purposes. It was believed
that there is a close relation between women and
trees, both fertilising one another by their touch.
There was a belief that woman by her touch could
cause a tree to blossom, and she in turn would also
become fertile by touching a tree. Buddha’s mother
Maya delivered when she held a branch of a Shala
tree. Women played games associated with trees,
such as the plucking of Shala and Ashoka flowers on
spring festivals. The ‘woman and tree’ became a
motif in art from the 2nd century BCE, and is
depicted until today in traditionally built temples.
There is textual support for the depiction of
shalabhanjika on buildings, as evidenced from
literary texts.
It is significant to point out that sensuous motifs are
depicted on Buddhist monuments to which nuns
and monks donated. Inscriptions at Bharhut, Sanchi
and other Buddhist sites show that, as well as the
laity, Buddhist monks and nuns donated for the
constructions of these monuments. As Vidya
Dehejia says, ‘Consideration of the intended
audience ... suggests a shift from the spectatorship
model of the West. The Bharhut stupa was ritual
space and public domain. The Bharhut images were
neither necessarily commissioned by men, nor
intended to be viewed solely by them.’12
Similarly, the motif of apsara or surasundari, the
celestial damsel (fig 2) occupies an important place
š 8
An approach to temple art
In addition to the socio-historical approach to art,
there is another approach – that of the study of the
architect’s design of the temple, and concepts
presented through the sculptural scheme of the
temple. When we employ a sociological approach to
Fig 2 Apsaras or surasundaris, celestial female figures,
Vishvanatha Temple, Khajuraho, CE 999.
ART HISTORY IN INDIA š
temples, we talk in general about its art, without
going into the intricacies of its specific imagery.
Within the general and broad social framework,
however, there is also possibly a closer view of the
temple and its art. It is possible to get an internal
view of the temple, a view into the design of the
master architect. As a case study I will take my own
field of research in the temple art of Khajuraho.
There is an internal logic to planning the temple,
which could be glimpsed from a minute study of the
actual placement of sculptures in the architectural
scheme of the temple. This occurred to me when I
was looking at the sculptural schemes of three
mature temples of Khajuraho, built between 950 and
1050 CE. Michael Meister had made a subtle
observation on architectural punning by architects
by noticing the placement of conjoint figures on
juncture (kapili) walls joining the sanctum and the
hall of temples at Khajuraho (fig 3) and
Chittorgarh.15 While studying the placement of
erotic figures at Khajuraho, a paper assigned to me
for the ‘Discourses on Siva’ Symposium at
Philadelphia in 1981, my attention was also drawn
to the well-planned placement of divinities in the
temples. It seemed as if the architect achieved the
balance between the left and right sides of the
temple by pairing two opposite or complementary
divinities such as Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth,
and Sarasvati, the goddess of learning.
The cardinal niches on the south, west, and north
walls of these east-facing temples represent the chief
divinity’s manifestations. Professor Stella
Kramrisch, in her monumental book The Hindu
Temple16 has shown how the centre of the sanctum –
the principal divinity – is the energy centre, which
radiates its power through the images of its
manifestations in the cardinal niches of the sanctum
façade. I closely observed the planning and design
of the Khajuraho architect, how he had placed
images in the temple’s scheme. It is important to
study the underlying conceptual scheme in
comprehending the monument.
Fig 3 Drawing of the ground-plan showing the juncture wall
as an overlap of two squares, Kandariya Mahadeva
temple, Khajuraho, CE 1030.
Medieval India, particularly in the 10th to 11th
centuries, witnessed the building of some of the
mature temples at Bhubaneswar, Modhera,
Udaypur and Tanjavur, and also Khajuraho, just to
mention some masterpieces of temple art and
architecture. Aesthetically, these temples express a
superb harmony of architecture and sculpture, of
monumental and plastic form. While it is general
practice to teach the historical development of
temple art and architecture, describing different
architectural elements such as the plinth, wall and
tower (shikhara), these well-designed temples can
also be presented to students by pointing out the
placement of images in cardinal niches in relation to
the central divinity in the sanctum. We should
remember that the divinity in the sanctum is the
nucleus of the temple.
I would like to comment here on the role of
iconography and iconology in the study of temples.
To illustrate this point, I may mention that there are
some important images on the plinth of the
Lakshmana temple at Khajuraho, which were not
earlier identified. These images represent six
handsome divinities, along with Surya (Sun),
Ganesha and Durga. Four of these have their
mounts: goose, lamb, elephant and frog. I looked up
the iconography of several mythological figures. It is
the frog as the mount that gave me a clue to the
figure being the planet Shukra (Venus, in India a
male divinity). For a frog is the mount of the planet
Shukra in sculptural depictions of central and
eastern India, as also in the textual tradition of the
western Indian texts.17
So, if the figure with the frog mount represents the
planet Shukra, the rest of the six figures and Surya,
being collective divinities, also represent the other
planetary divinities. But we cannot stop with just
conventional iconographic study and identifications.
Identifications of individual images are important,
Surya = Sun, Soma = Moon, Mangala = Mars,
Budha = Mercury, Brihaspati = Jupiter, Sukra = Venus,
Sani = Saturn
Fig 4 Drawing showing planetary divinities (Grahas) placed
around the Lakshmana (Vishnu-Vaikuntha) temple,
Khajuraho, CE 954.
9 š
š 21ST-CENTURY ART HISTORY
but not an end in themselves. It is equally important
to take into account the configuration of images, and
not just study these as isolated images.
This identification of the seven figures as planetary
divinities brings us into the field of iconology,
concerned with the meaning and context of images.
If you see these figures of seven planets in the
context of their placement of the temple (fig 4), you
notice that they encircle the temple and form, as it
were, a Graha-mandala (magical circle) around the
temple.
This imagery of planetary divinities encircling the
temple is of great significance. For it makes the
temple imaged as Mt Meru, the cosmic mountain in
the centre of the Universe, around which the planets
revolve. This is a cosmic imagery, which we would
miss if we do not have knowledge of iconography in
order to identify the images, and see their
configuration in the temple’s scheme. We have to
perceive the intimacy of architect’s ideas and their
visualisation into his design of the temple. This
approach of the study of actual context of images
helps us in comprehending temple art and
understanding its designers.
I recently visited Cambodia, and noticed that there
the temples are structurally shown as Mt Meru,
whereas at Khajuraho, the temple is shown as Mt
Meru by projecting concepts through the sculptural
scheme.
do not make students art historians,
theoreticians ungrounded in reality.
In addition to the art-object oriented approach,
however, the framework-oriented approach should
be considered and introduced in teaching methods.
The teaching of art in its social milieu, and in the
context of gender issues, combined with a study of
style and form, will give a wider perspective to
students of art history. š
End Notes
Photographs by Devangana Desai. Drawings courtesy of the
Archaeological Survey of India, New Delhi, and Franco-Indian
Research, Mumbai.
1
Shivaji K Pannikkar, Parul Dave Mukherji, Deeptha Achar,
Towards a New Art History: Studies in Indian Art, DK
Printworld, New Delhi, 2003.
2
For different views, see Catherine King ed., Views of
Difference: Different Views of Art, Yale University Press, New
Haven & London, in association with the Open University,
1999.
3
Devangana Desai, ‘Reflections on Coomaraswamy’s
Approach to Indian Art’, in Paroksa, Coomaraswamy Centenary
Seminar Papers, Lalit Kala, New Delhi, 1984.
4
B N Goswamy, The Essence of Indian Art, Asian Museum of
Art, San Francisco, 1986.
5
Doris Chatham, in Kaladarsana, American Studies in the Art of
India, ed. Joanna Williams, E J Brill, Leiden, 1981
6
Richard Davies, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Mumbai, vol 79,
2004, p 59.
7
Devangana Desai, ‘Social Dimensions of Art in Early India’,
Presidential address, Ancient India, Indian History Congress,
Gorakhpur Session, December, 1989.
8
R N Misra, Ancient Artists and Art Activity, Simla, 1975.
9
R S Sharma, Perspectives in Social and Economic History of Early
India, New Delhi, 1983.
Conclusion
The latest technology is proving useful in the study
of Indian temple art. Satellite photography of
monuments, which is now available around the
globe, is a helpful tool for the study of architectural
monuments within archaeological contexts. I could
see this being used, for example, in a presentation
on the World Heritage Site of Champaner-Pavagadh
in western India. Digital photographs, which can be
enlarged on computer to show details of facial
features, ornaments, drapery, etc of sculptural
figures, are also proving useful in the teaching of the
stylistic features of art.
Another practical tool is the preparation of models
as a way of helping students to grasp and
understand the principles behind the construction of
architectural monuments. I have seen this used by
students in Adam Hardy’s classes (earlier at
Leicester, now in Cardiff), and by students in
western India, where they prepared models of stepwells and other monuments.
The dynastic histories of the patrons are still being
taught, and this should continue. We have to know
the dates of art works and monuments. The basic art
material has to be taught, as is conventionally done.
Otherwise we will be talking empty theories, which
š 10
but
10 Romila Thapar, Ancient Indian Social History, New Delhi, 1978.
11 Devangana Desai, Social Dimensions of Art in Early India, 1989.
12 Vidya Dehejia ed. Representing the Body, New Delhi, 1997, p 5.
13 Devangana Desai, Surasundaris, Celestial Beauty in Indian
Art; in Saundarya, The Perception and Practice of Beauty in India,
ed. Harsha Dehejia and Makarand Paranjape, New Delhi,
2003.
14 Devangana Desai, The Religious Imagery of Khajuraho, Mumbai,
1996, pp 181–9.
15 Michael Meister, ‘Juncture and Conjunction: Punning and
Temple Architecture’, Artibus Asiae, vol. XLI, 1979.
16 Stella Kramrisch, The Hindu Temple, Calcutta, 1946.
17 Devangana
pp 135–43.
Desai,
The Religious Imagery of Khajuraho,
Author biography
Devangana Desai is the author of Khajuraho – Monumental Legacy,
2000, The Religious Imagery of Khajuraho, 1996, Erotic Sculpture of
India - A Socio-Cultural Study, 1985, and over 70 papers on various
aspects of Ancient Indian Art. Dr Desai is General Editor of the
Monumental Legacy Series on the World Heritage Sites in India,
being published by Oxford University Press. She is the Editor of
the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Mumbai. She is currently
researching on the Museum Images of Khajuraho, as a project of
Franco-Indian Research, Mumbai.
Where on Earth is South Asia? Studying the arts of
India in 21st-century Britain
CRISPIN BRANFOOT
T
he GLAADH (Globalising Art, Architecture and
Design History) project highlighted the
presence of pockets of expertise and teaching in
non-Western art and design around the United
Kingdom, and brought many scholars together to
address how 21st-century art history might be
reshaped to reflect our globalised world.1 The
teaching of the art produced by the cultures and
communities of South Asia over the past 2,000 years
– modern India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri
Lanka, Bhutan and the Maldives – is striking for its
neglect in British universities in the early 21st
century. India and British imperial history from the
18th century to the 20th century is widely taught as
part of history degrees, the ethnography of South
Asia is a common element in many anthropology
degrees, and Indian religions are a central part of
any religious studies programme. Even South Asian
archaeology is currently taught in four British
universities (UCL, Cambridge, Bradford and
Durham). But where is the art history of this large,
diverse and wonderful region?
My focus is on South Asian art, but some of the
issues raised are equally applicable to anyone
interested in how less familiar art and cultural
contexts – such as those of Japan, China, Latin
America or Africa – can be introduced into more
Eurocentric curricula. These have often been
marginalised as ‘non-western art’. A key challenge
for art history in 21st-century Britain is to abandon
such divisive terminology and recognise that the art
of these regions must be addressed on an equal
footing with that of European art. A central theme in
my discussion is the separation and distinctiveness
of South Asian art. Partha Mitter has written that
‘the interesting question is not what Indian art
shares with western art, but how it differs from it.’2 I
would agree that this is indeed one interesting
question, but such an approach has led to the
underdevelopment and limited integration of South
Asian art into the art historical mainstream.
Presenting South Asia and its art as separate – as an
insular academic domain – is misleading and, I
would argue, damaging to its conception and
reception as part of the academic discipline of art
history.
Why should students study South Asian art history
in Britain? Many undergraduate students will have
encountered South Asian culture before arriving at
university, either in Britain – and the nation’s
favourite dish is not insignificant here – or through
travelling. The 21st-century gap-year equivalent of
the ‘Grand Tour’ is not travelling around Europe but
involves longer round-the-world trips to India,
Nepal, Thailand and Australia. Many of our
undergraduates are as likely to have seen a
Rajasthani palace or the Taj Mahal as the paintings
in the Uffizi in Florence.
Britain and India have a long imperial and colonial
relationship stretching back to the foundation of the
East India Company in 1600 and the gradual
establishment of British rule in India during the 18th
and 19th centuries. This long period of cultural
engagement has resulted in major collections of
Indian sculpture, painting, textiles and decorative
arts in British museums, both large national and
smaller local ones. Introducing South Asian art into
the art history curriculum will ensure that museum
curators will not only have the skills to analyse
objects but will have the specific knowledge to
understand their whole collection. The creation of
numerous South Asia specialists is not required, but
Asian art and culture should be part of everyone’s
general education, and that of South Asia is
especially important given the history of
colonialism.
Another legacy of Britain and India’s shared history
is the significant South Asian communities in many
British cities. Students with families from South Asia
may want to know more about their cultural
background, from pure curiosity, or also to apply
that knowledge to creative art, design or
architectural projects. In an increasingly globalised
world, awareness of cultures beyond Europe is
essential; given the growing economic might of
India in the world economy, studying the art and
culture of this region should be part of every
student’s degree.
Included under the umbrella of South Asian or
Indian art is a huge range of art and artefacts, with
great cultural diversity over 2,500 years and a vast
geographical area. Around a quarter of the world’s
population now lives in South Asia, and all the
major world religions are represented there:
Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism, Jainism, Christianity,
Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, and Judaism.
An argument against teaching the art of areas
beyond Europe and North America is the lack of
direct experience by undergraduates with those
cultures and their art. Can you teach South Asian
art, for example, without a field trip to India? Many
11
21ST-CENTURY ART HISTORY
existing degree courses, or as part of more
specialised degrees in South Asian Studies. The first
emphasises the ‘Art’, the second emphasises ‘South
Asia’ in South Asian art history. A reflection on the
issues involved in these two learning contexts will
highlight how and why a closer integration of South
Asian art with the wider art-historical discipline can
be mutually beneficial.
South Asian art and art history
The majority of UK art history degree courses
include sections on methodology or approaches to
art history. Instead of presenting students with
material they may already know, exercising their
skills of visual analysis with an unfamiliar painting
– a Rajasthani court painting rather than an Italian
Renaissance one – can enhance their grasp of
methodological issues by focussing on the approach
over the object’s specifics. Discussions of portraiture,
its conception and reception, could include a South
Asian example. A course on cities might use a South
Asian example, such as Vijayanagara, the 14th to
16th century ‘City of Victory’ in southern India (Fig
1), 17th-century ‘Old’ Delhi or Lutyens’ early 20th
century, colonial New Delhi.
Many of the issues studied in South Asian art are
broad art historical ones.
Fig 1 The ‘City of Victory’ or Vijayanagara in Karnataka,
south India, mostly 14th to 16th century.
students would be delighted to have a field trip to
Delhi as part of their undergraduate degree, instead
of Paris, Rome or Berlin. But South Asian art is
never far away in Britain. In terms of educational
resources, there are substantial and accessible
collections of sculpture, painting and decorative arts
in London and Oxford; many local museums, such
as in Edinburgh, Birmingham, Leicester or Durham,
have a few examples of South Asian art. It is even
possible to study architecture, given the
construction of temples and mosques in many
British cities from the 1990s. The conversion of old
buildings is now giving way to the construction of
wholly new temples or mosques, often with the
involvement of traditional craftsmen from South
Asia. Good introductory literature is available to
support teaching, alongside the increasing number
of web-based educational resources. The expanding
role of museums in education has led to excellent
websites that can support a teaching programme.3
Some museums even offer specialist short courses
for students who have not been able to study South
Asian art as part of an art history degree.4
South Asian art history may be taught in two ways:
as small sections or optional modules within
12
The analysis of visuality and ways of seeing in
Western Art, whether of a Byzantine icon or a
Renaissance painting, is just as problematic as
understanding the use of Hindu images. A course
on religious architecture and sculpture might
include seminars on wooden origins and the
formation of the architectural tradition or
‘language’; narrative sculpture and iconographic
programmes; myth, ritual and image-worship;
festivals, processions and sacred landscape; and,
religious architecture and political patronage. Such
an approach applies equally to a course on the
ancient Greek temple as much as the Hindu temple.
A course on early modern art, looking at the
techniques of painting, drawing and sculpture; the
nature of workshop practice and its relationship to
how artists worked; the range of subject-matter
represented; the relationship between artists and
patrons; the social context of works of art; the
different function and meaning of particular
paintings, sculptures and buildings; or the
relationship between art and religion, could equally
examine these issues in the context of 16th century
Italy or the contemporary courts of north India.
Thus, whilst the context may be new to students, the
approaches to understanding the art are familiar.
If a whole block of India may seem too much to
introduce to an existing degree programme, then
there are accessible ways in which existing material
can be diversified. A course on European art in the
WHERE ON EARTH IS SOUTH ASIA?
18th and 19th centuries might easily expand beyond
Europe to address how European artists depicted
India or how Indian artists responded to European
patronage, developing the ‘Company’ style of
painting in the early 19th century. The history of
Victorian architecture could profitably include the
Indian context, where the ‘dilemma of style’ was not
just between Neoclassical and Gothic Revival, but
between these two and a third option, the equally
historicist ‘Indo-Saracenic’ style that sought to
emulate the architecture of India’s past for the
colonial present.
Examining moments of cultural encounter, such as
Company painting or Indo-Saracenic architecture, is
an excellent way of making this material more
accessible to undergraduates unfamiliar with South
Asia. Two other moments of cultural encounter
between the West and South Asia that can profitably
be studied include the Buddhist art of ancient
Gandhara, looking at the impact of the Classical
Mediterranean on Central Asia in the early centuries
CE, and the artistic culture encountered by European
travellers and missionaries at the Mughal court of
north India in the 16th and 17th centuries.
A problem with this approach to Indian art,
however, is that it is only seen as interesting when
there is some European connection, which excludes
huge areas of study such as the temple architecture
and sculpture discussed in Devangana Desai’s
chapter in this volume. Ages of global encounter
such as the period 1500–1800, when South Asia was
central to the expanding networks of political,
economic and cultural exchange between Asia and
Europe, are exciting for the great source material
and material evidence they provide. Examining how
Europe viewed South Asia and the reverse, how
South Asia viewed Europe, is fascinating, as the
Victoria & Albert Museum’s exhibition Encounters:
The Meeting of Asia and Europe 1500–1800 in autumn
2004 demonstrated.5
But we need to remember that South Asian art in
this period, or indeed the 19th century colonial
period, is not solely defined by its relationship to
Europe. There are plenty of traditional art forms in
South Asia that have little relationship with the
encounter with Europe. Eurocentrism may thus
persist in curricula that neglect to address South
Asian art beyond the impact of Europe, however
well intentioned and admirable including any
mention of material from outside Europe might
seem.
The pioneering scholarship, largely by Europeans, in
the later 19th and early 20th centuries tended to
emphasise the connections with the West and the
influence of Achaemenid Persia, Classical and
Hellenistic Greece or Rome on the formation of
Indian art. The Nationalist response in India was to
stress the independent development of, for example,
early architecture or the Buddha image. Both
Colonial and Nationalist viewpoints shared in the
view that early Indian art from the formative period
of the 3rd century BCE to the 5th century CE was
worth studying. Later Indian art from 500 CE
onwards was good if it was Islamic, such as Mughal
painting and architecture; ignored, considered
‘degenerate’ or not even ‘art’, if Hindu; and when it
comes to the impact of 500 years of interaction with
Europe this period was not usually considered to
part of the Indian ‘story of art’ at all.
Such views have changed very positively over the
course of the later 20th century, not least because of
archival art historians’ assessment of the
historiography of art history and archaeology as
disciplines in 19th and early 20th century India.
Much of this new postcolonial literature by, for
example, Partha Mitter and Tapati Guha-Thakurta
makes for stimulating discussion with
undergraduates.6 It can, however, become a subject
in itself divorced from actually critically assessing
sculpture, paintings, textiles or architecture in the
museum or on the ground in South Asia.
From my experience of teaching Indian art history to
students of Western art history, and art & design in
British Higher Education, I have encountered great
enthusiasm for studying a wholly new topic that
they have not previously studied at ‘A’ level or in
the first year. The initial bafflement with new
names, new geography, technical vocabulary in
Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian, and a great variety of
religions is quickly overcome. Lecturers teaching
Mediaeval or Renaissance European art will find
that the iconography of Christian saints or Biblical
narratives may be as unfamiliar to many 21st
century undergraduates as that of the multitude of
Hindu deities. Introducing students to the basic
principles of Indian iconography is straightforward
and empowering – and they get some great stories
to read.
In terms of practicalities, the majority of secondary
literature on the arts of South Asia is in English. Can
students study the arts of India without knowledge
of Indian languages? Does the same objection apply
to current undergraduates’ absence of Dutch when
studying ‘Golden Age’ painting? Overall, students
have responded very positively to the opportunity
to approach art in new ways and new contexts.
Before reflecting on positive future directions for art
history in the 21st century, I wish to consider
another way in which Indian art is currently
studied, as one aspect of specialised studies of South
Asian culture.
►
13
21ST-CENTURY ART HISTORY
Fig 2 The Taj Mahal,
Agra, north India,
mid-17th century.
Indian art and South Asian studies
Where Indian art has been taught in British
universities it has often been within specialised
institutions such as the School of Oriental and
African Studies, or as part of larger courses on Asian
art. The arts of India may be placed alongside the
arts of the Islamic world from Spain to Central Asia,
or Southeast Asia (Burma, Thailand, Cambodia,
Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines and
Indonesia) and East Asia (China, Korea and Japan).
Existing lecturers in Indian art history have often
come from an Indological background and are
steeped in Indian religions, ancient and mediaeval
history and literature. This is potentially positive for
the interdisciplinary depth of their studies. The
downside, however, is that Indian art is often
presented as a subject separate from art history in
general – an interest in India can override an interest
in art.
There are culturally specific features to traditional
Indian art, such as the aesthetic theory of Rasa,
which privileges viewers’ emotional responses, or
the complex iconographies of Indian religions with
their multi-headed, multi-armed gods and
goddesses – but this insularity can lead to the
persistence of Indian art history as a ghetto subject,
only comprehended by those who have received
initiation into India as a whole.
The Islamic art of India is good example of this.
Islamic culture has been present in South Asia since
the 8th century, and there is a continuous record of
Islamic art and architecture from c.1200 on – the Taj
Mahal is the best-known example (fig. 2). But until
very recently Indian Islamic art has been treated
separately from ‘mainstream’ Islamic art in the
14
Middle East and North Africa. Islamic art historians
withdrew, like Alexander the Great, at the border of
India. The Islamic art of South Asia was then only
understood through an Indian lens and not as part
of the wider Islamic world.
Specialised courses on Indian art often dwell at
length on either the iconography of sculpture, with
interminable lists of deities’ names and attributes,
the art often appearing only to illustrate the
religions. Or the discussion may focus excessively
on stylistic analysis for the court paintings of north
India. This may be fine for students already
converted to South Asian culture, who want to
know the subject in great factual detail. But this
approach is very methodologically limiting,
especially when the student moves outside South
Asia, and it enhances the external view of Indian art
as a purely connoisseurial discipline.
A key problem with South Asian art at present is its
relative enclosure, its insularity as a specialised field
of area studies and not as an essential element of art
history. Many broader art historical issues and
approaches have yet to filter in to many areas of
South Asian art history to any substantial degree,
partly a reflection of the small number of scholars of
South Asian art worldwide. Teaching South Asian
art alongside other more traditional areas of art
history is mutually beneficial: South Asian art can
develop in positive, new directions, and more
Eurocentric art history programmes can reflect on
their methodologies by looking at alternative views
of the production and consumption of art in, for
example, a South Asian context.7
Embedding South Asian art within art history as a
discipline is very positive for South Asian art
WHERE ON EARTH IS SOUTH ASIA?
historians, as it encourages new avenues for
research and teaching, beyond the obsession with
early Indian iconography and the connoisseurial
analysis of style in north Indian court painting.
There are comparatively few scholars examining
South Asian art worldwide and that includes in
India and Pakistan. There is much material waiting
to be documented and analysed for the first time,
and new approaches to be formulated. For
undergraduates and indeed postgraduates, the
wealth of material available for original study is
vast. This does mean that undergraduates can easily
pose questions to an experienced lecturer that the
scholarly body has yet to adequately address, but it
also means that final-year dissertations can embody
original work whether from brief fieldwork in
vacations or museum study.
The globalisation of the art, architecture and design
history curricula is essential to the continued vitality
of the 21st-century academic discipline. With a
diminishing number of art history applicants across
Britain, one way in which our particular university
courses can be made distinctive and more attractive
is to diversify our curricula. The distinction between
art history as the history of Western art from the
Renaissance to the present, and the teaching of the
art of areas beyond Europe and the West as part of
Area Studies, must be dissolved. North American
universities are ahead of Britain in this respect. Are
we ready to discard the term ‘non-Western art’? Art
history must include all areas without having to
precede the phrase with ‘world’. Flexibility, variety
and a wider choice for students can only be a good
thing for art history in 21st-century higher
education.
End notes
1
www.glaadh.ac.uk
2
Partha Mitter, Indian Art, OUP, Oxford, 2001, p1.
3
The Metropolitan Museum in New York and the British
Museum in London are two good examples.
4
The British Museum’s postgraduate Diploma in Asian Art,
which includes a 15-week intensive course in Indian art, is the
best current example.
5
Anna Jackson and Amin Jaffer (eds.), Encounters: The Meeting
of Asia and Europe 1500–1800, V&A Publications, London,
2004.
6
Partha Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: A History of European
Reactions to Indian Art, University of Chicago Press, Chicago
and London, 1977; and Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Monuments,
Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Postcolonial
India Columbia University Press, New York and Chichester,
2004.
7
A related issue to the Area Studies nature of much current
South Asian art history is its presentation, whether via
conferences or publications to a specialised audience alone.
South Asian art historians in Britain should present their
research at mainstream Art History conferences and publish
in journals such as Art History or The Art Bulletin.
Author biography
Crispin Branfoot has taught South Asian art history at SOAS, De
Monfort University, the British Museum and Oxford University.
His research is focussed on the Hindu arts of southern India. He
is the co-editor of Pilgrimage: The Sacred Journey (2006) and a
forthcoming monograph, Gods on the Move: architecture and ritual
in the south Indian temple (2006).
15
Art History, Globalisations and
Sly Multiculturalism in the Academy
NATASHA EATON
T
his paper questions whether a global
worldview of/for art history is on the agenda.
My intervention plays off art history in the UK
against art history in two alternative locations –
India and the USA – with a focus on South
Asian/diasporic visual culture in/outside higher
education. I explore why repercussions of a certain
19th-century/imperialist ‘exhibitionary complex’
still determines British ideas of ‘governing art
history’ and how Britain deploys this perspective for
evaluating other ideas of art histories. In this
reckoning (concerned with ‘critical dialogue’
between museums, galleries and art history
departments), art history in India, by
‘rejecting/mistranslating’ this status quo, must be in
crisis. But we must take into account the dynamic
interactions between art historians, artists, curators,
and public speech that articulate productive
disjunctures in the postcolonial, vernacular practices
of art history in South Asia – where several of the
leading scholars of visual culture are not art
historians at all.
Given the legacy of the Subaltern Studies’ drive to
provincialise European/colonial history by
disrupting the hegemonic idioms of the western
(especially US) academy, this paper considers
whether British universities qua their Indian/US
counterparts, are taking these challenges seriously.
Is this a question of lack of resources in marked
contrast with the Asian endowments of the USA
(e.g. Asia Society), where non-western art is a
conspicuous agent (often equal player) in university
education, or is it. more ominously, steeped in ‘sly
multiculturalism’ – i.e. a strategy for its institutional
inclusion and simultaneous confinement in terms of
authenticity/difference and the marginal?
The exhibitionary complex in the UK
context
The very ambiguity of what might be ‘South Asian’
art in art history stages the polarities of a ‘radical
chic [or crasser] version of Raj nostalgia’1 and the
popularity of contemporary South Asian imagery
(e.g. film/posters) in public culture. Art history
rarely addresses the oscillation, even schizophrenia,
between these spheres, preferring to retreat into its
westernised canon. I propose this discomfort traces
its genealogy to the colonial project of Victorian
Britain – grounded in world’s fairs and a certain
romanticism displaced from the Arts and Crafts
Movement to the colonial agenda.
16
According to Tony Bennett’s seminal work on the
evolution of museums in mid-19th-century Britain,
the development of a new mode of sovereignty –
governmentality – involved a degree not only of
social- but also of self-surveillance.2 Parallel to the
institutionalisation and increased public invisibility
of corporeal punishment, the establishment of
museums, art galleries etc, formed what he terms an
‘exhibitionary archipelago’ for understanding
histories and cultures through their material traces.
It also premised a form of self-control intimately
linked to the carceral, but which also involved
increased access to and participation within a
modern, and I would stress a colonial regime that
was intensely visual. Encouraged (perhaps by their
employers at times even coerced) to attend world’s
fairs and evening views at museums, workers were
encouraged to inculcate certain ‘object lessons’. In
this ideology, both the objects and the temporal gaps
between them – as in the case of the natural history
typological displays exemplified by the Pitt Rivers
Museum, were intended to immerse the viewer
within a certain civilising process that made s/he
aware of the metonymic power of the visual. This
object-oriented experience bled from fairs to
museums, to anthropology, archaeology and to the
new, perhaps always precarious, discipline of art
history.
Promoted in institutions exemplified by SOAS, art
history’s orientalist legacy and specialised program
demand that students make a commitment to nonwestern art prior to entry. The recent retirement or
relocation of several leading specialists (Partha
Mitter, Giles Tillotson) has seemingly created a
lacuna, which sits uneasily with the wealth of south
Asian archival materials available for academic
research. But are we looking in the wrong place?
The high profile GLAADH project underscored the
need, the urgency for a forum for prising open the
British university curriculum. In simple terms, this
three-year project called for a certain structural
readjustment to the ways in which British
institutions think art. Principal issues involved the
dilemma of a certain sly multiculturalism – i.e. the
ways in which older programs could invest in a
liberal/funky outlook through the inclusion of
colonial or non-western art without seriously
challenging the hegemony of western European art.
Most universities have yet to address issues of
outreach and the ways in which South Asian art can
attract students otherwise unconcerned with
SLY MULTICULTURALISM IN THE ACADEMY
studying art history but engaged with, experiencing
identity politics that thread in and out of academic
environs. I propose one point of entry through a
turn to the contemporary – the agency of diasporic and
South Asian art which fleshes out our
comprehension of the modern and the postcolonial.
From my own experience teaching Indian and
British colonial art in Britain and the USA, students
are attracted to seminar presentation/essay topics
which locate India in the present. At Manchester
University I taught/supervised both undergraduate
and MA courses centred on Indian and colonial art,
1700–2000. At undergraduate level, (not always of
their own choice I later learnt!), the enrolment for
this weekly two-hour seminar was filled to the
maximum of 16. At Master’s level, however, the
number never exceeded five. Although both courses
were favourably received, feedback from four sets of
students (several of whom came from anthropology
and history) revealed that they were attracted to this
subject area primarily for its marginal/novelty value
rather than viewing it as an essential component of
the curriculum.
This turn to the contemporary is also reflected in the
proliferation of online and image archives of South
Asian art exemplified by Leicester-based SALIDAA
(South Asian Literature and Diasporic Art)
established in 1999, Birmingham-oriented Sampad
(established1990) and the Horizon Gallery – a
continuation of IAUK (Indian Artists in the UK).
These projects – alongside GLAADH’s online
resources of non-western art experts, university
experiments in curriculum reform and bibliographic
tools – are the dynamic outcomes of partnerships
between artists, curators and art historians who seek
to foreground South Asian and British Asian
cultures, not only through their archives but
through a series of links to like-minded galleries,
museums and artist websites. Nevertheless, these
initiatives have yet to penetrate the western
Eurocentric agenda of the British university system.
South Asian art in the US academy
How far do the same or alternative problems of
‘cultural imperialism’/negligence arise in the US
academy? 9/11 accelerated academic endowments
and engagement with the arts of Islam.3 Is it to be
expected that post-tsunami a new focus in
South/South East Asian art history will emerge out
of a different state of emergency? In the larger art
history schools of the USA, the choice of art
operates through requirements that both encompass
and divide ‘oriental’ from ‘occidental’ visual
cultures. This non-western focus deals primarily
with the principal political ‘others’ of the USA: Islam
and China. But what is the status of South Asia,
which after all has a far less obvious presence in
American political discourse? In spite of its strategic
location between these two eastern players, the arts
of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh are, as in Britain,
dramatically under-represented. Paradoxically, in
the last 20 years diasporic endowments for language
(especially Hindi and Telugu) and South Asian
history programmes in the US academy have
increased ten-fold. But these endowments do not
make space for the study of Indian art, which is a
‘frivolous addition’ to the serious study of law,
medicine and computer science.
In those pockets of the US academy concerned with
Indian art, the main thrust has been towards the
history of architecture and urban planning in 19thand 20th-century India – exemplified by the
dynamic promotion of South Asian art by Frederick
and Catherine Asher (at Minnesota). But outside
these specialist-driven centres, ancient/
medieval/modern India are increasingly
marginalised from art history programs – assigned
to archaeology, anthropology and the history of
religions or to the first few sessions of Asian or
Islamic art survey classes whose cut off point is
often c.1850. This marginal and non-modern
presence of South Asian art further distances it from
political representation and the type of funds
lavished on China and Islam. As in Britain, attempts
to readdress the balance is coming less from the
academy than from alternative artistic collectives –
exemplified by the Asia Society’s drive to promote
contemporary South and South East Asian art
through such high profile shows as Edge of Desire.
Art history in India: Provincialising the
West
So, given these two western contexts, what is the
status of artistic production in relation to art history
in India? Despite the variety of well-appointed
actors in the theatre of Indian art was until recently
an aspiration for the artist to become a central
national figure. It was hoped that this trope of the
artist might be able to articulate in work and speech
an historical position that work clearly demarcate a
national space. This ideal of an integrated identity
had as much to do with the mythic imaginary of lost
communities as with nationalism and its political
utopia. But it also had to do with third-world antiimperialism and postcolonial personae.
In the post-Independence ethos, M F Husain (b.1915)
is the primary example of the ‘national artist’
marking the conjunction between the mythic and the
secular and then between secular and aesthetic
space. He also embodies the paradoxes and tensions
of the status of the postcolonial artist in India. At
once claiming a socialist register – using his work to
expose political tensions such as communalism –
nonetheless Husein’s idea(l) of the ‘autonomous’
artist still works within an institutionalised notion of
17
21ST-CENTURY ART HISTORY
bourgeois society. But how far is this bourgeois
society shot through with fragments of the colonial
exhibitionary complex?
According to one of India’s leading writers on visual
culture, Professor Tapati Guha-Thakurta, in her new
book Monuments, Objects, Histories, the museum and
the discipline of art history – i.e. the ingredients of
the metropolitan exhibitionary complex, failed to
take root in India.4 We need to ask what makes for
particular disciplinary trends and tags in these areas
of knowledge in India, UK and USA, and whether
the changing faces of these subjects in the western
academia are reflected in the making or unmaking
of fields in India.
In spite of the ideological drive of the South
Kensington Museum, whose 1870s curriculum was
exported to the colonial art schools of Madras,
Calcutta, Lahore and Bombay, the tensions of
translation and split publics for the reception of
Indian art prepared the ground for its ambiguities
and innate anxieties. The object lessons of British
museums instead became enmeshed with spectacle
– translated into wonder houses (ajai’b jadu ghur),
which effectively transformed the colonial art
laboratory into magic space, blurring the boundaries
between public and private, bazaar, temple and
educational institution.
According to certain authors – exemplified by GuhaThakurta – the contemporary study of Indian art
history is grounded in the tensions and
controversies that have riddled the competing
spheres of archaeology and art history.5 From her
perspective, when they are not targets of attack or
remake, monuments and museum objects in India
today stand strangely emptied of meaning and
value whereby they are left to fight for a new curse
of obsoleteness in the nation’s public life. Most
damningly, she condemns museums as being as
fossilised as the desiccating objects they contain.
More urgently, she argues for the inseparability of
the spheres of professional and public knowledges,
of academic and nationalist motivations, which
forms an underlying visual culture of which art
history is a minor player. Taught in art schools and
history departments, art history acts within a certain
national paradigm that incorporates and is infused
with the visual. This hybrid or sub-discipline
discipline (for want of better terms), alerts us to the
possibility of rethinking the space for South Asian
art history in India, Britain and the USA – which
already has a certain genealogy in late 19th-century
India.
Anxious to preserve ‘disappearing’ Indian crafts –
embodied by the simultaneously atemporal and yet
medieval and vanishing artisan – the economic
drive of the colonial state relied on the fees of the
18
westernised elite keen to educate their sons in
European ‘fine arts’. Even the reforms from the
swadeshi era (c.1905) – the art administrator E B
Havell’s act of throwing all European paintings into
the Calcutta Art School’s tank; the establishment of a
collection of Mughal miniatures and the
mobilisation of art as central element in the Bengali
struggle for swaraj (self rule) provide the
complicated legitimisation for the contemporary
predicament of Indian art history. Not only the
Bengal School but also its self-constructed antithesis
– the ‘Victorian sensuality’ of the south Indian artist
Ravi Varma – claimed to exist outside of the
exhibitionary complex. In the myths and practices of
Indian nationalism, these artists – especially
Abanindranath Tagore – turned British object
lessons inside out. They moved in alternative, panAsian collaborations, which promoted ‘the
performance of genius’ based on yoga and intuition,
inspired by bhav (emotion), Buddhist art, Sanskrit
epics and more problematically by the legacy of the
Mughals. Refusing to participate in the rigorous
civilising process of either metropolitan or colonial
governmentality, from the 1890s Indian art and its
relationship to a certain historicity restaged itself in
terms resonant with the struggle for the modern.
Primarily involving the intervention of art critics
and historians – exemplified by political
activists/aesthetes Sister Nivedita and Ananda
Coomaraswamy – this collective refigured the nexus
between art schools, museums and art history. This
then was not so much the failure of art history in the
colony so much as its radial deconstruction and
application to alternative more urgent networks that
involved the political and a certain casting of what
should be the ethically superior, essential aspects of
Oriental art.
Post-Independence, Indian artists, exemplified by
the Bombay Progressives, saw themselves as
belonging to a collective of social-democratic or leftliberal Nehruvian intelligentsia, whose identity
must engage with the modern. And if that
questioned modernity it did so on the basis of a
tradition that had been, despite the innovations of
sacred myths and symbols, ‘invented’ during a
nationalist resurgence and was therefore sufficiently
secularised. Or this seemed to be so until we began
to interrogate the past. These debates concerning
what type of visual past should be invested in, take
place not so much in art history departments as in
the art school and gallery space – exemplified by the
Fine Arts program at Baroda. As one of India’s
leading art critics Geeta Kapur suggests, ‘in India,
the terms modern and secular so completely stood
in for contemporaneity that modernism as such was
never really problematised. It was made into a
matter of aesthetic choice, existential temperament,
this or that style and the auteur’s characteristic
SLY MULTICULTURALISM IN THE ACADEMY
signature’.6 But all these modernist assumptions,
covered over by the jargon of authenticity, soon
required an overhauling of both practice and
discourse. Kapur suggests that eclecticism in Indian
modernism has been too unquestioning: ‘I take this
critical position because once hybridity is
established as a multicultural norm within the postmodern then hybridity could mask the sharper
contours of an identity forged by the diverse
pressures of a cumulative modernity, decolonisation
and global capitalism’.7 A continued insistence on
eclecticism and its conversion to various ideologies
of hybridity within the postcolonial can serve to
elide the diachronic edge of cultural phenomena and
thus ease the tensions of historical choice. It leads
not only to nostalgia but also to a kind of temporal
recoil. Rather, critics like Kapur and Guha-Thakurta
advocate that Indian artists look not for hybrid
solutions but for dialectical synthesis. A space for
contradictions has to be opened within the
national/modern/postcolonial paradigm so that
there is a real (battle) ground for cultural difference
and so that identities can be posed in a far more
acute manner than postmodern notions of hybridity
can accommodate.
Neither Kapur nor Guha-Thakurta is a practising art
historian. In all three academic environs I have
briefly mapped, art history suffers from being
compared with the success of South Asian history as
a discipline. In this field, critical theorists are less
concerned with the failure/fate of metropolitan
disciplinary/discursive machinery than with
recuperating and refocusing the fragments of pasts
unconfined by colonial discourse. Might this not
also be an inspiration for the study of Indian visual
cultures – admittedly from subject positions which
refuse to be confined by what we understand as
disciplinary boundaries?
Conclusion: Dismantling the Norm
Museum visitor statistics in Britain, the USA and
India demonstrate the sustained popularity both of
permanent Indian collections and exhibitions. In the
British and Indian contexts, in particular, Indian art
has been associated with the packaging of this
history as the embodiment of the nation. We must
open up a critical position that lies both within and
outside the disciplinary bounds: a position from
which we can grasp the broad discursive contours of
the field. There is an urgent need for such an
intermediary space that can span the
outside/insider divide, for it has remained largely
unconcerned about the ways in which it has cast or
created its objects of knowledge. In all three
contexts, to study art historically we must caution
against the risk of performing an uncritical
multiculturalism (now so often garbed as
globalisation) in and for the curriculum but, instead,
seek out alternative, less predictable perspectives –
to create new edges of desire.
End notes
1
Nicholas Dirks, ‘Introduction’, Dirks (ed.) Colonialism and
Culture, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1993, p3.
2
Tony Bennett, ‘The exhibitionary complex’, Bennett, The Birth
of the Museum, Routledge, London & New York, 1995.
3
One fallout from 9/11 in terms of South Asian art was the
removal of all Islamic – i.e. Mughal – materials from the south
Asia section of the Metropolitan Museum, New York to the
Islamic section – which is now under refurbishment.
4
Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Monuments, objects, histories:
Institutions of art in colonial and postcolonial India, Colombia
University Press, New York, 2004.
5
See also Gyan Prakash, ‘Science gone native in colonial India’,
in his Another Reason, Princeton University Press, New York,
1998.
6
Geeta Kapur, ‘Dismantling the norm’, Contemporary art in
Asia: Traditions/tensions, Asia Society Galleries, New
York,1998, p64.
7
ibid
Author biography
Natasha Eaton is Lecturer in the History of Art at University
College London. She has recently completed a book concerned
with the critical cross-cultural exchanges between India and
Britain, 1750–1850. Her current research focuses on missionary
collecting strategies and visual ethnography in South Asia.
19
The Secret History of Ceramic or
The reluctant history of an applied art
MICHAEL MOORE
W
hat does one think of when one uses the
word craft? Perhaps an historical, rural
activity? Or a skill-based production of useful
objects such as cutlery, footwear, clothing and food
containers? If one attaches the word ‘contemporary’
this may then attach associations of the urban,
domestic, culinary or interior adornment. In relation
to ceramics, as with textiles, ‘craft’ also historically
has an industrial association; Stoke-on Trent kilns
have been firing drainpipes, house bricks, and
tableware and roof tiles since the industrial
revolution.
Ceramic is indigenous. Clays from different parts of
the world fire to different colours and have
particular characteristics, which eventually influence
the way in which each clay is used: porcelain for fine
tableware, stoneware for pitchers and crocks,
earthenware for house bricks. Each potter is
partially influenced by the clay they choose to work
with, and their practice becomes unique to the
characteristics of that particular clay. The craft
history of ceramics therefore differs from region to
region, country to country, with different
practitioners developing individual techniques and
solutions to the challenge of their medium.
In a broader sense, this led historically to the
establishment of guild and apprenticeship systems,
intended to preserve, protect and indeed keep
secret, particular techniques and practices. Whether
it was from town to town or through matriarchal or
patriarchal lineage, craft technique was protected.
During the Middle Ages in Europe, working men
of particular trades joined associations called
craft guilds. These guilds were forerunners of the
modern unions and served to regulate and
preserve a monopoly of crafts. Weavers were
probably the first to organise. Quickly
Goldsmiths, Silversmiths, Fishmongers, Bakers,
Dyers, Glove makers and other craftsmen saw
the benefits of organisations and formed their
own separate fraternities… Qualifying for
membership in a guild involved a long and
unpaid apprenticeship. The apprentice was
bound out by his parents to an employer for
approximately seven years…When the
apprenticeship was completed the apprentice
was free to pursue their craft for daily wages.
Often though, they chose to travel from town to
town seeking more knowledge of their craft.1
20
Has this led to a 21st-century dilemma when it
comes to the accurate documentation and
preservation of craft practice? Consider the
following question:
Is the silence or reluctance to talk about craft in
some way connected to the long tradition of not
writing about craft? Historically craft knowledge
was not written down, but guarded and
protected in guilds and handed on through the
apprentice system. However in today’s fast
moving culture, and a craft community now
dependent to some extent on public funding, it
seems impertinent to expect others to talk
intelligently about crafts if those in the field are
not prepared to do so. It is to their credit that
these reluctant makers considered the debate
important enough to contribute to this project. 2
This paper sets out to consider the matter of writing
about the applied arts. It will consider the above
comments by Pamela Johnson, and remarks made
by others, to offer the perspective of an applied art
practitioner, in relation to applied art writing.
An Irish approach to ceramics training
As the writer is a maker, trained and working in
Ireland in ceramics, these remarks on issues of
education, training and studio practice inevitably
comes from an Irish perspective.
Consider the comments of Justin Keating, former
Irish Minister for Trade and Enterprise, who
discusses how Irish cultural history excelled in
literature, music poetry and song throughout the
19th and 20th centuries to a far greater extent than in
the visual and applied arts.
The whole thrust of our cultural preoccupation
was verbal. Remarkable playwrights, novelists,
poets, a great focus on the Irish Language and on
traditional music and song, but concern for
material culture was light. The brightest children
of the new proprietors of new farms were busy
making money in the retail trade, primarily
drink, and their grandchildren were rushing to
become doctors, lawyers and priests. Their ideal
of a beautiful house was a ‘desirable bungalow
residence’ the type that would have been at
home in Cheltenham or Croyden. They furnished
this in the style of the British mass-produced
furniture and textiles of the time, either imported
directly of copied here. There was no ‘William
THE SECRET HISTORY OF CERAMIC
Morris’ strand in the national revolution. The
thirties, forties and fifties were a time of terrible
pious, petty bourgeois respectability, for the
craftsman and artist, a period of disaster.3
To define the applied arts, let us consider the
applied art object or material as either that which
has, or has had, an association with craft and
function. As already discussed, craft was a tradition
passed on from generation to generation, through
apprenticeships, families or villages and towns,
involving secrecy, hidden techniques or processes or
effects. Is this the world that Johnson speaks of and
how does it fit today in the 21st century?
Consider the glaze recipe book in ceramics for an
example of an historical practice that still continues
today. This book is always a factor in the potter’s
studio, and even to this day students in art school
ceramics departments are encouraged to keep a
glaze book, like a list of recipes from a cookery book.
And why? To avoid the situation where an effect is
achieved but cannot be repeated. A marvellous
effect that deems an object a complete success that
can never be replicated. The glaze book, if properly
updated, avoids this. But what if this were lost or
stolen? Disaster. Historically, there is a tendency to
guard and protect elements of applied art process,
and this may have only encouraged a level of
secrecy. An example is early 20th-century Irish
studio potter Gratten Freyer of Terrybaun Pottery in
County Mayo, whose wife and studio partner
Madelaine Freyer did not even know the recipe
breakdown of her husband’s decorative slips. 4
In terms of ceramics education in Ireland, the Crafts
Council of Ireland (established in 1971) is significant
in that its one-year pottery-skills course trained
wheel-based potters for a growing craft pottery
market. This programme, established in 1990, was
the first ceramics training provided outside in
Ireland outside art schools.
Potteries were established in Ireland before this
time, for example Carrigaline Pottery, in 1928 and
Arklow Pottery in1934, but the ceramics industry
broadly came in for severe criticism under the
Scandinavian Design Report, commissioned by the
Irish Government in 1962. Here, six Scandinavian
Designers were invited to Ireland to assess the
standards of design, design industry and design
education:
The Scandinavian Design Report of 1962…
identified the problems facing industrial design
in Ireland, namely a general lack of design
awareness in the country, inadequate higher
education for designers in the art colleges and
universities and the absence of effective design
managers. 5
Their concerns relating to ceramics in Ireland point
to a lack of indigenousness, production quality and
innovation:
The main criticism of the ceramics industry was
that what was produced was based on bad
English production both as regards design and
form, decorated with transfers which had been
imported from England and elsewhere. The
solution was in education and the training of
decorators, casters and printers. They stressed
the importance of smaller potteries in design
innovation as well as providing opportunities for
potters to develop their work. 6
Ceramics as a taught course was first set up by Peter
Brennan at the National College of Art in Dublin in
1963. Perhaps this was a direct consideration of the
improvements recommended by the Scandinavian
Designers.
Within Ireland, since 1990, two strands of training
have existed for ceramics: the Pottery Skills Course,
intended to create skilled production potters, and
the art school degree courses, which create
graduates with both production skills and the
intellectual skills needed to debate conceptual
issues. Perhaps here there is a potential for tension,
which may have fostered unwillingness by potters
and applied artists to enter into dialogue and
debate, or to document the history of their activities.
If the potter is trained in terms of function and use
and the artist is trained in freer less skill-based
practice, consider American historian Howard S
Becker’s statement:
Just as the standards of utility are devalued, so,
too are the old craft standards of skill. What the
older artist-craftsman has spent a lifetime
learning to do is suddenly hardly worth doing.
People are doing his work in the sloppiest
possible way and being thought superior to him
just because of it. 7
Surely this must create some tension between the
artist and potter that may have an influence on
Johnson’s comments. In 2003, the Irish Craft
Council’s Pottery Skills Course was extended to a
two-year programme to offer each participant not
only a base training in production, but a chance to
focus more pointedly on design and aesthetics. This
may, in future, further blur the distinction between
the artist and potter.
Towards a hybrid
There are practitioners who seem to step outside the
issues of utility, while still working with an applied
art medium. A recent copy of the Irish Arts Review,
published in August 2005, points to one particular
artist, Deirdre McLoughlin, who may epitomise a
21
21ST-CENTURY ART HISTORY
hybrid entity, perhaps indicating a way through this
unending debate. McLoughlin won the German
Westerwald Vessel prize in 2004. The Westerwald
judges wrote:
... there is the elegance of the material
component, of the exquisite technique which also
corresponds to the language of ideas: finest
marble seems to have been used rather than clay,
warmth and skin-like surfaces are to be found
where unglazed surface defines spatial volume.
Unpretentiously, nonsense is made of the
ceramics discussion about vessel and sculpture.8
The comments of Becker are also useful, both in
defining craft and also in defining use, which is
historically associated with craft.
... defining craft as knowledge and skill which
produce useful objects and activities implies an
aesthetic, standards on which judgements of
particular items of work can be based, and an
organisational form in which the evaluation
standards find their origin and logical
justification.9
Here, Becker defines craft as having both functional
and aesthetic qualities. Or in simple terms, it must
work and have an aesthetic appeal. This then invites
someone other than the maker to make that
appraisal. Does it work? Does it appeal on both
these levels? Is that even important? Considering the
range of debate that has occurred 10 there are many
who consider this issue in earnest.
Rob Barnard considers a different use for use and
considers how it has evolved in the modern day:
That fundamental act of choosing to use an object
rather than merely placing it on a shelf is what
permits the user to become part of the aesthetic
equation that addresses all our senses in an
elemental but nonetheless powerful way. 11
So, a sequence can be identified in which the maker
makes a useful object or an object with an historical
association to a use, incorporating techniques
handed down, passed on and also picked up along
the way. Then the buyer of that object, acquires that
object and makes a series of decisions about how to
interact with that object, how to use the object: as a
functional tool or as an ornament. If the object is
located in the public forum of a gallery, then the
critic, curator and writer enter the frame.
This then calls for an analysis of that sequence of
decisions and who is best suited to make that
analysis, the writer or the maker?
What Johnson’s comments actually invite is to open
up the forum of makers writing about their applied
art practice and to consider why this has been
historically a reluctant entity: the writing maker. As
22
a maker myself, I find writing is a very different
world to my dusty Dublin studio. Hardest of all is to
write about one’s own practice. Slightly easier is to
write about other artists’ work. This was echoed
during the ‘Interpreting Ceramics’ writing seminar
held in Bath Spa University in September 2005,
organised by Dr Jo Dahn and Dr Jeffery Jones.
How does one get a potter to talk about their work if
this reluctance to talk does exist?
One solution appeared in the journal Ceramics Art
and Perception, where critic and maker Rob Bernard
interviewed two potters: Julian Stair and Edmund
De Waal. Stair commented that if practitioners of the
applied arts fail to document the evolution of their
practice, they run the risk of others doing it
incorrectly:
So if makers are not going to get involved in
writing the definitive history of their own past,
not only are we going to have inaccuracies about
our work in a contemporary sense, but also have
inaccurate versions of the history of our own
discipline written for us. So I think it is
imperative that makers are involved in writing in
a contemporary vein as well as on the historical
developments in our field. 12
So where does this leave the applied art historian? Is
there a concern in the world of the applied art
practitioner that historians, writers or critical
theorists will not understand their practice? And if
so, which element or elements of the practice?
Technical? Aesthetic?
This takes one to the fundamental concern of this
paper: yhe documentation of the applied art practice
of the 20th and 21st centuries. Do the historians, the
writers and critics need to understand technique to
truly document the reluctant history of the applied
arts? If, according to Stair’s comments, practitioners
do not do it for themselves and their peers, then it
may be done inaccurately.
However, can the applied art practitioners
document their own history properly? There are
practitioners, such as Stair and De Waal and Alison
Britton, who are gifted writers, but are they in the
minority? I consider them to be so because for the
vast majority of applied art practitioners, their
immediate tools of expression, the media with
which they choose to reveal their innermost
thoughts are the materials they have been trained to
use – clay, metal or glass – not the written word.
The applied art historian or writer is essential to the
accurate archival documentation of the applied arts.
But who needs, if anyone, to be convinced of this
need? It would seem that the issues raised in Rob
Barnard’s interview, and the comments by Pamela
Johnson, do indicate that there is a problem here, be
THE SECRET HISTORY OF CERAMIC
it mistrust, traditional forms of rural secrecy, or a
dissatisfaction with the manner in which the applied
arts have been documented.
Yet there are certain things the applied art historian
must realise, and this realisation has been lacking to
date. To fully understand a traditional craft-based
applied art practice, the historian should have
direct, regular contact with, and understanding of,
the processes of the applied arts in order to
accurately document its historical evolution. And
that is not achieved by reading about it or watching
it, but by actually doing it, thereby creating a hybrid
applied art ‘practorian’.
And does it follow that the opposite must then
happen? Do the practitioners need to become
writers, critics or historians? As more and more
makers write, for example those involved in the
University of East Anglia and Northumbria research
fellowships chaired by Tanya Harrod, Pamela
Johnson and Julian Stair, this is already happening.13
Can either do both? One does it when teaching, at
university level when one engages one’s students in
making, writing and research. As most teachers of
the applied arts at university level also studied at art
school, they will have some writing experience
through essays and theses. But of those practitioners
who go forward into the professional world of the
applied arts, how many become writers and how
many become makers? Or consider how many
writers or critics of the applied arts actually
abandon their writing to become makers?
Theory meets practice
In 1999, as a practising studio ceramic artist, I
embarked on a masters by research at the National
College of Art and Design, Dublin. For over two
years I travelled Ireland, interviewing potters and
ceramic artists to document the history of 20thcentury studio ceramics in Ireland. I most certainly
did, on a very practical and intimate level, encounter
reluctance on the part of makers to talk about their
practice. Why? Because the makers felt isolated; this
was the first time many had been approached to
discuss their work outside of bite-size artists’
statements for the front of exhibition catalogues, or
fizzy interviews by interior design magazine
journalists interested in what must be in the latest
interior photo shoot. I often encountered a sense of
intrusion. Why was I interested in their work after
all these years of isolated and silent practice? What
was the reason for the research, and could the
practitioner review the text before it was formally
published? It seemed that years of isolation led to a
hint of paranoia. Who is this person and why are
they interested in my work and why now, after all
these years?
Marcus O'Mahoney, Glencairn Pottery,
Lismore, Co Waterford.
This required much explanation on my part, and
frequent persuasion. But I always held my trump
card until the last moment, and where possible only
when I met the maker in person. To reveal to them
that I was a qualified maker with international
recognition was akin to tearing off the clothes of the
enemy to reveal a comrade, an equal, someone on
the same side. The sense of relief for many was
tangible. Why? I can only reason that this was due
initially to plain human suspicion. Interviews,
photographs, anecdotes of similar kiln-firing
disasters for example, all contributed to a more
amicable air. Of the more than 50 makers
interviewed, this was the first time most had been
interviewed to any great depth.
However, the actual analysis of that gathered
material at interview would probably have been
best left to a critical theorist, as once the information
had been gathered I struggled seriously to analyse it
and to come to any viable critical outcome. It was
only thanks to the intervention of art historians and
writers that any decent level of critical analysis was
drawn from this raw research. This level of critical
interdependency within the process of documenting
the applied arts again supports the argument for a
hybrid theory for the applied arts.
Whether it is the practitioner writing or the writer
making, a forum is created for debate and
documentation of the reluctant history of an applied
art. Reluctance, as referred in this paper, may be due
to isolation and a lack of critical or historical
gathering and analysis in Ireland, but as the
spotlight is turned on the applied arts in Ireland,
their history and current context, perhaps this
reluctance will abate.
23
21ST-CENTURY ART HISTORY
End Notes
1
History of Guilds.
2
http://Renaissance-Faire/Renfaires/Entertainment/Historyof-Guilds.htm
3
Pamela Johnson, Ideas in the Making, 1998, p 10.
4
Justin Keating in Tim Pat Coogan eds., Ireland and the Arts,
Namara Press, London, no date, p 232
5
Peter Lamb, ‘a kiln fired of turf, Gratten Freyer and the
Terrybaun Pottery’, Irish Arts Review Yearbook, 1995, p 70.
6
Paul Caffrey in Sara Prendergast ed., Contemporary Designers,
London, no date, p 373.
7
Paul Caffrey, ‘The Scandinavian Ideal, a model for design in
Ireland’, Scandinavian Journal of Design History, Copenhagen,
vol 8, 1998, p 39.
8
Howard S Becker, Art Worlds, Berkeley, 1982, p 279.
9
Audrey Whitty quoting Westerwald Prize Judges in: ‘Not Just
Pots, Contemporary Irish Ceramics at the National Museum
of Ireland’, The Irish Arts Review, vol 22, no 3, 2000.
10 Howard S Becker, Art Worlds, Berkeley, 1982, p 274.
24
11 The Crafts Council supported conferences: The Body Politic
chaired by Julian Stair, 2000; Ideas in the Making, chaired by
Pamela Johnson, 1998; Obscure Objects of Desire, chaired by
Dr Tanya Harrod, 1997, under University of East Anglia and
University of Northumbria research fellowships.
12 Rob Barnard, ‘A New Use for Function’ in Julian Stair ed. The
Body Politic, London 2000, p 71.
13 Julian Stair, ‘Rob Barnard interviews Julian Stair and Edmund
De Waal’, Ceramics Art and Perception, Issue 38, 1999, p 44.
14 Consider for example the range of research fellowships
mentioned in reference 10.
Author biography
Michael Moore is holder of a Master of Arts from the National
College of Art and Design, Dublin, and is Reader in Fine and
Applied Arts, University of Ulster. He is a member of the
International Academy of Ceramics, Geneva. He has works in
permanent collections in The National Museum of Ireland, the
Library of the National Museum of Ireland, the Australian
National University, the World Ceramic Exposition Foundation,
Korea, International Museum of Ceramics, Czech Republic, and
Panevezys Civic Art Gallery, Lithuania.
Art History and Cultural Belonging
in Contemporary Syria
EMMA LOOSLEY
T
his paper has evolved out of a series of
community projects that I have initiated in
Syria since 1997. My hypothesis is that a knowledge
of the artistic traditions of a region bring local
people more in touch with their cultural roots and
encourage a sense of belonging. This is particularly
the case when a religious minority feels
disenfranchised by the majority group.
In 1997 I began taking groups of Christians from
Aleppo to the Limestone Massif, to the west of the
city, in order to explain to them the abandoned lateantique villages that dominate the landscape. These
groups ranged in age from late teens and early
twenties through to pensioners. During the course of
these visits people questioned why there is no
formal training in Art History in their country, and
discussed how this kind of cultural awareness tied
them more closely to the land than they had
previously thought. In turn, this caused them to
question their self-imposed perception of
themselves as ‘outsiders’ and caused them to think
in terms of a wider ‘Syrian’ identity.
From 2000 onwards I have worked with a
community in the Syrian desert that mixes
Christians and Muslims, bedu and agricultural
workers. Boundaries are fluid and village worship
centres on the ancient monastery of Mar Elian. Mar
Elian (St Julian) is venerated by all villagers, and this
perception of ancient ties means that art historical
research into the site has been welcomed by the
community as a whole as it is seen to validate their
claims of the power of their saint.
Taking these two projects as case studies I shall try
and evaluate the importance of Art History as an
academic discipline in the contemporary Middle
East.
The Syrian education system and the study
of the past
In Syria the choice of subject studied at university is
decided by the state with a points system. Students
can request preferences for the five national
universities, but they have little choice over
destination and practically no options when it comes
to choosing a subject. Places are allocated according
to the points gained in the baccalaureat examination
taken at seventeen or eighteen. Students choose at
the age of 14 to study a science or arts baccalaureat
and most choose science, knowing that if they take
the arts and literature pathway then the highest
status subjects will be closed to them. Every Syrian
schoolchild aspires to be a doctor or an engineer, as
these are the professions that grant the highest social
status, the steadiest and most lucrative career
prospects and, an important consideration in an
economically precarious society, the most valuable
skills on foreign visa applications.
In this way other disciplines are downgraded as
unimportant – a student studying history for
example, is pitied as someone who was not bright
enough to gain a place to study a more exclusive
subject. Whilst many young Syrian history students
are bright and enthusiastic, a significant proportion
makes it clear that they are only in the subject
because they failed to get high enough scores to
study engineering. This obviously has a
demoralising effect across the board for all subjects
and the students themselves are often pushed into
studying subjects they have no vocation for, but
their parents will force them to accept the ‘highest
status’ option offered by the state. There is no
conception of a western, some would say privileged,
ethos where students choose subjects simply on the
basis of personal preference, where A-starred
students are just as likely to fight each other over a
place to read English as they are over a place to read
Medicine, and where Engineering has a recruitment
problem.
In an educational system such as that in Syria there
is little incentive for young people to study their
past. Knowledge of history is vague and highly
partisan. Schools concentrate almost exclusively on
Arab history after the advent of Islam, with ancient
Mesopotamian and Syrian culture encompassed
only at university level. The level attained by most
students is relatively low, due to a lack of books and
access to foreign language material. This general
malaise with regard to the past spreads to related
disciplines, such as art history, that are not
recognised as courses of study in Syria, and to a
general lack of interest in the conservation and
preservation of historic sites.
With this kind of cultural background, history is
largely the hobby of a few interested amateurs but
not the ‘day job’ of many people in Syria. Foreigners
who study the past are viewed as exotic eccentrics
who must be wealthy in order to pursue a study
with no commercial value. The idea of bursaries for
anything other than absolutely essential studies in
medical research or civil engineering is seen as
frivolous in such a poor society.
25
21ST-CENTURY ART HISTORY
Aleppo 1997–98
In 1997 I moved to Aleppo in Syria to undertake
fieldwork for my PhD. My aims were threefold: I
wanted to visit a group of churches first surveyed
by Georges Tchalenko in the 1950s1 to assess their
condition 50 years on, to study Syriac – an Aramaic
dialect that is the liturgical language of the Syrian
Orthodox Church – and to study the contemporary
Syrian Orthodox liturgy. This was to gather data for
a thesis studying the architecture and liturgy of late
antique Syrian churches. Having been welcomed
into the local Syrian Orthodox community in the
Hay Suryan quarter of the city, I quickly settled into
a routine of Syriac lessons, church attendance and
days spent hiking across the Limestone Massif to the
west of the city.
Without any contemporary maps I was hoping to
use the knowledge of local people to help me find
the villages where the churches were located, but I
soon discovered this to be impracticable. The
inhabitants of the villages were Kurds who had only
settled in the region as a result of the political
upheavals of the 20th century and therefore were
not especially knowledgeable about the history of
their settlements. Back in Hay Suryan I discovered
that the whole population were the descendants of
people from the contemporary Turkish city of
Şanliurfa, formerly Edessa. Their families had been
evicted by the Turks in 1924 and had walked to
Aleppo, where they had stayed ever since.
Therefore, despite the fact that the whole region was
a traditional heartland of the Syrian Orthodox
Church from late antiquity to the middle ages, the
current Syrian Orthodox population of Aleppo felt
divorced from the countryside and saw themselves
as outsiders.
Within the Christian community of Aleppo as a
whole, very few people took an interest in the wider
Christian heritage of the region. The few exceptions
were local engineers who had written books on the
Limestone Massif and published them through
Aleppian Church presses. In Syria doctors and
engineers are seen as the most learned members of
society and so few people sought to question the
accuracy of these unedited works that were largely
plagiarisms of Butler and Tchalenko2. After
attending several community lectures given by
engineers that were largely inaccurate plagiarism, I
began to question the widespread ignorance of the
local community with regard to their cultural
heritage. There were of course, several notable
exceptions. The local Syrian Orthodox Archbishop
of Aleppo proved to be knowledgeable, although his
information was largely theoretical rather than
empirical, which was also the case with my Syriac
tutor, Fr Antoine, a Syrian Orthodox Priest, and
with the Archbishop’s former secretary and local
26
English teacher, Farida Boulos. All three had read
widely on the Limestone Massif but had only
actually visited rarely. The final exception was a
local engineer and amateur historian whose hobby
was visiting these sites for his own curiosity, Samir
Katerji. Samir quickly adopted me and we spent
many days hiking across the hills guided by
shepherds and villagers who remembered seeing
ruins answering to the descriptions we gave and
who accompanied us for the pleasure of hearing city
gossip from Samir.
Back in Aleppo the community of Hay Suryan were
beginning to question why this strange foreign girl
was disappearing frequently and returning
sunburned to the city, and Farida, Samir and Fr
Antoine let it be known that I was there to study the
Christian heritage of the region, which was their
history. Informal questions over coffee with local
people led to invitations to talk to the various
community groups linked to the church. Samir had
instituted an organisation of ‘Families’ – social
groups that met once a month for a lecture, meal
and dance and who went away together on holiday
each summer. The aim was to cement community
ties and to provide a friendship network outside the
family groups that dominate the lives of most
Syrians. There were seven groups arranged around
middle-aged couples, young families, young
graduates, those who cared for disabled relatives
and so on. Fr Antoine quickly involved me with his
group of middle-aged couples who were interested
in local history and Syriac. Whilst they were
generally not too keen on hiking and leaving the
comfort of the city, they were happy to listen to
lectures on the churches scattered in the hills to the
west of the city. This also awakened a general
interest in church history, encouraged by Fr
Antoine. An immediate effect of this was increased
church attendance as the group confessed that after
Fr Antoine’s guided tour of the church they
understood the Syriac liturgy for the first time.
Trips into the past
Having been befriended by the ‘Mar Grigorios’
group, I was spending my evenings in the church
coffee-shop-cum-community-centre with a group of
people my own age (late teens to mid-twenties).
This group comprised largely of those with
vocational qualifications rather than graduates, and
the leading members were carpenters, plumbers,
mechanics and secretaries. After a few weeks I was
asked by the leader of the group, a carpenter named
Yusuf, if I would lead the group on a visit to some of
the places that I was working on. A Sunday was
chosen and Yusuf instructed the group to dress
practically in jeans and trainers, with hats, suncream
and plenty of water. As the trip was taking place in
early July we planned to leave at 5.00 am, eating
CONTEMPORARY SYRIA
“In one ruined chapel the men
spontaneously called upon a deacon
amongst them to lead prayers.”
breakfast en-route and planning a typical Syrian
lunch (3.00 pm) on the return home to the city.
I planned an itinerary that started with easily
accessible monuments. Many of the villages were
beside country lanes and it did not require any
strenuous exercise to reach them. However there
was one village that was a walk of between 3 and 4
km from the nearest road. I had not had the
opportunity to visit this site before and, since Yusuf
had said to include some sites that were new to me
so that I would also benefit from the trip, I included
this village on the list. I had carefully checked
beforehand that it would prove an interesting site
for the group. Unlike the majority of the villages of
the region that were occupied solely from the 4th to
7th century CE, Kafar Nabo was one of the villages
that had been occupied from the first century BCE,
and the church I was seeking was built on top of a
Roman temple to the god Nabo. By teaching the
group something about the continuity of the
historical record I hoped to ignite interest in these
sites and spark some enthusiasm for the subject.
Immediately it was clear that the sexes took
radically different views of the subject. The men,
and two older female community workers, my
friend Farida and another teacher, were instantly
caught up in the excitement of exploring a ‘new’
site. They rushed around calling me to come and
look at every new discovery – Roman statues and a
long Greek inscription among them. They also
listened courteously to the local Kurdish population,
who herded sheep in the area, and asked many
questions of the shepherds, as well as keenly
examining the photocopied plans from Tchalenko’s
book that I carried with me. By contrast, the women
were largely concerned with their (unsuitable)
footwear, scorned the local shepherds and only
became animated when a Kurdish farmer lent them
a donkey to ride back on.
Back at the restaurant, as the females miraculously
recovered enough to spend hours dancing the
dabkeh, Yusuf, Farida and a small group of
community leaders decided that the day had been a
success. Many of the young men and a smaller
proportion of women had requested further
information and professed their shame that they
were unaware that they had spent their entire lives
only 40 km away from these places and known
nothing about them. Yusuf had spoken sharply to
those with unsuitable footwear and pointed out that
this was a valuable exercise in regaining their
history. The inhabitants of the region had
disappeared, it was presumed northwards into
contemporary Turkey in the 7th century, and in the
20th century the ancestors of the population of Hay
Suryan had moved south from Turkey. Therefore he
reasoned that understanding these monuments was
a vital part of understanding the Christian heritage
of the region, a heritage that transcended the
modern state boundaries and was more
understandable as a region ruled as the hinterland
of the great city of Antioch. It was decided that I
would photocopy my site notebook for Farida, who
would then translate the information and act as
guide on a series of future trips. When I returned in
1998 I found that this had worked well, and that the
trips were still continuing a year later.
It was on my second period of research in Syria, in
the autumn of 1998, that I was approached by Samir
Katerji to achieve the same objective with an
altogether less willing group. For months Samir (a
devout atheist) had been annoyed by a large group
of elderly men playing backgammon in the church
community centre when they should have been
attending mass. To Samir this was extremely
disrespectful and, one Tuesday during the evening
mass, he gave them an ultimatum. If they were
found playing backgammon the following Sunday
morning he was taking a monetary forfeit from
27
21ST-CENTURY ART HISTORY
them. Predictably, on Sunday morning they were all
there as usual and Samir took a token amount of
money from each man (they were largely middleaged to elderly and relatively poor) and ordered
them to meet at the community centre at 6.00 am the
following Sunday. Then he telephoned me.
Considering himself an atheist who had properly
considered all the options, Samir felt that these men
were alienated from the Church through ignorance
and needed to be educated about their past. I was to
turn up at 6.00 am the next Sunday and lead the
group on an exploration that would cause them to
question their relationship with the past and with
the Church.
I turned up early on that Sunday morning because I
was staying with Farida, who, unusually in Syria,
was exceptionally organised and woke me at 5.30
am with a picnic of iced water, cucumbers and fruit
to take on my travels. On reaching the church I was
amazed to see that most of the men had already
arrived, some bringing sons and grandsons with
them, but I was to be the only female. Generally,
they were practically dressed, but one man in his
eighties was sporting his best black suit with shirt
and tie.
Despite their age, these men could walk for miles
and were bursting with questions. They were as
curious about the lives of the Kurdish farmers they
found living in the region as they were about the
monuments they were exploring, and frequently
stopped to talk to the local villagers. In one ruined
chapel they spontaneously called upon a deacon
amongst them to lead prayers, and even Samir was
to be found crossing himself as they sang the Lord’s
Prayer. The highlight of the day was when a passing
farmer gave us all a lift in his trailer to the ruins we
were searching for. The success of the trip was
illustrated by the fact that before we reached
Aleppo, the men had already chartered the bus for
the following Sunday and ordered me to devise a
new itinerary for them.
I have been back to Aleppo every year since 1998,
and from Yusuf, Farida and Samir, I know that these
trips have continued and, indeed have spread.
Farida now takes her all-women Bible study groups
on trips to the Limestone Massif and other Christian
sites further afield. The community groups still go
on visits-cum-picnics and there is a demand for local
speakers to talk about the Christian history of the
region. It is perhaps also telling that those who have
fully embraced this interest are those least likely to
emigrate. Samir has an engineering degree and lived
in Sweden for a while but says that he was unable to
live so far away from his cultural roots, and Yusuf’s
social circle is far less likely to move away than the
graduate groups – not least because they have such
a strong sense of community and ‘home’.
28
In June 2005 I was in Hay Suryan visiting friends
and, naturally, I went to the community centre to
drink coffee and be seen – the central point of social
life in the area. The old men were still playing
backgammon and, after admiring the improvement
in my Arabic (non-existent when I lived in Aleppo)
took my elbow and drew my into the snooker and
ping-pong room. There on the wall were two
photographs I had taken of them, blown up to
poster size. One showed them praying in a ruined
church and the other showed them standing on the
back of a tractor driven by a smiling Kurdish farmer.
Qaryatayn, 2000 – present
During my time in Aleppo I became friends with a
monastic community in central Syria, in a monastery
approximately 90km north of Damascus. Whilst
Deir Mar Musa al-Habashi3 (the monastery of St
Moses the Abyssinian) is relatively well known, due
to the mediaeval fresco cycle in the monastery
church (the only complete cycle still extant in the
Levant4), in 2000 the community was given another,
less glamorous and visually spectacular monastery.
Dayr Mar Elian esh-Sharqi (the monastery of St
Julian of the East) today stands approximately 500 m
to the west of the town of Qaryatayn, a shabby mud
brick structure; very little of the ancient monastery
remains above ground today. As the last settlement
before Palmyra, Qaryatayn was a staging post for
the major caravan routes until the advent of motor
vehicles killed the town’s most lucrative trade as a
rest-stop on the Damascus-Palmyra journey.
Unfortunately, the town, with its current population
of 28,000 people, approximately 20 per cent of
whom are Christians, descended from an unbroken
Christian tradition of at least 1,500 years, forms one
of the most economically and socially deprived
communities in contemporary Syria.
It was with this knowledge that I arrived in
Qaryatayn in 2000, and immediately it became
apparent that the attitude of the local population
was unlike that of Hay Suryan in Aleppo. Whereas
in Aleppo I had been treated as an eccentric, but
young and enthusiastic, student and quickly
assimilated into local society, in Qaryatayn I was
viewed with suspicion. Firstly, they were not used
to outsiders – and the concept of ‘foreign’ extended
to anyone from outside the village. Fr Jacques, from
the Community of Deir Mar Musa, who had recently
been appointed parish priest, was viewed with
suspicion as he came from the unimaginably distant
city of Aleppo. Second, any outsider interested in
the monastery was viewed as a potential graverobber come to despoil the tomb of Mar Elian (St.
Julian).
Having established that the last overseas residents
of the village were an eccentric Danish Protestant
CONTEMPORARY SYRIA
missionary who slept with her gun, and Gertrude
Bell, who was a frequent visitor in the early years of
the 20th century, I set about trying to make contact
with the villagers by displaying my ignorance.
Finding that the town was inhabited by a mixture of
bedu and fellahin, I befriended the patriarch of the
largest Christian bedu clan and questioned him
about his childhood. Over a series of meetings in the
home shared by the whole vast Bayt Habib when the
herds were in town I spoke to Abu Naseef about his
memories of the monastery going back to the 1920s
and 1930s. Slowly, other members of the family
began to visit me at the site and his daughter was
able to give me valuable information on her life as a
resident of the monastery until almost all the mud
brick structures had collapsed in the 1980s due to
termite infestation.
In 2001 on 9 September, the annual festival of Mar
Elian, I arranged a small display in the church
explaining who I was and why the exploration of
the monastery was important. Over the course of the
day between 1,500 and 2,000 people read this
display. They then began to approach me over the
coming months with their recollections of the site
and stories of vanished village traditions. As these
were collated they were made into a small
exhibition in one of the three remaining mud brick
chambers on site.
Local people always recognised the importance of
the site and now they felt that they would like
others to share their saint with them. In talking to
local people Fr Jacques has discovered that many
villagers feel that the arrival of foreigners somehow
validates their belief in the sanctity of the site, and
that if more were to appear as tourists, then history
may prove the way to revitalise a dying community.
Conclusion
Over the course of almost ten years working with
Christian communities in Syria I have found that it
is a feeling of dislocation and rootlessness that is
most likely to bring about emigration in the younger
generations of Christians. Whilst the reason for
emigration is most commonly given as economic, it
is clear that people will brave economic
disadvantage if they feel that they are part of a
growing and vibrant community.
By putting younger people in touch with their past
and reminding them of the historical continuity of
their ancestral past, as illustrated by the vast wealth
of late antique monuments in contemporary Syria,
many are now questioning their role in society and
seeing that cultivating social responsibility and
community feeling may be a more satisfactory
answer for their future than flight to an alien and
possibly unsympathetic culture elsewhere in the
world. Ultimately, this kind of community project
The author collecting oral history data inside the Church of
Dayr Mar Elian
encourages a sense of cultural belonging that creates
a cohesive social force and that will hopefully stem
the widespread emigration that threatens to destroy
the Christian communities of the Middle East within
one or two generations.
This text is a variation on a paper published with a more
archaeological focus in World Archaeology. World Archaeology,
vol 37, no 4, Dec 2005, pp. 589–96.
End notes
1
G Tchalenko, Villages antiques de la Syrie du Nord. Le Massif du
Bélus a l’époque romaine, Vols. 1–3. Paul Geuthner, Paris, 1953.
G Tchalenko, Églises syriennes à bema. Paul Geuthner, Paris,
1990.
2
H C Butler, Ancient Architecture in Syria. Leyden 1909.
3
Tchalenko1953 and 1990 op cit.
4
The standard English transliteration for monastery is Dayr
but Deir Mar Musa was restored by an Italian group and has
an Italian Abbot who use the Italian spelling Deir. The
monastery is now so widely known by this spelling that it is
best to preserve it as all literature relating to the site is spelt in
the Italian manner.
5
E C Dodd, ‘The Monastery of Mar Musa al-Habashi, near
Nebek, Syria, Arte Medievale, 1992, pp.61–132.
6
E C Dodd,The Frescoes of Mar Musa al-Habashi. A Study in
Medieval Painting in Syria, 2001.
Additional references
Baccache, E., under the direction of G. Tchalenko, Églises de village
de la Syrie du nord, vol.2, Planches. Paul Geuthner, Paris, 1979.
E Baccache Églises de village de la Syrie du nord, vol.1; Album. Paul
Geuthner, Paris, 1980.
Toronto: Pontificial Institute of Mediaeval Studies.
Kaufhold, H. 1995. ‘Notizen über das Moseskloster bei Nabk und
das Julianskloster bei Qaryatain in Syrien’, Oriens Christianus 79
(1995), pp.48-119
Author biography
Emma Loosley studied the architecture and liturgy of the Syrian
Church for her PhD at the School of Oriental and African Studies,
University of London, before moving to Syria to work as the art
historian and archaeologist of the monastic community of Deir
Mar Musa al-Habashi in the Syrian desert north of Damascus.
Since January 2004 she has taught Oriental Christian and Islamic
Art at the University of Manchester.
29
Teaching the Art of Africa
THOMAS A DOWSON
A
s an archaeologist I began my research and
teaching career on Southern African rock art in
South Africa at the beginning of the 1980s. This was
a time when Jan Vansina remarked that it was
impossible to write an art history of Africa, ‘as too
many scholars in the field of “African art” have been
allergic to historical pursuits’.1 He also pointed out
how very restrictive the notion of ‘African Art’ was,
and how it ignored vast parts of the African
continent, including Southern Africa. Of Southern
Africa, ‘the annihilated Bushman communities and
the impact that their well-known rock art has had on
the formulations of the subcontinent’s history [were]
of scant interest to many southern African
academics.’2 South African Art historians, for
instance, generally believed that the ‘multitude of
images engraved and painted on the stone surfaces
survive to tantalise archaeologists and to fascinate
students of aesthetic form.’3 This sort of view is
perhaps not surprising, as rock art was all but
ignored in undergraduate art history curricula. For
art historians, rock art served only as an
introductory device to their magisterial accounts of
art in Southern Africa. By the beginning of the 1990s
there was a significant literature on rock art, mostly
produced by archaeologists or in archaeology
publications. While it is true there was considerable
and often heated debate amongst archaeologists
about the meaning and significance of rock art, at
least there was a debate. The idea that at the
beginning of the 1990s rock art merely ‘tantalised’
archaeologists is evidence enough of how
uninterested art historians were.
In my research on Southern African rock art, and the
socio-politics of its contemporary reception, I soon
came to appreciate that if ever there was an artistic
tradition that was excluded by popular and
academic perceptions of African Art, it was rock art
– from any part of the African continent. In
attempting to get to understand the reasons for this
exclusion I was interested to know what was
quintessential ‘African Art’. Vansina provides a
clue: ‘African art is the label usually given to the
visual and plastic arts of the peoples south of the
Sahara, especially those of western and central
Africa.’4 And, if there is one tradition that stands out
from these, in so many different ways, whether
historically, financially or intellectually, it is the art
from Benin – and in particular those objects looted
by British armed forces after the sacking of Benin
City in 1897.
30
Much has been written on the centuries of
appropriation of so-called ‘non-Western’ art by the
West, and its reception and continued
representation there.5 The West’s interest, whether it
is academic or popular, in African art has always
been constructed around a series of paradoxes;
although rarely articulated as such in a sustained
manner. The very idea of ‘African art’ itself stands in
conflict with widely held notions and ideas about
Africa, the continent and it’s people. And this
fundamental conflict permeates all other aspects of
the reception and representation of African art in the
West, resulting in yet further paradoxes and
tensions.
Paradoxes of Reception and Representation
Perhaps the most fundamental paradox of all in
‘African art’ is that the meanings of such concepts as
‘Africa’ and ‘Art’, and how these terms have come to
acquire their meaning in the West, are in direct and
continuous conflict with each other. Widely held
perceptions of Africa as a continent do not easily
allow us to think of Africans as producers and
consumers of art. Our collective imaginations of
Africa and Africans are deeply entrenched,
originating in the accounts of European explorers
and missionaries to Africa over the centuries.
Early European accounts of Africa and its people are
filled with highly judgemental comments about
‘barbaric’ practices and intellectual capabilities (or
lack thereof). In an account of travels during 1797
and 1798 into the southern African interior, then
largely unexplored by Europeans, Sir John Barrow6
wrote of the rock art he saw there: ‘The force and
sprit of drawings, given to them by bold touches
judiciously applied, and by the effect of light and
shadow, could not be expected from savages.’ The
same applies to many, if not all, artistic traditions of
Africa; Europeans simply could not accept that
Africans had made the art they were encountering
and looting. Some of the early Benin bronze work,
for instance, was initially thought to be far too
sophisticated to have been made by indigenous
people of the area; after all Benin was known as the
City of Blood. Early Portuguese traders, the ancient
Egyptians and, for some, even the lost tribes of Israel
were more suitable candidates. And still today there
are people who find it more palatable to believe that
southern African rock art was made by aliens than
by indigenous hunters and gatherers.
TEACHING THE ART OF AFRICA
The racist notion that Africa was full of savages with
barbaric practices was used to justify what can truly
be termed barbaric acts carried out by Europeans for
their colonial agenda. One of the two surviving
soldiers of the ill-fated (and ill-advised) mission on
4 January 1897 that led to the massacre and sacking
of Benin City later in the month wrote:
The loss which the British nation has
sustained during the last sixty years, through
the deaths of so many brave soldiers,
bluejackets, and civilians in the glorious work
of rescuing the native races in West Africa
from the horrors of human sacrifice,
cannibalism, and the tortures of fetish
worship, must ever be a matter of deep regret
and sadness to all.7
Having all but raised the City of Benin to the
ground, and exiling the King of Benin, British troops
both officially and personally looted artworks from
the royal residence. The British Foreign Office sold
off its war booty to defray costs of the punitive
expedition, while individuals sold their personal
loot in various auctions in Europe. There are now,
spread around the world, numerous artworks from
the City of Benin that were taken as part of the raid
on the city.
In April 2003 an object that was looted from the city
of Benin after the raid went up for auction with an
estimate of between US$60,000 – $80,000; it actually
sold for US$185,000. In 1907 the Pitt Rivers Museum
bought a bronze plaque from Benin City, said to
have been ‘hidden away from [British] soldiers after
the capture of Benin on the Punitive Expedition of
1897 and … brought to Lagos by a native trading
woman’, for the then princely sum of £5.8 Three
years later the Pitt Rivers Museum paid £10 for 178
pieces of miscellaneous West African art. The raid
provides a unique provenance to these objects that
afforded them enormous monetary value after the
raid, a value that is still recognised today. But the
Punitive raid only ever receives scant attention in
books about, and museum displays of, Benin Art.
In a recent attempt at providing a history of art in
Africa, A History of Art in Africa,9 the coverage of
African arts is refreshing: there is considerable
attention to pre-historic traditions and
archaeological research, as well as the art of Ancient
Egypt. But in attempting to write ‘a history of art in
Africa’ the socio-politics of that history are only
really ever mentioned in passing, as a way of
imparting straightforward empirical detail, or as an
obligatory introductory chapter (although Blier’s
introduction to this volume is in stark contrast to the
approach adopted in the rest of the volume). In the
chapter that discusses Benin art, the Punitive Raid is
used to explain how Benin Art comes to be in the
A letter from
W J Hider, a
British naval
officer
present at the
sacking of
Benin, to the
Horniman
Museum
offering to sell
the ‘curios’
he had taken
from Benin to
the museum.
He states that
he is ‘certain’
that the
pieces he
had taken
were the only
ones to have
survived the
sack of Benin.
museums and private collections it can be found in.
Nowhere is there any meaningful consideration, not
even in the bibliography, of the impact Benin art has
had in the West since 1897, nor is there any
discussion, no matter how brief, of how the raid is
constructed as a single cataclysmic event rather than
as one event in a number of historical disruptions.10
Simply including in the bibliography Coombes’s11
groundbreaking study of the reception of Benin art
in the West would have gone some way to
acknowledging different conceptions of African art.
The real business of the study of African art as seen
in A History of Art in Africa12, and others like it13, is
underwritten by an approach that provides distinct
ethnic histories of as many creative traditions as
possible. Magisterial accounts such as these
celebrate rather than challenge the West’s
construction of ‘African art’14 – a construction that
creates meaning and value according to a dealer–
critic system.
What is overlooked in these constructions of African
art is the way in which the presence of these objects
in Western institutions is justified on the basis that
they are part of a national heritage. Claims for the
repatriation of the so-called ‘Benin bronzes’, for
example, are often dismissed because these objects
are said to be an integral part of a British national
heritage. It was a result of the arrival of the Benin
objects after the raid that we saw the setting up of
the Ethnography Department at the British
Museum. It is not surprising then that the real
provenance of these objects is overlooked or
downplayed – the presence of these objects in the
British Museum, and other pubic and private
collections, results from the colonial and imperialist
31
21ST-CENTURY ART HISTORY
activities of the British Government. The sacking of
Benin City in 1897, and the distasteful reasons
behind the massacre, is not an event that is openly
celebrated as such today as are other military
endeavours of the past. In an attempt to avoid the
real reasons why these objects are a part of British
national heritage, they become an international
heritage; these object are held ‘in trust for
mankind.’15
It is as a result of the paradoxes and tensions I have
briefly outlined above that many creative traditions
of Africa have become objectified. These ‘objects’
have been removed from their social and political
settings, and been denied their initial and
developing subjectivity. They are rarely seen or
presented as part of ongoing, developing traditions;
they are placed in distant pasts or ethnic ‘others’.
Objects produced more recently are often
catalogued as ‘crafts’ and dismissed as ‘tourist art’.16
Aspects of African Art
One of the primary aims of teaching African art in
the United Kingdom for me has been to challenge
the ideologies on which these paradoxes and
tensions are founded – not to present a series of
‘ethnic’ traditions in time and space. I do so by
explicitly exploring some of the socio-political
aspects of artistic traditions, not just the formal
qualities of the art, their chronologies and
meanings.17 I recognise five aspects that require
particular attention.
First, I believe students need to actively challenge
the idea we can never really know anything about
certain artistic traditions. This idea comes from the
belief that to fully understand an artistic tradition
we need direct textual information relating to the
art’s production and consumption. In some
instances colonialism is used as an expedient
marker: what happened before colonialism is lost,
what happened after the arrival of Europeans is
recorded and documented and hence accessible. As
archaeologists have shown, there are indeed ways to
know about these traditions. It may be a difficult
enterprise, one that is fraught with numerous
epistemological problems, but it is certainly not an
impossible exercise. These epistemological problems
should be specifically addressed because, like all
academic enterprises, they are not socio-politically
neutral. It is no longer, if ever it was, sufficient to
write off Africa’s pre-colonial artistic traditions as
merely tantalising archaeologists and fascinating
scholars of aesthetic form. Once we accept that there
are different ways of knowing about the past, we
should foreground the intellectual complexity of all
African creative traditions, not just those that are
obviously produced in post-colonial contexts.
32
Second, students should acknowledge that Africa’s
creative traditions have come out of Africa’s
complex past, and the production and consumption
of these were integrally linked to prevailing sociopolitical contexts. We should not deal with arts as
exclusively ‘ethnic traditions’, thus proclaiming the
‘otherness’ of African peoples. On the contrary, all
the peoples of Africa, including for example,
Middle-Eastern and European traders and
conquerors, missionaries, explorers, have been
caught up in various ways in the production of
certain creative traditions.
Third, the specific historical context of the art’s
production and consumption can and should be
extended. Our knowledge about African arts, past
and present, is constructed in the present, and we
need to think very carefully about what that
knowledge is saying to us today, about ourselves as
well as Africa. It is all too easy for us to impose our
contemporary, Western attitudes about class,
gender, race, sexuality and age on to those of
African people in our constructions of Africa.
Fourth, the technical aspects of the arts production
should be located within the social and historical
conditions of that production. Far too often, even
today, people use apparent technical expertise in art
as an indicator of intellectual sophistication. African
arts have often been classified according to skill and
abilities, where some preconceived notion of what is
‘simple’ often stands for childlike and primitive.
Such classifications are then used to construct
temporal schemes that see the art evolving from
simple and primitive styles to more complex and
advanced styles. Producers of material culture use
particular techniques and formal qualities, etc, for
particular reasons; these are socially and historically
contingent, not simply historical markers.
And finally, the manipulation of African art in
contemporary material culture, such as art,
advertising, or souvenirs for tourists, should be
critically examined. Some of these representations
do indeed reinforce widely held stereotypes about
Africa, its people and their artistic traditions, but
some do in fact challenge these and force people to
think about Africa in different ways.18
Cultural biographies: objects as subjects
By explicitly dealing with the issues I have only
briefly outlined above in specific epistemological
contexts I believe we can come some way to
restoring the subjectivity of the material cultures we
often label as ‘ethnographic objects’. In other words,
looking at the narratives of these objects to restore
their subjectivity, or as Mieke Bal19 suggests, using
objects to tell narratives. I end with one example,
different objects and events, to present a tentative
but different and tantalising narrative.
TEACHING THE ART OF AFRICA
Leopards carved in ivory
with copper inlay. On
display in the British Museum,
London.
The British Museum has many pieces of art in its
care that were taken after the raid on Benin City.
Some of these are on display in the museum. Two of
these that are on display are on permanent loan
from the Queen’s collection. They are ivory and
copper leopards. They are exquisite pieces and are
often reproduced in publications on Benin art. But
the focus in these publications is on the significance
of leopards for the people of Benin, and that they are
probably from the ‘Late period’ of Benin art. These
leopards provide evidence for an idea that ivory
carving, unlike brass casting, did not suffer a decline
in the Late period. Whatever the take on this sort of
analysis, these leopards have become two objects
slotted into a Western idea about the development
of artistic style. This kind of analysis ignores so
much in the biography of these beautifully
produced leopards.
The rump of one of them can be seen in the muchreproduced 1897 photograph of members of the
British punitive expedition in the royal compound
of Benin City seated amongst their war booty. Also,
in the National Archives (Kew Gardens, London)
there is a letter that relates specifically to the passage
of these two Leopards to London and their current
‘owner’. On 20 March 1897 the British
Commissioner and Consul General at Old Calabar,
Nigeria, wrote to the Marquess of Salisbury, the
Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs:
My Lord Marquess
Admiral Rawson and the officers engaged on the
expedition that some memento should be sent to
England which Her Majesty the Queen might be
graciously pleased to accept as the Imperial forces
were engaged.
I have selected two carved ivory tusks and two
leopard figures made from ivory which I am
sending home in charge of Major Landow who will
deliver them at the foreign office and I would
respectfully suggest that Your Lordship bring the
matter under Her Majesty’s notice for gracious
approval.
The ivories would require polishing and putting in
good order as they were unfortunately slightly
damaged by fire though first rate specimens.
I am,
My Lord,
Your Lordship’s most obedient,
Humble servant,
R Moor
Commissioner & Consul General
I argue these other objects, the photograph and the
letter to the Foreign Office, should not be perceived
as interesting documents associated with the two
leopards. On the contrary, they are an integral part
of the biography of these two ivory leopards, and
they should be treated as such, in publication and
display. Together they enable and empower a telling
and different story.
Referring to my despatches Nos 17 and 23
reporting operations against Benin City I have the
honour to state that it was the wish of Rear
33
21ST-CENTURY ART HISTORY
End notes
Photographs: Thomas Dowson
1
Jan Vansina, Art history in Africa: an introduction to method,
Longman, London, 1984, p1.
2
Thomas A Dowson and David Lewis-Williams, ‘Myths,
museums and Southern African rock art’, South African
Historical Journal, volume 29, 1993, p60.
3
Esme Berman, Painting in South Africa, Southern Book
Publishers, Halfway House, 1993.
4
Vansina, op.cit., p1 (note 1).
5
For the most sustained discussion on these topics for Africa
see Annie E Coombes, ‘Ethnography, popular culture and
institutional power: narratives of Benin Culture in the British
Museum 1897-1992’, Studies in History of Art, volume 47, 1994,
pp.143-157; Annie E Coombes, Reinventing Africa: museums,
material culture and popular imagination, Yale University Press,
New Haven, 1994; Elazar Barkan, ‘Aesthetics and Evolution:
Benin Art in Europe’, African Arts, summer, pp. 36–41.
6
John Barrow, An account of his travels into the interior of
southern Africa in the years 1797 and 1798, Volume 1, p. 237,
Cadell & Davis, London, 1801.
7
A Boisragon, The Benin Massacre, Methuen, London, 1897,
p189.
8
Coombes, Reinventing Africa, p. 148 (note 5).
9
Monica Blackmun Visonà, Robyn Poynor, Herbert M. Cole
and Michael D Harris, (eds), A history of art in Africa, Thames
& Hudson, London, 2000.
10 Joseph Nevadomsky, ‘Studies of Benin art and material
culture, 1897–1997’, African Arts, summer, pp. 18–27.
11 Coombes, Reinventing Africa (note 5).
12 Visonà et al op. cit. (note 9).
13 See, for example, Tom Phillips (ed.) Africa: art of a continent,
Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1995.
14 See, for example, Olabisi Silva, ‘africa95: cultural colonialism
or cultural celebration’, in, Art criticism and Africa (ed. K.
Deepwell), pp15–20. Saffron Books, London, 1997.
15 Sir David Wilson, 1989, the then director of the British
Museum, cited in Coombes ‘Ethnography, popular culture
and institutional power … ‘, p154 (note 5).
16 Joseph Nevadomsky has published a valuable piece on
contemporary art in Benin City, ‘Contemporary art and artists
34
in Benin City’ African Arts, autumn, pp54–63.
17 The approach I adopted was greatly inspired and influenced
by Catherine King King ed, Views of Difference: Different Views
of Art, Yale University Press, New Haven & London, in
association with the Open University, 1999; and Rachel
Mason, Art Education and Multicultralism. NSEAD, Corsham,
1995.
18 For the use of southern African rock art in contemporary
material culture, see Thomas Dowson, ‘Re-production and
consumption:the use of rock art imagery in Southern Africa
today’, in Miscast in history: the making and breaking of the
Bushman (ed. P. Skotnes), pp: 315–21. Cape Town: UCT Press,
Cape Town, 1996; and Thomas Dowson, ‘Off the rocks, onto
T-shirts, canvasses, etc. … power and the popular
consumption of rock art imagery’, in, Rock art and ethics: a
dialogue (ed. W D Hyder), pp: 1–14. American Rock Art
Research Association, Tuscon, 1999.
19 Mieke Bal, ‘Telling objects: a narrative perspective on
collecting’ in, The cultures of collecting (eds J. Elsner and R.
Cardinal), pp: 97–115. London: Reaktion Books, London,
1997.
Acknowledgements
This piece has its origins in a project I carried out as part of the
Globalising Art, Architecture and Design History Project (see
www.glaadh.ac.uk), and is part of ongoing research into the
reception and representation of African art in the West today. I
acknowledge funding received from the GLAADH project and
the University of Manchester. I thank Ed Evans, Mark Zlotowski
and Emma Poulter for their assistance with archival research. I
thank the Horniman Museum for permission to photograph and
publish the Hider letter. I also thank Sîan Jones, Helen Rees
Leahy and Louise Tythacott for stimulating discussions about
some of the issues raised here. Finally, I thank Janet Tatlock and
Catherine King for inviting me to take part in the AAH
conference session at which I presented an earlier draft of this
paper.
Author biography
Thomas Dowson is an independent researcher, having held
research and lecturing positions at leading South African and
British Universities. His research includes shamanism and the
interpretation of rock art, theory and methodology of
archaeological approaches to art, and the reception and
representation of African art. His publications include Rock
Engravings of Southern Africa (1992, Witwatersrand University
Press) and, with David Lewis-Williams, Images of Power:
understanding San rock art (1989, Second edition 2000, Struik).
The ‘End of Art' or Iconoclash: ‘Crises of Representation’
and Attempts to Globalise the ‘New’ Art History
Abstract for a paper by STEPHANIE KOERNER
T
he last century has seen a series of crises of
representation whose causes and consequences
are the foci of proliferating debates across diverse
theoretical literatures, areas of research and
teaching, and programmes for public understanding
expert knowledge. The most influential paradigms
for the new art history emerged in relation to wider
crisis in the human sciences and humanities of the
1960s and 1970s. Major differences among these
paradigms have turned upon principles drawn from
the different ways in which the founding figures of
the analytic, continental and sociological
philosophical (or theoretical) tradition responded to
crises in physical science and natural philosophy during
the first half of the 20th century to conflicts between
Relativity Theory and positivist theses on scientific
unity, social progress, and the idea of an (impartial)
universalisable (empiricist) language for
distinguishing true and false knowledge claims (cf.
Kuhn 970 [1962]). Major differences between these
traditions turn on principles intended for new
approaches to (a) objects of research, (b) methods for
explaining or interpreting a, (c) researchers relations
to a and b, (d) the contents and social contexts of a, b
and c, and (e) how a–d relate to social and moral
accountability (Koerner, S. 2006).
Neither of these crises occurred in a social vacuum.
Crises in the human sciences and humanities over
hitherto authoritative paradigms for research and
teaching developed in the midst of the Cold War
and escalating post-colonial conflict over social
inequalities based on race, class and gender. Crises
have been experienced especially by artists,
academics, and public media practitioners who have
seriously reflected upon historical roots that these
paradigms have shared with some of the most
powerful colonialist, imperialist and nationalist
political ideologies of modern times. Loss of naiveté
about the dynamics of political history, pedagogical
institutions, and public affairs became a core
concern of the new art history (Harris 2001).
Unfortunately, many responses have been entangled
in tendencies to reduce concrete social and
ecological crises to pedagogical wars over rival
paradigms that agree on what and who are excluded
from debate (cf. Benjamin 1978 [1937], 1994 [1940];
Latour 2000).
The turn of the 21st century is seeing the situation
change as crises traversing the physical sciences,
human sciences and humanities converge
on discrepancies between core-periphery
representations of globalisation and the social
geography of ecological risk, sustainable
development and exposure to political violence
(Beck, Giddens and Lash 1996; Irwin and Wynne
1996; Friedman ed. 2002; Inda and Rosaldo eds.
2002). New spaces are opening to discuss problems
of the Eurocentric focus of many undergraduate
courses in the History of Art and Design (Branfoot
2005) and iconoclast notions of the end of art
(Weibel 2002). Strongly relativising ideas of
globalising multi-cultural political identities,
alternative realities, and the new cosmopolitanism
are being questioned (Latour 2004; Koerner, S. 2006).
Truths are not contested across mutually exclusive
worlds. Different things matter to people living in
the same one. Wars are not fought over different
worlds, but over conflicting views on what is most
important in the world that rivals both inhabit.
Research on the long history of paradoxically
devout iconoclast beliefs in belief – especially in
beliefs of others in deceptive images can illuminate
contradictory views on these matters and the end of
art (cf. Benjamin 1977; Toulmin 1990, J.L. 2002;
Weibel 2002), which relate to challenges that a
‘common world is not something we can come to
recognize, as though it had always been here. A
common world, if there is going to be one, is
something we have to build, tooth and nail
together’ (Latour 2004: 455).
My presentation has two aims. Part 1 identifies
several requirements of strongly reflective
approaches to notions of the ‘end of art’ and
‘globalising’ ‘the new art history’ in light of themes
in the session and Walter Benjamin’s works: (1) the
historical contingency of reductions of existential
human crises to ‘pedagogical wars’, (2) the
normative roles of ‘state of emergency’ in views that
philosophy’s main task is a standpoint ‘beyond’
local situations for judging true and false, fact and
fiction, friend and foe, (3) ‘going against the grain’ of
myths that ‘a clean slate’ divides ‘moderns’ from
‘pre-moderns’, (4) questions of whether Platonist
and Aristotelian views on philosophy’s tasks, ethics
and human capacities for poetic (creative)
expression have exhausted their usefulness.
Few 20th century scholars have worked more
urgently on such matters than Benjamin. The theme
‘crises of interpretation’ runs through works
motivating his arguments that the ‘state of
emergency’ in modern times is not an anomaly but a
35
21ST-CENTURY ART HISTORY
‘ruling principle’, and that insight of the problem
can help us to combat forces that threaten variability
of human life-worlds (Benjamin 1992 [1940]).
Benjamin spoke too early and too late. Increasingly
phantasmagorical ideologies have been employed to
legitimate the marginalisation, exploitation and
oppression, even until death, of ‘minorities’. In 1949,
Theodore Adorno (1973) argued that 20th century
events undermined the credibility of universalising
claims about reconciling all-encompassing ideals
with concrete historical reality. Critical theory,
Adorno said, faced a turning point in the ‘dialectic’
of ‘culture and barbarism’; it would be barbaric to
hoist images of redemption arising from this
dialectic - yet we cannot do without culture.
Barnes, B 2000. Understanding Agency: Social Theory and Responsible
Action. London: Sage Publications.
It bears stressing that, for Adorno, Hanna Arendt
(1989 [1958]) and others who have argued against
cultural treatment of terrible historical events as
‘redemptive’, crucial questions are: How can
humanity continue (we live)? How can we anchor
our various fields of practice to one another, some
common sense of good, and hopes for the future? At
stake is not the ‘end of art’ but how we can deal
with the ways in which culture can and has
deceived without abandoning hope that the arts can
help us to proceed.
Brandom, R. 1994. Making It explicit: Reasoning, Representing and
Discursive Commitment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
The arts (and whatever we call culture) form our
conditions of possibility for creating ‘spaces of
reasons’ – contexts where reasons given and asked
for by mutually susceptible and accountable
intentional beings create the ‘we’ for whom things
matter (cf. Brandom 1994; Barnes 2000; Habermas
2003). Strongly reflective approaches to bringing an
end to problematic notions of the ‘end of art’ can
build upon the long history of arguments for the
‘poet-orator’ rather than the ‘philosopher-king’ as
pedagogical and political ideal.
Part 2 illustrates how these issues relate to
challenges facing art history research and teaching
at the turn of the 21st century in light of materials
for the seminars of an MA course entitled,
Iconoclash: Debates in Pre-Columbian and Latin
American Visual Culture Studies, dealing with such
topics as: (a) art, cosmology and converging ‘Old’
and ‘New Worlds’, (b) realism, abstraction, crises of
representation, (c) destruction of ‘idols’ and colonial
expansion, (d) contextualizing the ‘baroque’,
‘surreal’ and exotic’, (e) mural painting and
changing views on ‘popular culture’, (f) carnival and
social critique, (g) art, poverty, other modernities,
(h) ‘image wars’ in an age that some call that of ‘risk
society’.
End notes
Adorno, TW [1963] 1973. Negative Dialectics, E B Ashton (transl.)
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Arendt, H 1989 [1958] The Human Condition. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
30
Beck, U Giddens, A and Lash, S. 1994. Reflexive modernisation.
Politics, tradition and aesthetics in the modern social order.
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Benjamin, W. 1977. The Origins of German Tragic Drama. London:
Fontana Press.
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