Art and the issue of ‘globalization’
The recent period has seen a burgeoning interest in the globalization of art. Indeed, it is something of a fashionable concern. But it is more than that. Fundamental change is afoot in the ways art is made and seen, in the ways the concept of art is understood, and the ways in which the history of art is taught. Art in Theory: The West in the World is intended as a contribution to this change in how the history of art is being taught and studied. Many books now exist with words such as ‘world’ and ‘global’ in their titles. But in a post‐colonial situation where there is an understandable desire to promote diverse traditions and to challenge canonical hierarchies of art, the lack of an adequate overall historical perspective can result in a stereotyping and homogenizing of European attitudes which at its worst perpetuates some of the very failings that the global perspective sets out to redress. This is one important reason for the present collection. However, it is not just about contemporary attitudes and debates; it is not simply an argument made by contemporary scholars about the past. We have tried to let people from the past – artists, writers, philosophers, travellers – speak in their own words about the objects and ideas they encountered; their words are their own, and frequently not those that would be chosen by or acceptable to a contemporary writer, but they are part of the historical record and we present it as it was written. It is a commonplace, of course, that no framing of the past can be wholly neutral and objective. We do have our own points of view; but as far as possible, in the process of constructing the anthology we have attempted to let our authors speak for themselves.
At the same time, the situation we represent is not one of an egalitarian dialogue. Firstly, a representative knowledge of Indian art, Chinese art, African art, pre‐Columbian American art, Oceanic art and the many and various ideas subtending them, is simply beyond the competence of the present editors; indeed, we suspect, it would, at the present time at least, be beyond anyone’s competence. More to the point, there is an inequality in the historical record itself. For most of our chosen time‐span – the period of modernity in its broadest sense – Europe, and latterly the ‘West’, has been hegemonic in terms of global power. This means there is an imbalance in the written sources available to us, as well as in our knowledge of them. Although the growing interest in the art of the whole world is bringing to light ideas and arguments which have for centuries been obscured by the European reflex that its own culture was the leading light of world civilization, the fact remains that, because of the very expansiveness of European states in the modern period, European writers have been more preoccupied with learning about and commenting on the cultures they encountered than the other way round.
To say this is to find ourselves immediately on contested terrain. For one thing, that situation has never been static. As the rest of the world has struggled to emancipate itself from the yoke of Western imperialism, so voices from beyond the core transatlantic regions (as well as dissenting voices within them) have increasingly challenged traditional Eurocentric assumptions. With increasing frequency over the last century and a half at least, voices have talked back to the West – and written back. It has been an important principle in organizing the present book to give space to the representation of those voices. The present collection is a medley of subordinate and hegemonic voices, and part of the point is that which voice is which can change over time.
That much has to be clear; but it also masks a deeper point. As we venture off the terrain of the Western canon of ‘Art’, particularly when that terrain is shaped by unequal power relations in the form of colonialism and imperialism, we have to acknowledge that the hegemony of Western textual knowledge has itself been a determining factor in what counts as ‘Art’, as material culture, and – as it were from the other side – in what count as coherent forms of cultural resistance to Western domination. When one expands the remit of a collection of changing ideas about art to the wider world, one has to make adjustments to the sense of what knowledge is, of how knowledge can be created and transmitted. If it is the case that written forms of resistance to Western domination become evident in the historical record with increasing pace from the eighteenth century, through the nineteenth and with gathering force through the twentieth century, then this is not to say that such resistance did not happen earlier, nor that a written challenge to hegemony is the only cultural resistance there is. Opposition to and dissent from the hegemony of European cultural forms can itself take forms that Europeans may not even have recognized. Oral and material knowledge have often been the stuff of these positions. This points to a limit on our project itself. We have made a book, and a book without illustrations must perforce be made of words. It is only through textual representation that we can include evidence of non‐textual practices, be these patronising descriptions of carnivals by Caribbean slave owners or the modern painter Frank Bowling’s reference to nineteenth‐century African‐American dancers and potters working against white hegemony in their own terms, in their own media, in their own day (cf IIIC4, VIB16 and VIID6). Then again, at the other end of the spectrum, contemporary art‐debate often takes place in online social media, which can just as easily slip through the net of a conventional text‐based anthology. All we can say in this regard is that in both such registers – past and present – we have done what we can to represent in book‐form as diverse a range of voices as we could.
Nonetheless, we cannot escape – nor would we want to escape – the fact that the present editors are European, British to be precise, and in the officially demanded language of such things, ‘White British’. In an academic environment dominated by managerially inflected, discipline‐based protocols on the one side and identity politics on the other, it is almost an act of resistance itself to imagine such a chronologically deep and geographically diverse enterprise as the present anthology. We cannot avoid the fact that our broad parameters and our particular choices within those parameters have been formed within a particular heritage. We are the products of that ‘Western canon’ (including the ‘Modernist canon’) which has come under increasing challenge during the last fifty years, after five hundred years of its construction and domination.
On this issue we should like to adapt a phrase cited by the art historian Thomas Crow, in turn taken from the words of the socialist historian Raphael Samuel who, in his discussion of the seventeenth‐century True Levellers (the ‘Diggers’), had noted their decision to ‘dig where we stand’; in their case, on St George’s Hill in Surrey. Paul Wood previously employed this phrase as a leitmotif for his book Western Art and the Wider World (2014), which is conceptually connected to the present volume. It remains relevant for Art in Theory: The West in the World. We have dug where we stand. And the criss‐crossing roots we have turned up – or, striking a more contemporary note, the rhizomes we have traced – are what the present book is made of. To put it more firmly, as far as art goes, we believe they are what the present situation writ large is made of.
The Art in Theory project
Art in Theory: The West in the World is an independent, free‐standing book. It can be read, studied and taught from in its own right. But it also forms a complement to the three existing volumes of the Art in Theory project. In chronological order, these books are: Art in Theory 1648–1815, Art in Theory 1815–1900 and Art in Theory 1900–2000. Published between 1992 and 2003 under the editorship of Charles Harrison, Paul Wood and Jason Gaiger, these anthologies presented an archaeology of the changing ideas that had contributed to the making of