World Art History

This paper strives to pluralize notions of taste in relation to the canonized category of the Hindu or Indian temple. I put 'Hindu' in italics because I include Jain temples in my discussion and I put 'Indian' in italics because the architecture I discuss predates India as a nation-state and in the twenty-first century includes buildings in South and Southeast Asia as well as the Diaspora. Through a discussion of the Archaeological Preservation Aesthetic (APA) and multiple variants of the Ritual Renovation Aesthetics (RRA), new ways of looking emerge. This paper seeks to reconcile the hegemonic assumptions about art historical taste and the temple within an increasingly global environment. The main argument is predicated on temple users' practice as a form of curatorial practice in the field and provides a deep description of the multiplication of aesthetics due to increasing privatization of temple administration in India. The tenth-century cluster of temples from the Medapata region (Southern Rajasthan) serves as case study for a widespread phenomenon of putting ancient temples 'back' into worship during the second half of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Compared with other ‘peripheral’ art, exhibitions of Asian art in the
United States remain depoliticized and unscrutinized. This essay
examines recent exhibitions against the long trajectory of collecting,
classifying and displaying Asian art in the US, and argues that,
despite their efforts to venture beyond conventional museology, art
institutions today still tend to prioritize poetics over politics,
‘tradition’ over modernity, homogeneity over heterogeneity. Such
lingering Orientalism can be attributed to reasons ranging from
logistical difficulties to conflicted interests, but above all to a lack of
historicity: the intentional or habitual shunning of contextual
complexities, the inclusion of which may deprive the artworks – and
their hosts – of their pretense to neutrality, transcendence and aura.
The critical approaches taken by contemporary Asian American
artists and curators, on the other hand, are also fraught with
contradictions and ambivalence, but they point to more historicized,
nuanced and illuminating ways to display Asian art. Contemplating
the unexplored directions and hidden connotations of Asian and
Asian American art exhibitions in recent years, this essay contends
that restoring and explicating historical specificity is crucial for
building and propagating meaningful accounts of world art history,
in which issues such as the appropriation of as well as resistance to
modernity, the migration of objects, personae and techniques, and
the experiences of the global diaspora can serve as governing themes
and guiding principles, replacing a taxonomy based on nationality,
‘culture’ or chronology. Those accounts of world art history are
destined to be fragmentary, yet only through such stories can we envision substantive (if ephemeral connectivity)

Abstract: Small, ceramic figurines used in household settings in Central Mexico during the first millennium BC were emphatically stylistic. Attributes cooperated to direct the viewer’s attention to the style of the figurine, to how the figurine was made, and to the choices of makers and users from a range of alternative ways of making. This paper draws on studies of modern fashion to develop a social interpretation of these patterns based on two collections of figurines, one from the Basin of Mexico and the other from Tlaxcala. The history of Formative figurine fashions is considered at multiple scales.

In Pursuit of Universalism is the first comprehensive, English-language study of early twentieth-century Japanese modern art. In this groundbreaking work, which is also the inaugural recipient of the Phillips Book Prize (awarded by the Phillips Collection Center for the Study of Modern Art), Alicia Volk constructs a critical theory of artistic modernism in Japan between 1900 and 1930 by analyzing the work of Yorozu Tetsugorô, whose paintings she casts as a polemic response to Japan's late-nineteenth-century encounter with European art. Volk places Yorozu at the forefront of a movement that sought to define Japanese art's role in the world by interrogating and ultimately refusing the opposition between East and West. Instead, she vividly demonstrates how Yorozu reframed modern art's dualistic underpinnings and transposed them into an inclusive and synthetic relation between the local and the universal. By looking closely at questions of cultural exchange within modern art, In Pursuit of Universalism offers a new and vital account of both Japanese and Euroamerican modernism. Volk's pioneering study builds bridges between the fields of modern and Asian art and takes its place at the forefront of the emerging global history of modern art.

Reviews:
“Masterfully written. . . . Alicia Volk embarks upon a fascinating journey to develop an alternative perspective for narrating the complexities of the Japanese art scene. . . . Volk’s stimulating book definitively illuminates a new horizon for the field of modern Asian art. . . . It is precisely what the discipline needs.”— Journal Of Oriental Studies

“Forceful and eloquent. . . . Volk masterfully unravels the knotty strands that coalesced to shape one individual artist’s perception of self and his work within existing academic, institutional, and professional structures. . . . [The] book deserves praise for being a substantially rigorous and provocative probe into the search for universalism in a differentiated world.”—International Journal Of Asian Studies

“Deserves to be read by all historians of modern art and East Asian culture.”—Journal Of Asian Studies

“An impressive book, beautifully produced and sustaining intellectual rigour with its detailed, stimulating research.”— Japanese Studies

“Excellent. . . . Exquisitely written.”—The Art Bulletin

"Written beautifully and compellingly... Volk has made an important contribution to the growing literature on alternative artistic modernisms." --The Journal of Japanese Studies

"In presenting readers with this most cogent argument for the emergence of Japanese modernism through the artistic engagement of one of its central players Volk has made a genuinely original contribution to the field."--New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies

"This is an... intellectually nourishing read, in which Volk's voluminous knowledge of art movements and discourse creates a text of commanding erudition."--The Japan Times

“Volk's impressive study rethinks the East-West binary often reiterated in discussions of Japanese modernism by reinserting local aspects into the universalizing tendencies of modernism itself. The book makes an important contribution to the growing literature on modern Japanese art history by providing an alternative comparative framework for understanding the global development of modernism that decenters Euro-America. Rigorously historical in her critique, Volk destabilizes our understanding of the Japanese experience of modernity through the prism of Yorozu's singular vision of the self, leaving us questioning conventional wisdom and contented to wobble.”—Gennifer Weisenfeld, Duke University

“In Volk's affectingly stunning and deeply reflective study of the Japanese artist Yorozu Tetsugorō's work between 1910-1930, we have a profoundly historical reminder of how modernism everywhere struggled to meet the demands of the new with the readymades of received artistic practices. In this study of Yorozu's utopian universalist project, Volk has imaginatively broadened our understanding of the modernist moment and perceptively captured its global program to unify art and life, contemporary culture and history.”—Harry Harootunian, author of Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture and Community in Interwar Japan

The Fowler’s activist museology deploys an interdisciplinary model based on the fact that the disciplines of art history and anthropology remain separate overall in their university departments and in their categorical museums. My own chapter for this volume provides an update to art historical practices by returning to the foundational European institutions of art history and anthropology in order to track the shifting boundaries of exhibitions of art and science. In questioning the definition, meaning, and ideology of world art and global art, this study returns to the Louvre as the original “art academy” in France (since 1793) and the Pitt Rivers and Manchester Museums as the earliest university museums of anthropology in England (begun in the late nineteenth century). The Louvre’s inauguration of a new wing for the “tribal arts” in 2000 was the symbolic act of admitting ethnographic objects into the canon of European masterpieces; while at the Pitt Rivers and Manchester Museums of anthropology and natural science, artistic conceptualism and collaboration with global performance artists have transformed the viewing engagements with the “tribal arts.” The symbolic change to the ways in which objects represents peoples in the historical European sites of cultural hegemony impacts the new global museum sites, especially in the countries of the source cultures of anthropology.

The avant-garde movement Estridentismo (Stridentism) erupted in 1921, in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution, with the distribution of the poet Manuel Maples Arce's subversive manifesto Actual No. 1, which disparaged local art and literature as retardataire and outlined an aesthetic plan based on models from Futurism and Dada. As a result of dialogues between artists – including Mexico's first generation of mural painters – and writers over the course of the 1920s, Estridentismo eventually expanded its original proposal, increasingly embracing socially responsible causes and allying itself with radical politics. It became emblematic of the complexities of avant-garde thought in Latin America, torn between formal innovation and social relevance, cosmopolitan dreams and local concerns. This paper uses the example of Estridentismo and its offshoot movement ¡30–30! to shift the geography of modernism, assessing how such movements upset Eurocentric narratives and force us to recognize the importance of other locales to the production of knowledge.

The interdisciplinary project reported here combines art history, archaeology and the historical anthropology of religion. It consists of a study based on the material culture of recusancy from the mansion and medieval bishop’s palace at Fetternear, Aberdeenshire. After the Reformation, the property became the main seat of the Leslies of Balquhain, a recusant family. A stone plaque bearing the inscription IHS MRA, probably dating from 1691, placed on the façade of the mansion indicates the religious allegiance of the family. This study of the contents of the mansion is based on surviving material culture associated with Fetternear and documentary sources and shows that the Leslies of Balquhain were building up the necessary intellectual and material resources for sustaining Roman Catholic worship and that their property served as the headquarters of the Jesuit mission in Scotland in the late 17th century.

Fifty years after Linda Nochlin published her revolutionary article, 'Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?', art historians are still grappling with the canon. Part Research Article and part Position Essay, this paper examines the problem through the lens of Thomas Kuhn's famous 'paradigm shift' theory of 1962, which offers an intriguing solution. The model suggests that although we may never eliminate the canon, we can move beyond it if we embrace our innate subjectivity and usher in a new art history guided by the principles of poststructuralism.

This article conducts a comparative study of Morris Weitz's The Role of Theory in Aesthetics and Lu Zhenglan and Zhao Yiheng's What Is Not Art: Defining Art from the perspective of Semiotics to analyze the art theory. Both summarize the previous definition of art. In his article, Weitz critiqued the predecessor's definition and theory of art and finally draw a conclusion that we should not define the flexible art with closed concepts. In the article What Art is not, the author pointed out that in response to the problem of “art generalization, the”"negative definition" is needed to analyze art. It can be said that both articles, explicitly or implicitly, have transformed the question of "What is art?" The former transforms this question into "what kind of concept does art belong to?", while the latter believes that the question of "what is art not" should be cleared up.
Keywords: Art, Anti-Essentialism, Openness, System-History, Art World

The call for decolonising in the fields of culture studies has gained impetus, especially through numerous publications from and interviews with the circle around Walter Mignolo. In this article I look specifically into decolonising the art museum. For this I take it for granted, also based on my experience as a curator, that museums, including art museums are struggling with issues of cultural diversity and inclusivity. This struggle is rooted in fundamental frictions in which Art History plays a role.

Global and World Art in the Practice of the University Museum provides new thinking on exhibitions of global art and world art in relation to university museums.  Jane Chin Davidson and Sandra Esslinger, editors.

The volume includes a full-colour photo essay by Marla C. Berns on the Fowler Museum’s ‘Fowler at Fifty’ project, as well as contributions from Donald Preziosi, Catherine M. Cole, Lothar von Falkenhausen, Claire Farago, Selma Holo, and Gemma Rodrigues.

Taking The Fowler Museum at UCLA, USA, as its central subject, this edited collection traces how university museum practices have expanded the understanding of the ‘art object’ in recent years. It is argued that the meaning of cultural objects infused with the heritage and identity of ‘global culture’ has been developed substantially through the innovative approaches of university scholars, museum curators, and administrators since the latter part of the twentieth century. Through exploring the ways in which universities and their museums have overseen changes in the global context for art, this edited collection initiates a larger dialogue and inquiry into the value and contribution of the empirical model.

In the late 1980s women artists took the reins of the contemporary Aboriginal art movement in Australia. After years of working in the shadows, assisting their fathers and husbands, they burst onto the scene, giving it a new vitality and dynamism. Women artists redrew the boundaries of Aboriginal art, and continue to be among its most daring innovators.

Drawn from the collection of Debra and Dennis Scholl, Marking the Infinite features the work of nine leading exponents of this ongoing tradition: Nonggirrnga Marawili, Wintjiya Napaltjarri, Yukultji Napangati, Angelina Pwerle, Carlene West, Regina Pilawuk Wilson, Lena Yarinkura, Gulumbu Yunupingu, and Nyapanyapa Yunupingu. These nine artists offer a snapshot of the diversity of Aboriginal Australian contemporary art practice. Matriarchs in their communities, they are steeped in the ancient cultural traditions of their people. Inspired by these traditions, they extrapolate to the universal, creating artworks that speak
to the entangled globalized world in which we live.

In this volume, the art of each artist is given in-depth analysis by leading art historians, curators, and anthropologists. The essays shed light on the rich and complex histories behind the artworks, placing them in the contexts of traditional Aboriginal culture, philosophy, colonial experience, and the contemporary art world. Marking the Infinite shows nine artists producing works that cross cultures and bridge worlds. This strength of vision is immediately evident in works that shimmer and swirl, affirm their authority like lightning bolts, or sparkle like the night sky. These are marks upon
the infinite, connecting people from different cultures and countries, and reminding us of our shared humanity.

Featuring contributions from Tina Baum, Anne Marie Brody, John Carty, Rachel Kent, Howard Morphy, JoAnne Northrup, Hetti Perkins, Cara Pinchbeck, Sarita Qunilivan, Elina Spilia, Will Stubbs and Suzette Wearne.