chair / Noni Brynjolson, University of Indianapolis
How is the production and consumption of art connected to social class? How do artists, critics, curators and historians negotiate differences in cultural taste through their work? How do differences in taste reflect conflicting political ideologies, expressions of identity, and/or social inequalities? This panel takes its name from Pierre Bourdieu’s influential 1979 book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, a sociological study of French culture that explored its connections to social class, cultural capital and identity. The panel invites broader reflections on these themes – for example, many contemporary artists have engaged with issues related to class through approaches that consider its intersections with gender, race, sexuality, ability, age, and other aspects of identity. The theme of the panel also invites discussion on topics such as elitism, populism, and the democratization of culture; conflicts between indigenous and settler cultural values; and the global circulation of cultural tastes. The panel references Bourdieu’s text to investigate these and other themes, and to examine the ways in which art, cultural capital and social mobility are connected today.
Noni Brynjolson is an art historian who studies collaborative public art projects. Her research analyzes large-scale, long-term works in which artists address the politics of housing and neighborhood redevelopment through forms of cultural production and community organizing. Noni is a member of the editorial collective of FIELD: A Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism and her writing has appeared in FIELD as well as in Akimbo, Geist and Craft Journal, and several edited books. Noni completed her PhD in Art History, Theory & Criticism at the University of California, San Diego in 2019. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Indianapolis.
A.3.1 The Cosmopolitan Taste of Biennial Publics
Paloma Checa-Gismero, Swarthmore College
During the 1990s, the number of biennial exhibitions of art grew from five to over 200 around the planet, impacting aesthetic languages and the circulation of art objects, experts, and audiences. Parallel to the globalization of the contemporary art industry, the expansion of neoliberalism as dominant international ideology fostered the formation of a new global elite. Actors and decision makers in the new transnational economic, cultural, and social fields, this global elite have become adept participants in the global art biennial. My paper The cosmopolitan taste of biennial publics addresses the manifold value conversions active in the configuration of a global taste at the turn of the millennium. Departing from Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological analysis of taste, it aligns with current Marxist explorations of the emergence and consolidation of a global elite, to discuss the role that the biennial scene plays in this classed social cohesion. Drawing from rich empirical material, this paper highlights the role that desire for consumption of cultural difference played in the creation of a global taste, shaping the looks, discourses, and practices of global contemporary art and the extra-artistic objects that surround it.
Paloma Checa-Gismero is assistant professor of modern and contemporary art history at Swarthmore College. She holds a PhD in art history, theory, and criticism (UC San Diego, 2019) and an MFA in arts, production, and research (Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 2009). She has written widely about the translations that localized engaged art practices undertake in their access to contemporary international art circuits of art circulation. Currently, she is working on a book about the end of the millennium biennial boom.
A.3.2 Becoming Art Historians: Notes on Class Tendencies in Art Historical Practice
Hammam Aldouri
This paper aims to provide some provisional notes for a transdisciplinary investigation into class tendencies within professionalized art historical practice. My approach to this complex issue will be rather peculiar in that it will take as its point of departure an ostensibly inconsequential and peripheral academic trope often found in the acknowledgement pages of monographic art historical studies: the author’s expression of gratitude to their parents, especially for instilling in them an interest in art by taking them to art institutions when they were children. What do the narratives recounted in acknowledgement pages tell us about the mechanisms of art historical practice beyond the simple expression of gratitude? Who are the subjects of the cultural excursions recounted? What are the material and ideological conditions for such outings? To what degree do these excursions effect future art historical practice? How does early exposure to a certain cultural experience mediate the formation processes of professionalized art historical work? There has been much art historical scholarship on the historical import and structure of art institutions, but relatively little exploration of the way in which art museums are a determinate process in the formation of the subjects of academic practice. This paper seeks to rectify this absence. It claims that any investigation into the formation of art historical practice via early experiences of art museums must take into account the fundamental processes that constitute contemporary class tendencies: economic realities, ideological beliefs, the function of state apparatuses, the cultivation of “microphysical” technologies of class subjectivation, etc. Crucially, an investigation into issues of class in professional art historical practice must analyze the processual and temporal status of tendencies at the level of the form and content of the dominant academic products that give shape to professionalization and its social reproduction.
Hammam Aldouri holds a PhD in philosophy from the Center for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University (London) and a Helena Rubinstein Fellowship in Critical Studies, Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program (New York). His writings have appeared or are forthcoming in Radical Philosophy, Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, Nonsite, Cosmos and History, Journal of Art Historiography, Oxford Art Journal and Detroit Research.
Detail of Ica Textile from the Ica Valley, Peru (photo by author). The Ica society flourished on the south coast of modern-day Peru from approximately 1000-1600CE. The hyper-arid conditions of the Ica Valley allows for the pristine preservation of a wide variety of Ica art such as this colorful textile fragment.
A.3.3 Art and Distinction in the Ica Society: A Study of the Art of Early Colonial Peru (c. 1532-1600 CE)
Sara Morrisset, University of Cambridge
The phenomenon of artistic revival is often associated with the Italian Renaissance and modern nation-states, but less discussion has been dedicated to patterns of revival in the context of indigenous communities in the Andean region of South America. Based on archeological excavations in the lower Ica Valley on the Peruvian south coast, the Ica society appears to have engaged in the repeated practice of artistic revivals that drew inspiration from the styles and designs of the Ica’s ancestral past. The investigation of these artistic revivals and the specific contexts in which the art objects were found brings to light evidence of social inequality, conflicting political allegiances, and identity negotiation within the Ica society. For example, the Ica revival of the Early Colonial Period (c. 1532–1600 CE) involved the revival of ancestral designs as well as the deliberate rejection of artistic traditions associated with the Inca Empire that had conquered the Ica valley a century before. The period in which this Ica revival took place was also characterized by the arrival of the Spanish Conquistadors to the Andean region in 1532 CE. As such, this revival also reflects conflict and negotiation of identity between indigenous and settlers’ cultural values. Alongside Bourdieu’s work on the study of social class and identity, my work also incorporates Bourdieu’s related concept of habitus, whereby identities are shaped as people interact with the material world around them. Art production and changes in artistic practices in the Ica Valley during this dynamic period played a key role in generating habitus. Although this research focuses on Andean art of the 16th century, this study of identity, class, and social distinction of the past has cross-cultural and cross-temporal implications. Ultimately, my work analyzes how revivalist art expresses, reinforces, or challenges modes of identification.
Sara Morrisset: My research interests pertain to the art and architecture of the ancient Andes and my broader training is in the indigenous arts of the Americas. I have an interdisciplinary academic background in both the fields of art history and archeology. I have a BA in Art History as well as a BA in Anthropology from the University of California Los Angeles and an MPhil and PhD (submission date December 2020) from the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. I am currently a Gates Cambridge Scholar and my research has been supported by National Geographic through an Early Career Grant.
A.3.4 A Taste for the True North: Inuit Textiles in Southern Canada, 1950-70
Jennifer Burgess, Queen's University
The 1950s found Inuit women in the North adapting to forced relocation initiatives and the installment of new economies, mostly centred around art production. Women in Pangnirtung, Qamani’tuaq, and Kinngait made fibre arts like tapestries, appliqued wall-hangings, and printed fabrics, which enjoyed varying levels of success in southern art markets. These objects and the structures surrounding them produced economic pressures and opportunities simultaneously. Meanwhile, social, political, and economic shifts were taking place in those same southern markets, and southern Canada by extension. Inuit fibre arts performed a number of roles in post-war Canada: in the North they were a source of revenue, but in the South they acted as art objects that both indicated and informed the tastes and class of those who purchased them. As entities which fluctuate between the categories of craft and art, these fibre art objects are multivalent and complex. For this presentation, I use the textiles shipped from the North to southern markets as compasses to direct my exploration. Inuit art scholarship has considered the ways in which settler-Canadian culture has influenced Inuit art production, but I investigate the impact of Inuit art on a burgeoning post-war middle class, and especially the intelligentsia, keen to at once distance themselves from their working-class backgrounds and nostalgic for an imagined, shared past. I build upon work by Pierre Bourdieu (1979), Arjun Appadurai (1986), Alfred Gell (1998), Mary Louise Pratt (1991), and Howard Risatti (2007) to discover what roles these objects have played in the development of Canada’s middle class and middle class tastes, and more broadly, in nation-building projects for a country eager to develop an distinct identity and a place in an increasingly globalising, modern world.
Jennifer Burgess is a PhD candidate at Queen’s University in the Department of Art History and Art Conservation. She specialises in textile history, modernity and modernism. Previously, she explored the work of German modernist textile artist Anni Albers. Her current project investigates how Inuit women used textiles to navigate their roles in a shifting world from 1950 to 1970, and the modernities that shaped the North and post-war southern Canada. Her work has been published in Women Designers, Craftswomen, Architects and Engineers Between 1918 and 1945 (2017), Scan Contemporary Art Journal (2018) and .”ᖃᓪᓗᓈᖅᑕᐃᑦ ᓯᑯᓯᓛᕐᒥᑦ Printed Textiles from Kinngait Studios (2019). She is completing her dissertation in Montreal.
