A.3 The uneven ground of global art history
Thu Oct 27 / 9:30 – 10:30 / East Common Room, rm 1034, Hart House
chair /
- Anqi Li, OCAD University
This session examines the seemingly inclusive global lens in the emerging Global Art History. It is not rare for artists who thrive in their "local context" to go unnoticed on the "global" stage, while some artists from the same marginalized culture are celebrated globally. One explanation could be that the "global" artists' work is more accessible to its Western audience because their Post-Modernist approach can be readily linked and integrated into western art history's linear narrative. However, they are rarely discussed in their "local" context due to diverging political views and conceptual inscrutability. Inversely, as an art student, I recall my discomfort in applying "global" art frameworks to various "local" arts. This recurring local-global irreconcilability indicates the colonial attitude behind such a pseudo-global lens. Some proposed questions include: Is "Global Art History" western art history rebranded? How can we start a conversation outside the homogenizing western art history?
keywords: global art history, decolonization
A.3.1 Power dynamics in the global art world: navigating alternative systems
- Jonathan Adeyemi, Queen’s University Belfast
How has power relations configured the global art field, and how do marginalized artists achieve symbolic success? These are the questions I address in this paper through interviews and a survey of studies on the structure and dynamics of the global art world. Guided by postcolonial, feminist, and artistic field theories, the study highlights opinions such as Euro-American hegemony, the privileging of the white Western male artists, postcolonial exclusion, the increasing diversity and ascendancy of Asia. Despite the evidence of emergent diversity, equitable representation in the art world may be elusive since exclusion has been established as a strategy of the game. Therefore, I argue that marginalized artists require unorthodox systems for inceptive visibility and validation, which are fundamental to symbolic success in the artistic field. To substantiate this, I draw on the experiences of the Impressionists and Abstract Expressionists. I also tracked the rise to international prominence of two West African artists, El Anatsui and Njideka Akunyili-Crosby, through unconventional systems. Contrary to the notion that focused alternative platforms signify ghettoization, I construe them as necessities for excluded artists until the art world engenders equitable representation.
keywords: artistic field, marginalization, alternative systems, decolonization, Postcolonialism, symbolic success
Jonathan Adeyemi's PhD research used the case of Nigeria to examine the circumstances around the relative international under-representation of contemporary art from Africa. Jonathan's experience includes: Associate Lecturer, Arts Management and Cultural Policy, Queen’s University Belfast, United Kingdom (2021); recipient of the 2021 PhD Student Research Award of the Sociology of Arts Network, European Sociological Association (ESA); MA African Studies (Art history); MBA; BA (Hons.) Fine Arts; over 12 years’ experience in art education curriculum development and assessment, The West African Examinations Council (WAEC), Nigeria; director, Jue-Prayses Art Agency, United Kingdom; and founder/chairman, Artsider Northern Ireland (charity supporting outsider artists).
A.3.2 Disparate Modernities and Modern Arts: a case study of Understanding Korean art in the Global Art
Ji Eun (Camille) Sung, University of British Columbia
Although the discourse of global art history has struggled to discuss art from outside of Europe and North America, scholars often encounter a question of how to deliver, or translate, the “local” practitioners’ different comprehension of art in the words of global art history. My presentation investigates the limits of the established concepts and periodizations of the current discourse of global art history, particularly with a case study of Korean art: two Korean art critics’ periodizations of “modern Korean art” and “contemporary Korean art” in the 1970s, when they actively sought the place of Korean art in the global world. From opposite artistic and political stances, the two critics, Lee Yil and Kim Yun-su, proposed different periodizations of Korean art, based on disparate comprehensions of the meanings of "the modern,” “modern art,” and “contemporary art.” As firmly based on the representational and thus “modernist” view of art, Lee Yil argued that a series of abstract paintings are modŏn (modern) art of Korea. From this perspective, modern Korean art as equivalent to the Western concept appeared in the late 1950s. Kim Yun-su, who considered modŏn or kŭndaesŏng (modernity) as a nation’s autonomy and proximity to its reality, argued that abstract paintings cannot be modern art for Korea. These two different periodizations show the incompatibility of already-made Euro-North American frames, or what art historian Caira Kabanas called “monolingualism of the global,” in discussing the art of the “local,” and more importantly, the presence of autonomous frames that existed in the very sites of the art of the local. By presenting this example, I seek to open up a larger discussion of how to translate or show the art of the locals with their full specificities untamed.
keywords: modernity, contemporaneity, periodization, global art history, global modernisms, Korean art
Camille Sung is an art historian of modern and contemporary art with a focus on East Asia in its global relations. She has worked as an art critic and curator in Seoul, Korea, and is a member of the Korean feminist visual artist group No New Work. She has recently received her doctoral degree with her dissertation, which investigates object- and action-based art in postwar Korea, particularly within the larger context of modernization of the art, society, and nation of Korea and in relation to the global art currents at the time. In addition to the unconventional art media such as objects and actions and the issue of coloniality and post-coloniality, her broader research interests include queer and feminist art theory and practice, aesthetics and politics, and global art history.
