Terms: CIHA Journal of Art History

Introduction

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Manifesto

2022-12-07T12:01:04+01:00

How do artists call for engagement and political relevance with regard to the “ecological imperative”? This contribution focuses on the revival of the Manifesto in contemporary art. This revival formalized an intertextual rhetoric of exclamation and polemic in service to a new ethical stand: a relational worldview. I argue that discourse analysis can identify a shift in format that ultimate touches upon the academic discourse as well.

Counter-Archive

2022-12-07T12:06:45+01:00

This paper discusses theories and artistic practices that challenge classical notions of the archive. Since the early 1980s, postcolonial scholars alerted us to the fact that gaps and omissions form the problematic basis of any archive. Thus, counter-perspectives to hegemonic discourse, as well as new archives, have been established. Although alternative narratives came to the fore, the resulting multiplication of the archive followed more or less the same paths as before: Policies of restricted access led to a hierarchy of visibility. Currently, artists, filmmakers, and activists demand a far more radical archival policy. These models, which I group under the term “counter-archives”, propose accessibility (a) as part of the Global North’s commitment to decolonizing its institutions and (b) as part of a “Citizen Science” agenda that unbalances hierarchies between experts and laypeople.

Negotiation

2022-12-07T12:08:30+01:00

The term negotiation is investigated in its shift towards positive connotations for Public Art, while much art theory in the second half of the twentieth century was focused on defining the solipsist existence of contemporary art. The long queue of Modernism pressed artists to impose their persona on the artworks, though with Public Art practitioners projecting their work decidedly beyond the art field and negotiation became the essence of strategies engaging with the audience and their context. The term poses a methodological challenge, implying a paradigm shift from Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of a “closed art field” to Howard Becker’s open concept of “cooperating art worlds”, thus addressing the passage from an art history focused on adamantine interpretations to one open to participatory dynamics engaging with environmental and societal issues. The ecologist projects by Gayle Chong Kwan and Sasha Vinci are presented as recent examples.

Taking the Floor

2022-12-07T12:14:13+01:00

The inherent dynamics and challenges of speaking up vary from one context to another. Depending on both cultural expectations and socio-political history, local voices have sometimes remained unheard on the global stage. Drawing on the example of the Canadian Inuit, this paper considers the strategies undertaken by artists and activists when it comes to “taking the floor.” It first focuses on the genealogies of struggle, both internal and transcultural, before examining the question of multivocalities. Finally, it addresses the role of local epistemes and suggests shifting perspectives so they can be part of a global art history.

Nonviolence

2022-12-07T12:16:26+01:00

Nonviolence resembles the aporetic structure and ambiguity of many works of art or our conceptualization of them. As a term of engagement in the arts, nonviolence is insightful as an operational and comparative concept: operational insofar as it unfolds performative strategies in the arts and comparative insofar as those strategies often resemble the aesthetics of political gestures, e.g., Mahatma Gandhis nonviolent approach to political engagement and change. This essay examines the potential of the term nonviolence in three short case studies—three performances by Akira Takayama (McDonald’s Radio University, 2017), Kandis Williams (Eurydice, Orpheus, and the Maenads, 2019) and Petr Pavlensky (Lightning, 2017).

Garbage Wall

2022-12-07T12:17:58+01:00

This article revises how garbage is used as a material for a contemporary art installation which unfolds a provocative enviro-political potential, and thus determines different modes of engagement. Such a transformation and stimulation which will be explained with a paradigmatic on-site installation of the Mexican artist Abraham Cruzvillegas who conceived and realized the “Garbage Wall” in the stony desert natural reserve within the territory of the National University in Mexico City (Reserva Ecológica del Pedregal de San Ángel, REPSA). Four itemizations of actors and key terms of engagement will be analyzed: first, the artist as the principal actor; second, the support of the university administration; third, the criticism and resistance of some scientists at the REPSA; and fourth, the discursive intermediation of art historians, guided by the contents and methods of environmental aesthetics. The selected case study shows how epistemic routines can be broken by transdisciplinary debates on contemporary eco-art.

Poetics

2022-12-07T12:20:49+01:00

Does engagement have a particular poetics? Every artist is committed in and through his work, if only because expressing oneself as an artist, and in a certain way, is always a choice. When an artist like Urs Fischer and institutions like the Venice Biennale, the Pinault - Bourse de Commerce collection (Paris) or the Luma Foundation (Arles), choose to engage the history of art through one of his key works, the Rape of the Sabine Women (1583) of Giambologna, by inscribing it in the poetic register of melancholy or tragedy (abduction, violence, rape), they raise the question of the writing of the history of art today, with the return of looted works, the colonial past, the relationships of violence. This article proposes to question the staging of art history as a tragedy played in front of the media or in front of the public in museums and exhibitions.

Baroque

2022-12-07T12:21:53+01:00

The spiritual torsion and material complexity so characteristic of Baroque aesthetics is something that extends to (or perhaps, better, issues from) the intension of the term itself. This much is evident in the sense that, since the twentieth century, various projects have proposed such notions as a medical-baroque, a postcolonial-baroque, and a digital-baroque. Beyond any given object of analysis, then, in this way the Baroque adduces the concepts by which any inquiry into objects might take place. As such, the Baroque can be said to be that which signals the ongoing relation of thought to the world, of ‘the inside’ to ‘the outside’ (while at the same time problematising the priority of either side over the other). Indeed, following certain post-Kantian readings of Leibnizian philosophy, the Baroque is to be regarded not so much as something to be understood but rather as a frenzied development of the understanding itself.

Fragment

2022-12-07T12:24:51+01:00

This text begins on the Altonaer Balkon overlooking the river Elbe and the busy container terminals that have taken over Hamburg’s lower network of islands. The standardisation of shipping containers in maritime transportation in the 1960s, ‘made the world smaller’ and increased global interconnectedness across the orb. Watching the world come to your door remains mysterious; containers are small units that belong to a larger entity, cells within a great piece of machinery. They are also opaque. Amongst the enforcers, emblems, and symptoms of planetary globalization, containers are partly rational logistics, partly inscrutable pits. To secure one’s footing on this ‘terra mobile’ requires site-specific excavations. Beneath the curtain of measurable grids, turning on the light in pitch dark corridors reveals particular topographies, a ‘theatre of fragments’ in the puzzle of exponential connectivity. To reflect on this pattern of fragments, this text takes as a starting point a series of artistic research projects co-developed by TETI group in recent years. TETI (Textures and Experiences of Trans-Industriality) aims o bring artists and researchers from different disciplines together, to engage with the transformations of the present in the context of accelerated globalisation and to consider the modes through which diversification can be imprinted in the machinery of homogenisation. The discussion evokes in turn the figures of the lighthouse, chantiers, transportements, and arrière-cuisines.

Disengagement

2022-12-07T12:28:50+01:00

Distinguished from representation, another kind of art of “Word-Writing” finds echoes in Paleolithic art (e.g. the Lascaux cave), which features a type of “drawings” of lines and dots, in addition to mimetic images and patterns as signs and symbols in art history. Not being fully explained so far, this kind of “drawings/traces” can be a research subject if approached from the perspective of shufa (Chinese traditional art of Word-Writing which highlights spontaneity/freedom of expressing moods or feelings and also refers to a kind of freehand brushwork correlating) and xieyi (Chinese traditional painting which becomes similar to a kind of “Word-Writing”).

Nostalgia

2022-12-07T12:36:21+01:00

This essay discusses the concept of nostalgia as a paradigm that comes into play in engaged art and particularly in contemporary artistic practices and theories that relate to the global margins. While international art platforms and the museum are increasingly calling for decolonization, inclusion and diversity, issues of remembrance, migration and exile, trauma and loss, fragmentation and restoration, often appear to be negotiated or viewed through the paradigm of nostalgia. Can nostalgia be used as a critical tool to address these problematics? Can the aesthetics of nostalgia activate change or even inspire debate? Or, on the contrary, does nostalgia fix and maintain difference when it comes to gender and racial issues, as well as their intersectionalities? Is there a clear demarcation between the perpetrators of colonial nostalgia and the inheritors of its legacies? This essay intends to address these questions and expand the reflection on nostalgia as an effective term for the field of global art history.

Collectivity

2022-12-07T12:38:09+01:00

Rethinking “collectivity” aims at carving a methodology and standpoint to deconstruct the rigid forms of collectivity and to build different possibilities of reconnection. The term “to de/re-collectivize” is coined by Hyperimage Group to interpret contemporary artistic practices that intervene in social realities. This essay focuses on three representative artists from Hyperimage’s exhibition project “Why Collectivity?” for the Guangzhou Image Triennial 2021: Kidlat Tahimik (the Philippines), Koki Tanaka (Japan), and Daniel G. Andújar (Spain). Their practices respond to the core concern “re-/de-collectivize art in action,” which seeks to examine the changing modes of collective memory and visual heritage as they are confronted by the ongoing expansion of global capitalist markets and competing (geo-) politics, as well as the ways in which the imagination of a utopic social order becomes communal (artistic) practices of ad-hoc assemblies and temporary collectivities.

Terminality

2022-12-07T12:40:54+01:00

The liminal term terminality serves as a conversation piece for issues to do with our escalating climate crisis; it is a term of engagement against our lingering collective dis-engagement from what many of us perceive as irrelevant to our profession. Terminality builds alliances between its nominal identity as a term, the temporal duration of a term and the arrival-and-departure characteristics of a terminal. Inevitably, however, the term also connotes end-state or terminal condition. The use-value of such a term is to summon a set of interlinked issues and propositions to stimulate action from and within the most anthropocentric discipline of all: art history. The essay discusses how art history could respond to the above on the level of the material entities of the artworks themselves (usually abbreviated as “art”) and the narrations and interconnections we produce to account for their identities, interdependencies and temporal trajectories (usually abbreviated as “history”).

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Front Matter

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Preface

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Contributor Biographies

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