Academic Sessions: Liverpool 2002
Race, Culture and Representation
Convenors:
Rasheed Araeen (Third Text, PO Box 3509, London NW6 3PQ, Tel:+44 0207 372 0826. thirdtext@kalapress.freeserve.co.uk)
The question of race has been fundamental to colonialism. Race was used to maintain a separation of coloniser and colonised which in turn enabled 'backwardness' to be attributed to the 'inferiority' of these races, and for the connection between races and cultures to be eternally fixed. The colonised could not rise above the specificity of their cultures to speak with ideas that addressed the whole of humanity. In contrast, European artists explored indigenous cultures, their work apparently transforming the 'primitive' into an expression of modern consciousness. The living other, however, remained persistently outside this modern consciousness. Post-colonial theories of difference discuss 'in-between space', a space defined by the enunciation of the cultural difference of the 'other'. This only differs from 19th century racial theories in that the race or the culture of the 'other' is now valorised and celebrated in the name of cultural diversity. The freedom that allowed artists like Picasso to go beyond the exhausted limits of European visual culture is thus refused the contemporary 'other' who must still represent him/herself through his or her race or cultural difference.
Writing White on Black: the Construction of Race and Identity in 19th- and 20th-century South African Art Writing
Lize van Robbroeck (University of Stellenbosch, South Africa)
The central premise of this paper is that an appropriative and totalising discourse of modernity underlies most art historical, art critical and anthropological writings dealing with 'black' art production in South Africa. It will be postulated that a modernist obsession with 'progress', 'science', 'rational/empirical enquiry', 'civilisation' and 'race' found overt expression in the practice of colonialism and that colonial perceptions of 'black' art and material culture informed, and continues to inform, academic discourse in this field. I will look at a selection of texts from the 19th and 20th centuries to explore the various theories of race, civilisation, culture and subjectivity that informed 'white' art writing on 'black' artistic production. I will demonstrate that, despite various shifts and transformations that occurred in accordance with historical events and changing intellectual and political contexts, these texts share common ontological grounds. I will explore the extent to which colonialist preconceptions continued to inform art writing in Apartheid South Africa. It will be postulated, inter alia, that the invention of an essential 'black' cultural identity in these writings constitutes an instance of 'Othering' that assists the reification of 'white' cultural identity as rational, individualistic, creative, benevolent and supreme.
The Most German Eye: Discussion over Rembrandt in Weimar Germany
Katherina Homickova (Central European University, Hungary)
Bode's publication on Rembrandt was perceived as one of the most influential studies on Rembrandt's art. By claiming that Rembrandt's art is purely Germanic and "an offspring of a purely German stem", he introduced a particular type of rhetoric using terms, such as ‘German völkisch art’ and ‘Germanness’. However, he acknowledges him being Dutch too. This seems to suggest that Bode viewed Germanness in abstract sense and as a way of self-expression regardless of the artist's nationality. Consequently, scholars with conservative-nationalist orientation tried to explain Rembrandt's interest in Jews as interest in the "other" whereas others argued for his interest in the use of artistic means to express the models' identity. When the Nazi came to power, the "Rembrandt battle" entered its final stage in the polemic, in which leading Nazi art historian Wilhelm Pinder questioned the appropriation of Rembrandt as the most German artist. In 1944, Dutch collaborators with the Nazi regime brought the Rembrandt's case to a sad finale in an unsuccessful attempt to promote a national Rembrandt Day. By then it was too late for recovering the idea of Rembrandt's Germanness, which was long time deserted by both German art historians and designers of Nazi cultural policy.
Gone Nationalist: Black US and English Artists in the Long 1960s and 1980s
Jacqueline Francis (The Center for Afro-American and African Studies, USA)
The path to black American cultural nationalist art of the late 1960s and early 1970s has not been hard to map. Trained African-American artists dared a white-dominated establishment with blunt representations of anti-racist politics and of personal trauma and rage. The best of these artists developed new practices and vocabularies, laying down a "black aesthetic". During those years, Afro-British artists also considered "racial art", but the 1980s witnessed cultural and political alliances among artists of color. These tenuous coalitions collapsed in the late 1980s and were supplanted by various patronage mechanisms meant to support legibly "black" or "Asian" art. Strong and complex painting was supplanted by less aggressive, single issue statements in mixed media and installation formats. This paper considers the intersections of the two black nationalisms and their respective consequences.
Negotiating Sherwill's Santhals: Artisanality, Ethnicity, and Ideological Vision during the 1850s
Daniel J. Rycroft (University of Sussex, England)
My paper debates the colonial visual representation of tribal India in the 1850s, and the consumption of such images in Britain via their narrativization in the Illustrated London News (ILN). I analyse the engravings of Captain Sherwill whose authorial presence, as E.I.Company revenue surveyor and army officer in the Rajmahal Hills (eastern India) in the 1850s, produced two divergent paradigms of ethnicized ‘Santhals’. The first, disseminated by the ILN in 1851, inscribes the discovery of Santhals and celebrates their usefulness in helping to tame and cultivate the Rajmahal Hills, and to build India's first railway. Sherwill's attention is drawn to Santhal artistry and commerciality. I analyse the consumption this paradigm in the context of Britishness and the Great Exhibition, and the ILN's publication of other sketches by Sherwill which celebrate Indian artisanality (e.g. Bengali 'ivory-carvers'). The second schema, disseminated by the ILN in 1855-56, constitutes a counter-insurgency ideology as enacted by Sherwill in his viewing and suppression of the 'Santhal Insurrection' or hul of 1855. Visual representations of Santhal identity, morality and material culture were dramatically transformed during this counter-insurgency, and were narrativized by the ILN vis-à-vis a loyal artisanality (e.g. Bengali ‘cotton-weavers’ at the Paris Universal Exhibition).
A South African 'Museum without Walls': Cape Town's In/visible Art Institutions
Julie L. McGee and Vuyile Cameron Voyiya (Bowdoin College, USA and South African National Gallery, South Africa)
For more than decade the South African National Gallery and other CapeTown art institutions have committed themselves to institutional reconstruction and change processes that necessarily address the systemic racism, classism, colonialism, and imperialism of the professional art world. This reconstruction is often recounted as a sequence of events, related primarily to exhibitions. As such these visible and public responses have been and continue to be scrutinized, critiqued, documented and theorized by art world professionals. Less visible but no less real is the institutionalized peripheral position of black art in Cape Town. Black art and its critical reception and history may not be perceived as a formal institution, but in large measure its marginalization is. Through the voices and histories of black artists in Cape Town, this paper examines this institutionalized arena, places it in the context of acknowledged institutions, and considers non-event centered restructuring relevant to both. Issues of concern include the relevance of recognizable institutional changes to the many cultures of contemporary art in Cape Town, in particular, black art; change agents and agencies of change; sufficiency of restructuring generated by cultures of institutional control; and the hindrance of change by labels such as township art.
Rasheed Araeen (Third Text, PO Box 3509, London NW6 3PQ, Tel:+44 0207 372 0826. thirdtext@kalapress.freeserve.co.uk)
The question of race has been fundamental to colonialism. Race was used to maintain a separation of coloniser and colonised which in turn enabled 'backwardness' to be attributed to the 'inferiority' of these races, and for the connection between races and cultures to be eternally fixed. The colonised could not rise above the specificity of their cultures to speak with ideas that addressed the whole of humanity. In contrast, European artists explored indigenous cultures, their work apparently transforming the 'primitive' into an expression of modern consciousness. The living other, however, remained persistently outside this modern consciousness. Post-colonial theories of difference discuss 'in-between space', a space defined by the enunciation of the cultural difference of the 'other'. This only differs from 19th century racial theories in that the race or the culture of the 'other' is now valorised and celebrated in the name of cultural diversity. The freedom that allowed artists like Picasso to go beyond the exhausted limits of European visual culture is thus refused the contemporary 'other' who must still represent him/herself through his or her race or cultural difference.
Writing White on Black: the Construction of Race and Identity in 19th- and 20th-century South African Art Writing
Lize van Robbroeck (University of Stellenbosch, South Africa)
The central premise of this paper is that an appropriative and totalising discourse of modernity underlies most art historical, art critical and anthropological writings dealing with 'black' art production in South Africa. It will be postulated that a modernist obsession with 'progress', 'science', 'rational/empirical enquiry', 'civilisation' and 'race' found overt expression in the practice of colonialism and that colonial perceptions of 'black' art and material culture informed, and continues to inform, academic discourse in this field. I will look at a selection of texts from the 19th and 20th centuries to explore the various theories of race, civilisation, culture and subjectivity that informed 'white' art writing on 'black' artistic production. I will demonstrate that, despite various shifts and transformations that occurred in accordance with historical events and changing intellectual and political contexts, these texts share common ontological grounds. I will explore the extent to which colonialist preconceptions continued to inform art writing in Apartheid South Africa. It will be postulated, inter alia, that the invention of an essential 'black' cultural identity in these writings constitutes an instance of 'Othering' that assists the reification of 'white' cultural identity as rational, individualistic, creative, benevolent and supreme.
The Most German Eye: Discussion over Rembrandt in Weimar Germany
Katherina Homickova (Central European University, Hungary)
Bode's publication on Rembrandt was perceived as one of the most influential studies on Rembrandt's art. By claiming that Rembrandt's art is purely Germanic and "an offspring of a purely German stem", he introduced a particular type of rhetoric using terms, such as ‘German völkisch art’ and ‘Germanness’. However, he acknowledges him being Dutch too. This seems to suggest that Bode viewed Germanness in abstract sense and as a way of self-expression regardless of the artist's nationality. Consequently, scholars with conservative-nationalist orientation tried to explain Rembrandt's interest in Jews as interest in the "other" whereas others argued for his interest in the use of artistic means to express the models' identity. When the Nazi came to power, the "Rembrandt battle" entered its final stage in the polemic, in which leading Nazi art historian Wilhelm Pinder questioned the appropriation of Rembrandt as the most German artist. In 1944, Dutch collaborators with the Nazi regime brought the Rembrandt's case to a sad finale in an unsuccessful attempt to promote a national Rembrandt Day. By then it was too late for recovering the idea of Rembrandt's Germanness, which was long time deserted by both German art historians and designers of Nazi cultural policy.
Gone Nationalist: Black US and English Artists in the Long 1960s and 1980s
Jacqueline Francis (The Center for Afro-American and African Studies, USA)
The path to black American cultural nationalist art of the late 1960s and early 1970s has not been hard to map. Trained African-American artists dared a white-dominated establishment with blunt representations of anti-racist politics and of personal trauma and rage. The best of these artists developed new practices and vocabularies, laying down a "black aesthetic". During those years, Afro-British artists also considered "racial art", but the 1980s witnessed cultural and political alliances among artists of color. These tenuous coalitions collapsed in the late 1980s and were supplanted by various patronage mechanisms meant to support legibly "black" or "Asian" art. Strong and complex painting was supplanted by less aggressive, single issue statements in mixed media and installation formats. This paper considers the intersections of the two black nationalisms and their respective consequences.
Negotiating Sherwill's Santhals: Artisanality, Ethnicity, and Ideological Vision during the 1850s
Daniel J. Rycroft (University of Sussex, England)
My paper debates the colonial visual representation of tribal India in the 1850s, and the consumption of such images in Britain via their narrativization in the Illustrated London News (ILN). I analyse the engravings of Captain Sherwill whose authorial presence, as E.I.Company revenue surveyor and army officer in the Rajmahal Hills (eastern India) in the 1850s, produced two divergent paradigms of ethnicized ‘Santhals’. The first, disseminated by the ILN in 1851, inscribes the discovery of Santhals and celebrates their usefulness in helping to tame and cultivate the Rajmahal Hills, and to build India's first railway. Sherwill's attention is drawn to Santhal artistry and commerciality. I analyse the consumption this paradigm in the context of Britishness and the Great Exhibition, and the ILN's publication of other sketches by Sherwill which celebrate Indian artisanality (e.g. Bengali 'ivory-carvers'). The second schema, disseminated by the ILN in 1855-56, constitutes a counter-insurgency ideology as enacted by Sherwill in his viewing and suppression of the 'Santhal Insurrection' or hul of 1855. Visual representations of Santhal identity, morality and material culture were dramatically transformed during this counter-insurgency, and were narrativized by the ILN vis-à-vis a loyal artisanality (e.g. Bengali ‘cotton-weavers’ at the Paris Universal Exhibition).
A South African 'Museum without Walls': Cape Town's In/visible Art Institutions
Julie L. McGee and Vuyile Cameron Voyiya (Bowdoin College, USA and South African National Gallery, South Africa)
For more than decade the South African National Gallery and other CapeTown art institutions have committed themselves to institutional reconstruction and change processes that necessarily address the systemic racism, classism, colonialism, and imperialism of the professional art world. This reconstruction is often recounted as a sequence of events, related primarily to exhibitions. As such these visible and public responses have been and continue to be scrutinized, critiqued, documented and theorized by art world professionals. Less visible but no less real is the institutionalized peripheral position of black art in Cape Town. Black art and its critical reception and history may not be perceived as a formal institution, but in large measure its marginalization is. Through the voices and histories of black artists in Cape Town, this paper examines this institutionalized arena, places it in the context of acknowledged institutions, and considers non-event centered restructuring relevant to both. Issues of concern include the relevance of recognizable institutional changes to the many cultures of contemporary art in Cape Town, in particular, black art; change agents and agencies of change; sufficiency of restructuring generated by cultures of institutional control; and the hindrance of change by labels such as township art.