Martha Langford, Concordia University
Networking National Art Histories, or, [insert nationality] specialist seeks relationships with like-minded persons
A bitter joke, much repeated by second-wave Feminists, was that the recognition of women as cultural producers seemed strangely to coincide with the 'death of the author'. Something similar is occurring with the writing of national art histories in the post-colonial/post-Cold-War period: their relevance is being questioned, even deemed parochial, as part of the disciplinary turn toward global and world art histories. Both hegemonic history and counterhistory are in trouble, as Terry Smith reported in Art Bulletin (December 2010), adding that: "Globalization has recently reached the limits of its hegemonic ambitions yet remains powerful in many domains. The decolonized have yet to transform the world in their image". In the current economic crisis, with severe cultural and educational shrinkage, gains for counterhistories and other budding histories might seem unlikely, if not impossible. At this moment, Stuart Hall's Thatcher-era call for coalition-building (extended in Homi K. Bhabha's "act of negotiation") rebounds within a discipline extended by the digital humanities, but also defined by the digital economy - its creation of have- and have-not institutions.
This session wants to examine current approaches to local, regional, and national projects of archiving, writing, and mobilising art historical knowledge. Of particular interest are the backstories of projects that might be seen as doubly circumscribed or productively affiliated i.e. Irish diasporic art history or Canadian Aboriginal photographic history. The aim is not simply to assert the values of such projects, but to analyse their methodologies and participatory structures, consolidating our findings in an open-access publication written by an international coalition of national specialists.
Speaker. Association of Art Historians. 40th Anniversary Conference & Bookfair
AAH2014
40th Anniversary Conference & Bookfair
Royal College of Art
London, UK
April 10 - 12, 2014