A public lecture by Partha Mitter, Emeritus Professor of Art History, University of Sussex.
Modernism seems to have become an inclusive global concept in our time, causing anxiety among art historians about the end of art history. At international biennales and triennales, select artists from the periphery, namely, from central and eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas and Australasia, are offered as evidence that the contemporary art of the West, and the Rest of the World, now share certain common values. Rather than being universal, these values are in fact the product of the modernism of the western metropolitan centres and their special claims to universality. The roots go back to European expansion in the nineteenth century, and no study of non-western modernism can avoid the complex discourse of colonial power and authority, the tendency to consider all non-western modernisms as mere adjuncts of the dominant western modernism. In order to reimagine modernism for the 21st century we need to readjust our mindset. The lecture will suggest ways of challenging some of the favourite assumptions of art history such as the derivativeness of non-western art and offer some pointers to a non-hierarchical mode of cultural border crossings.
Modernism seems to have become an inclusive global concept in our time, causing anxiety among art historians about the end of art history. At international biennales and triennales, select artists from the periphery, namely, from central and eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas and Australasia, are offered as evidence that the contemporary art of the West, and the Rest of the World, now share certain common values. Rather than being universal, these values are in fact the product of the modernism of the western metropolitan centres and their special claims to universality. The roots go back to European expansion in the nineteenth century, and no study of non-western modernism can avoid the complex discourse of colonial power and authority, the tendency to consider all non-western modernisms as mere adjuncts of the dominant western modernism. In order to reimagine modernism for the 21st century we need to readjust our mindset. The lecture will suggest ways of challenging some of the favourite assumptions of art history such as the derivativeness of non-western art and offer some pointers to a non-hierarchical mode of cultural border crossings.