356 research outputs found
A Fragile Inheritance
No full textIn A Fragile Inheritance Saloni Mathur investigates the work of two seminal figures from the global South: the New Delhi-based critic and curator Geeta Kapur and contemporary multimedia artist Vivan Sundaram. Examining their written and visual works over the past fifty years, Mathur illuminates how her protagonists’ political and aesthetic commitments intersect and foreground uncertainty, difficulty, conflict, and contradiction. This book presents new understandings of the culture and politics of decolonization and the role of non-Western aesthetic avant-gardes within the discourses of contemporary art. Through skillful interpretation of Sundaram's and Kapur’s practices, Mathur demonstrates how received notions of mainstream art history may be investigated and subjected to creative redefinition. Her scholarly methodology offers an impassioned model of critical aesthetics and advances a radical understanding of art and politics in our time
A Fragile Inheritance
No full textIn A Fragile Inheritance Saloni Mathur investigates the work of two seminal figures from the global South: the New Delhi-based critic and curator Geeta Kapur and contemporary multimedia artist Vivan Sundaram. Examining their written and visual works over the past fifty years, Mathur illuminates how her protagonists’ political and aesthetic commitments intersect and foreground uncertainty, difficulty, conflict, and contradiction. This book presents new understandings of the culture and politics of decolonization and the role of non-Western aesthetic avant-gardes within the discourses of contemporary art. Through skillful interpretation of Sundaram's and Kapur’s practices, Mathur demonstrates how received notions of mainstream art history may be investigated and subjected to creative redefinition. Her scholarly methodology offers an impassioned model of critical aesthetics and advances a radical understanding of art and politics in our time
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A Fragile Inheritance: Radical Stakes in Contemporary Indian Art
No full textIn A Fragile Inheritance Saloni Mathur investigates the work of two seminal figures from the global South: the New Delhi-based critic and curator Geeta Kapur and contemporary multimedia artist Vivan Sundaram. Examining their written and visual works over the past fifty years, Mathur illuminates how her protagonists’ political and aesthetic commitments intersect and foreground uncertainty, difficulty, conflict, and contradiction. This book presents new understandings of the culture and politics of decolonization and the role of non-Western aesthetic avant-gardes within the discourses of contemporary art. Through skillful interpretation of Sundaram's and Kapur’s practices, Mathur demonstrates how received notions of mainstream art history may be investigated and subjected to creative redefinition. Her scholarly methodology offers an impassioned model of critical aesthetics and advances a radical understanding of art and politics in our time
Contemporary Art: World Currents in Transition Beyond Globalization
No full textAn edited transcript of a colloquium between Terry Smith, Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Pittsburgh, and Saloni Mathur, Associate Professor of the History of Art, University of California, Los Angeles, held at the Department of the History of Art and Architecture, University of Pittsburgh, on October 17, 2012.</jats:p
A Fragile Inheritance: Radical Stakes in Contemporary Indian Art
No full textIn A Fragile Inheritance Saloni Mathur investigates the work of two seminal figures from the global South: the New Delhi-based critic and curator Geeta Kapur and contemporary multimedia artist Vivan Sundaram. Examining their written and visual works over the past fifty years, Mathur illuminates how her protagonists’ political and aesthetic commitments intersect and foreground uncertainty, difficulty, conflict, and contradiction. This book presents new understandings of the culture and politics of decolonization and the role of non-Western aesthetic avant-gardes within the discourses of contemporary art. Through skillful interpretation of Sundaram's and Kapur’s practices, Mathur demonstrates how received notions of mainstream art history may be investigated and subjected to creative redefinition. Her scholarly methodology offers an impassioned model of critical aesthetics and advances a radical understanding of art and politics in our time
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Lines of Inquiry: Partition, Historiography and the Art of Zarina Hashmi
No full textThis paper examines Dividing Line (2001), a woodcut print by the contemporary Indian artist Zarina Hashmi, in relation to a history of Partition, the division of the Indian subcontinent in August 1947 that gave rise in part to the Islamic state of Pakistan. An abstracted rendering of the Indo-Pakistani border, Dividing Line, as this paper argues, not only presents an important pathway into the discussions around the place of Partition in the overall analysis of modern and contemporary South Asian art, but also raises significant questions around what the artist or the visual arts can uniquely contribute to the writing and understanding of Partition history in the present, a vexed and fragile historical terrain. This paper posits that Dividing Line can be understood as a historiographical threshold, a space upon which divergent and marginal histories of Partition converge. I argue, more specifically, that Zarina's use of cartography and her tendency towards abstraction in Dividing Line not only exhibits a unique capacity to both recognize and `map' the tensions and contradictions inherent to the historiography of Partition but also enables an endless dialectic around Partition `history' and `memory' through which fixed understandings of Partition can then be challenged and unsettled in powerful and productive ways
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Inventing the South: Regional Tourism After the Civil War
No full textThis dissertation argues that tourism exerted a transformative impact on the American South following the Civil War, functioning as a space of contestation where Southerners of different backgrounds contributed to the development of distinct iterations of the region and various ideas of Southern-ness. It explores how tourism played a pivotal role in modernizing parts of the Southern economy; shaping prevailing ideas of regional heritage, culture, and identity; spurring urbanization and creating unique place-images for Southern cities; effecting the forms and institutions of artistic production in the region; and exacerbating socio-economic disparities at the same time as providing opportunities for marginalized subjects to access and influence the public sphere. Focusing on the Southeastern states of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, this dissertation conducts in-depth research on four case studies from Charleston, Savannah, Jacksonville, and St. Augustine. Employing interdisciplinary methodologies from art history, the history of architecture, visual studies, and tourism studies, this dissertation investigates a diverse array of materials - from paintings and photographs to guidebooks, souvenirs, newspapers, travelogues, exhibitions, museums, and built and natural environments
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Reconsidering G�r�me: The Private Life of The Snake Charmer in The United States
No full textThis paper is a study of Jean-L�on G�r�me’s The Snake Charmer, 1879 in context with its yet examined life within the United States in the collection of the Clark family. This painting rose to prominence upon publication of Edward Said’s 1978 book Orientalism, where it was featured as its cover image. Since then, subsequent art historians have sutured the image to post-colonial methodologies, failing to acknowledge the material contexts with which it was collected and displayed. By examining these key contexts and players, new understandings about American orientalism and the role of race, class, gender and sexuality begin to emerge. Consequently, this paper seeks to unmask hidden readings of G�r�me’s artwork, while re-orienting questions about the painting away from its depicted subject matter towards the owner as subject. By examining the mode of its private display next to G�r�me’s Pollice Verso, 1872, and its relationship to Alfred Corning Clark, an alternative reading outside of existing art historical inquiry comes into view
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Art, Democracy, and the Culture of Dissent in 1950s Turkey
No full textArt, Democracy, and the Culture of Dissent in 1950s Turkey tracks the emergence of a modern Turkish art world of unprecedented size and dynamism between 1950 and 1960, a period during which Turkey first experimented with multi-party democracy. The scholarship on modern visual culture in the Middle East has often focused on the moment of nation-formation, emphasizing the determining role played by nationalist ideologies in shaping modern lifestyles in the new states that formed across the region in the twentieth century. In contrast, this dissertation analyzes what postcolonial scholarship has called the “moment of maneuver”: the transitional time when a young nation-state begins to rethink its nationalist past, while articulating a new vision of an international future through subscription to Western forms of liberal democracy. Cold War ideologies of democracy were a key reference for the members of the Turkish art world who inaugurated novel forms of institution-building, exhibition-making, and written critique. Drawing on Turkish, French, and English-language archives and interviews, the dissertation examines how artists and writers used exhibitions, painting, and art criticism to promote the democratic principles of popular participation, freedom of expression, and dissent. Throughout, it demonstrates that art was shaped by transnational intellectual currents, global organizations like UNESCO, and international exhibitions. This research troubles existing accounts’ portrayal of the West as a generative center from which modernist artistic currents and democratic political ideals radiated outwards, as if transmitted to a series of passive, “peripheral” receivers after World War II. Instead, it demonstrates that Western artistic and political ideologies were simply one component within a complex constellation of forces that shaped the development of modern art worlds across the globe. Furthermore, it argues that it is only by engaging with art worlds like Turkey’s—simultaneously in dialogue with the West and forged through processes of decolonization and nationalization—that we can fully understand the fundamental transformation that ideologies of modernism underwent in the post-war period
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Partition and the Historiography of Art in South Asia
No full textThis dissertation investigates the impact of the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 on the development of art, art institutions, and aesthetic discourse in India and Pakistan in the twentieth century. At the core of this study is the history of the Lahore Museum, whose collections of art and archaeology were divided between the emerging nations of India and Pakistan beginning in 1948. My analysis traces the contours of this division of movable art and heritage, against the broader spirit of madness of the period, to bring forth the crisis of dispossession that the Lahore collections endured in response to this unprecedented process of bifurcation. I argue that the fate of the Lahore collections in the twentieth century dramatizes the partition’s empirical and epistemological ramifications for art and art writing across South Asia both then and now. It exposes the forms of physical and ideological violence imposed on art and culture in the course of this process of decolonization and nation-building; it elucidates the pivotal role that museums have played in negotiating the ruptures of place, history, and identity concomitant to the experience of partition in South Asia; and, it unravels the dialectics of non-belonging and nationalization that entangle India and Pakistan into the present. I contend, moreover, that the case of the Lahore Museum stands as an allegory for the partition as an unfinished process of cultural fragmentation in South Asia. Methodologically, this dissertation combines extensive archival records, formal analysis of art objects, and histories of archaeology and museum spaces, with debates in Indian historiography and post-colonial criticism to weave a cross-border history of art and museums. It uproots the nationalist logic at the center of prevailing art historiography in South Asia by foregrounding repressed art histories of division, displacement, and dispossession. By writing on and across the Indo-Pakistani border, my analysis further emphasizes the continued ties between archives and museum collections in India and Pakistan, and seeks to intertwine these resources otherwise isolated by virulent national divides. In the process, this dissertation asserts the necessity of the visual arts to any writing of partition history in South Asia, and ultimately exposes how the experience of partition in South Asia has, through either memory or representation, perpetuated a pervasive ethos of division that continues to structure the art history of modernism in India and Pakistan today
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