FROM NATIONS TO NETWORKS: AN ANALYSIS OF NORTH AMERICAN WORLD ART HISTORICAL DISCOURSE DURING THE TRANSCULTURAL TURN, AND THE RISE OF THE MUSEUM AS AGENT

by

NATHALIE N. HAGER

B.A., High Honours in Art History, Carleton University, 1997 M.A., Canadian Art History, Carleton University, 2000

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

in

THE COLLEGE OF GRADUATE STUDIES

(Interdisciplinary Studies)

THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA

(Okanagan)

February 2020

© Nathalie N. Hager 2020

The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the College of Graduate Studies for acceptance, a thesis/dissertation entitled:

FROM NATIONS TO NETWORKS: AN ANALYSIS OF NORTH AMERICAN WORLD ART HISTORICAL DISCOURSE DURING THE TRANSCULTURAL TURN, AND THE RISE OF THE MUSEUM AS AGENT submitted by Nathalie N. Hager in partial fulfillment of the requirements of

the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Dr. Hussein Keshani

Supervisor

Dr. Robert Belton

Supervisory Committee Member

Dr. Suzanne Gott

Supervisory Committee Member

Dr. Jessica Stites Mor

University Examiner

Dr. Claire Farago

External Examiner

Additional Committee Members include:

Carolyn MacHardy

Supervisory Committee Member

Dr. Franciso Peña

Supervisory Committee Member

ii Abstract

This dissertation offers an analysis of the emergent English-language discourse of World Art History in North America during the transcultural turn in art history. It inquiries into what World Art History is by examining how the proposal for World Art History is impacting twenty-first century North American art historical theory and scholarship, and assesses the relevance of World Art Historical discourse for scholars of global contemporary art. With a targeted focus on the museum as a site leading in the development of World Art Historical research principles—including an original Canadian case study examining the National Gallery of Canada’s biennial exhibition series—it also assesses whether, and to what degree, a turn to World Art History effectively responds to the criticism of persistent Eurocentrism in the discipline. I argue that World Art History encompasses a series of moves that elasticize and often collapse the political borders, cultural boundaries, and racializations that have long bound together the European nation-state as the (artificial) construct upon which Western art history as a discipline—and the project of Western self-hood itself—is built. Further, I argue that in its challenge to the nation-state, World Art History questions not only the discipline’s ideological roots but also its signature methodologies and theoretical frameworks to reimagine the current Western-facing disciplinary frame in ways that re-orient and widen it according to a new global perspective. While many critics view these widening moves as creating an epistemological break with the discipline of art history and as presenting a serious and substantial threat, I argue that World Art History can be reconciled with the discipline. World Art History, currently a set of research principles corresponding with notions of networks of connection and exchange, signals a paradigm shift within the discipline of art history: by shifting parts of the discipline away from national histories and area studies towards modes that foreground connection and exchange, World Art History frames new types of inquiries around the historical reality of the interconnectedness of art and its history, and establishes the fundamental basis for evaluating research findings generated from these newly-mapped and now visible connections.

iii

Lay Summary

More than twenty years ago, British art historian John Onians ignited a debate within the discipline of art history when he proposed that art history transform itself into World Art History—a new approach to the study of all the world’s art based not on organizing objects according to national lines and Euro-American standards, but on seeking out connections between objects and their makers across nations, world regions, and time. But many art historians believe that abandoning the discipline’s signature organizational system—key in forging national identities—will lead to its eventual demise. This dissertation argues that the emergence of World Art History signals a paradigm shift within the discipline of art history that can be seen as a reorientation of the field, and not as a break. It also argues that this shift is necessary in the age of globalization.

iv

Preface

This dissertation is an original and independent work by the author, Nathalie N. Hager. “Chapter Six: Exhibiting and Collecting a National and International Canada” draws upon some of the socio-historical framework outlined in my master’s thesis, “The Ideal and the Pragmatic: The National Gallery of Canada’s Biennial Exhibitions of Canadian Art, 1953–1968” (2000). Each of these instances have been clearly cited by footnotes. The three appendices—A.1 Apollo 11 Cave Stones, A.2 Anthropomorphic Stele, and A.3 Running Horned Woman—were written by me and published by https://Smarthistory.org on November 21, 2015, December 31, 2015, and April 30, 2016, respectively under a Creative Commons licence.

v

Table of Contents

Abstract ...... iii

Lay Summary ...... iv

Preface ...... v

Table of Contents ...... vi

Acknowledgements ...... x

Dedication ...... xi

Chapter One: Introduction ...... 1

Context: The Nation-State as Paradigm ...... 4

Overview ...... 16

Methodologies ...... 20

The Data Set ...... 29

Key Terminology ...... 32

Contributions to the Field ...... 51

PART ONE – THEORY AND SCHOLARSHIP ...... 55

Chapter Two: Debating World Art History ...... 56

The World Art History Debate ...... 61

Phase One: Onians’ Proposal ...... 62

Phase Two: Critical Engagement ...... 68

Phase Three: Theorizing and Refining Approaches ...... 79

Phase Four: Challenging the Nation-State Thesis ...... 86

World Art History as Theoretical Discourse ...... 93

vi

Art History, The Study of Art, and the History of Art ...... 95

World Art History or Global (Art) History? ...... 98

(Western) Art History as a Global Enterprise ...... 102

World Art History and the Global Contemporary ...... 107

Chapter Three: Practicing World Art History ...... 112

World Art History as Scholarly Discourse ...... 113

The Geography of Art ...... 115

Global versus Local ...... 117

Trade Networks ...... 124

Encounters ...... 132

Cultural Exchange ...... 134

Centre versus Periphery ...... 144

Circulations ...... 147

Networks of Connection and Exchange ...... 151

PART TWO – THE MUSEUM ...... 152

Chapter Four: Writing World Art History for the Public ...... 153

The Didactic Essay Genre ...... 158

The Smarthistory Didactic Essay Genre ...... 162

Three Narrative Experiments ...... 167

Engaging with a World Art Historical Approach ...... 174

Geographic and Temporal Networks as Context ...... 178

Connecting Objects, and Groups of Objects ...... 179

vii

Self-Reflection: Artwriting the World Art Historical Way ...... 180

Chapter Five: Displaying World Art History ...... 184

World Art History as Museological Discourse ...... 188

Islamic Art in a Globalized World: New York’s The Metropolitan Museum of Art ...... 190

Telling the Story of Art in Canada ...... 204

Decolonizing the North American Museum ...... 211

Integration and Dialogue: The National Gallery of Canada’s New Canadian and Indigenous Galleries ...... 220

The Museum as Transcultural Agent ...... 232

PART THREE –WORLD ART HISTORY AND THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF CANADA’S BIENNIAL EXHIBITIONS ...... 234

Chapter Six: Exhibiting and Collecting a National and International Canada ...... 235

The Biennial Exhibitions of Canadian Art (1953–1968) ...... 239

A Mid-Century Call to Develop National Arts and Culture ...... 243

Conception and Inception ...... 246

A Geographic Canada ...... 249

The Biennial is Born ...... 259

A Centred Canada ...... 261

Brokering a National Canada ...... 267

A New Direction ...... 269

An Avant-Garde Canada ...... 272

The Biennial Reaches ...... 279

A “French” Canada ...... 282

viii

The Biennial Opens ...... 290

A Connected Canada...... 294

Brokering an International Canada ...... 300

Chapter Seven: Collecting and Exhibiting a Global Canada ...... 305

Resurrecting the Biennial Exhibition Series ...... 307

From Biennial to “Biennale” ...... 310

It Is What It Is: Recent Acquisitions of New Canadian Art (2010) ...... 312

Builders: Canadian Biennial 2012 ...... 320

Shine a Light (2014) ...... 327

2017 Canadian Biennial ...... 337

The Shift from National Identity Towards Transcultural Identity ...... 349

Chapter Eight: Conclusion ...... 360

World Art History’s Theoretical Debates and Scholarly Practices ...... 361

World Art History and the Museum ...... 366

A World Art Historical Perspective on the National Gallery of Canada’s Canadian Biennial Exhibition Series...... 372

From Nations to Networks ...... 374

Bibliography ...... 376

Appendix A.1 Apollo 11 Cave Stones ...... 397

Appendix A.2 Anthropomorphic Stele ...... 403

Appendix A.3 Running Horned Woman ...... 408

ix

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the University of British Columbia Okanagan and the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies for their funding support, and their support generally, as a student working to balance work and home. I would like to acknowledge the members of my Committee—Robert Belton, Carolyn MacHardy, Suzanne Gott, and Francisco Peña—for their work and support in guiding me through some difficult terrain, and for sharing their conception of the discipline of art history. I have learned so much from you all and I am grateful. I would like to especially acknowledge my supervisor, Hussein Keshani, and thank him for my education. You have sorted me out, many times, with your ability to see the way clearly. I have learned the most from you and it is ongoing. I have never taken for granted the opportunities you have offered me. Lastly, I would like to acknowledge the support of my husband Rob. Quiet and stable, you have left me alone when I needed that, and have always believed in me. And for Max and Sam.

x

Dedication

For my boys. Everything that I value you have given me.

xi

Chapter One: Introduction

When, more than twenty years ago, British art historian John Onians called for the study of art to develop a “new framework” with “wider frames of time and space” that extended beyond Europe,1 he set in motion a new debate sighted on an old problem long troubling the discipline of art history. While the call to expand the discipline’s horizons was not new—for more than half a century scholars had struggled to defend an art history accused of being centred on and powered by “the West”2—Onians’ proposal set a new course for now the focus fell not on questions of scope and inclusion but rather on the relevance of

3 the Western-facing discipline of art history in the current age of globalization. Instead of seeking to redefine the scholarship of art history by “correcting” the canon and “repairing” its guiding master narrative, scholars in North America and around the world asked “Is art history global?”4 and wrestled with what it meant to study all the world’s art in a changed world—one no longer obligated to national borders and nationalist thinking. Debating the possibility—and even the very feasibility—of a singular discipline competent for the study of art worldwide that could effectively respond to endemic Eurocentrism, art historians revived the old term “world art history” and under its guise proposed (and critiqued) a number of

1 John Onians, “World Art Studies and the Need for a New Natural History of Art,” The Art Bulletin 78, no. 2 (1996): 206–9, doi: 10.2307/3046172.

2 The term is widely understood to include the North Atlantic—Europe and her former colonies in North America—yet it is an artificial construct and not entirely useful; see Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 5–6. See also: Kwame Anthony Appiah, “There is no such thing as western civilization,” The Guardian, November 9, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/09/western-civilisation-appiah-reith-lecture.

3 It was Hans Belting who framed this question: the “world wide competence of the Western type discipline of art history.” Hans Belting, “Contemporary Art as Global Art. A Critical Estimate,” in The Global Art World: Audiences, Markets, and Museums, ed. Hans Belting and Andrea Buddensieg (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2009), 5.

4 This question titles James Elkins’ edited volume, Is Art History Global? (New York: Routledge, 2007).

approaches that experimented with the viability, merit, and implications of extending the discipline’s reach. The result was a wide-ranging, and conceptually and methodologically complex discourse on the proposed transformation of art history into World Art History.

Does World Art History represent a meaningful response to a discipline long-ago organized in line with Euro-American terms of engagement? If so, how does World Art

History propose to address the critique of entrenched Eurocentrisms, and move current disciplinary theory and practice towards a wider and more inclusive art history? To date there are few, if any, studies that present a comprehensive analysis of the World Art History debate and its drivers, recognize the ongoing development of the principles underpinning World Art

Historical scholarly practice and their driving motivations, and offer a wider understanding of the theoretical and practical implications the turn to World Art History might carry for the discipline of art history. What is needed is a focused study that locates, isolates, and analyzes the ways in which scholars attentive to the emerging discourse on World Art History have, in both theory and in practice, responded to the call to widen and expand the discipline of art history.

This dissertation offers an analysis of the emergent English-language discourse of

World Art History in North America during the transcultural turn in art history. It inquiries into what World Art History is by examining how and in what ways the proposal for World

Art History is impacting twenty-first century North American art historical theory and scholarly practice and, with a targeted focus on the museum as a site leading in the development and advancement of World Art Historical research principles, assesses whether, and to what degree, a turn to World Art History effectively responds to the criticism of persistent Eurocentrism in the discipline.

2

Despite the rise of World Art History—indeed, scholarship informing the World Art

History debate has grown to be both multilingual and broad, and is implicated in a wide variety of art historical practices across the world—much of the core World Art Historical discourse has taken place within the Anglophone world.5 Within this broad context, it is the ways in which the English-language World Art History debate is impacting North America as a world region increasingly regarded as “an overseas annex of European civilization”6— specifically Canada and the United States where, following World War II, art history was institutionalized in the tradition of the nineteenth-century discipline—that emerges as a rich and compelling area for analysis. As a surrogate for and an extension of the established intellectual formation of Western art history as it was conceived in Europe, North American art historical theory and practice stands at the very forefront of the accusation of Eurocentric bias thrown into relief by Onians’ proposal to extend the discipline of art history beyond the

West.

5 See: Zainab Bahrani, Jaś Elsner, Wu Hung, Rosemary Joyce, and Jeremy Tanner, “Questions on “world art history”,” Perspective 2 (2014): 213, doi: 10.4000/perspective.5587. Many scholars active in the World Art History debate—most notably key critics who have built compelling cases against the proposal for a world art history—locate their art historical thinking within North America’s intellectual borders and disseminate their scholarship across its various institutions; some have even formulated their arguments taking North American case studies in example. Consider James Elkins’ seminal text Stories of Art: in line with Bahrani’s observation (and also that of her roundtable conversant Jaś Elsner) that in North America world art history began as a curricular initiative—to seek an alternative to the Eurocentric narrative of art’s history taught by specialists— Elkins’ critique focuses on the North American art history survey and its attendant textbooks. James Elkins, Stories of Art (New York: Routledge, 2002).

6 Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 51.

3

Context: The Nation-State as Paradigm

Art History…can be defined as a geopolitical thinking system. Founded in the nineteenth century, an era that witnessed the formation of nationalisms, the discipline served to enshrine that model of separating art into national cultures while also supplying fantasies of discrete sources in culture, language, religion, and art forms for the nations’ cultural narratives of their origins. The national is reflected in the layouts of our museums, the categories of our books, the shape of our curricula, where the art of the world is divided, regionally in the prenational eras and by national school on the modern eras. — Griselda Pollock, Whither Art History, 16.

While for some the term “world art history” evokes the older notion of a universalizing narrative, the recent deployment of world art history as an inclusive narrative—one capable of taking into account a “worldwide perspective” and of viewing art as a “worldwide phenomenon”7—is but one response to Onians’ call to move art history towards a more global approach. World Art History, as it is developing in the twenty-first century, encompasses a wide range of moves that elasticize and in many instances collapse the political borders, cultural boundaries, and racializations that have long bound together the

European nation-state as the (artificial) construct upon which Western art history as a discipline—and, in fact, the project of Western self-hood itself—is built. As France Nerlich puts it:

While the nineteenth century invented the myth of art as a separate activity, with its own time and space, art history, as a new discipline, aimed to build itself as an autonomous field of knowledge with a separated history. Converging with political agendas in a divided Europe, which provided the laboratory for this discipline, ‘art history’ took the helm of the old ‘artist history’, operating through new kinds of divisions. As the elaboration of nations was at the core of nineteenth-century Europe, art history became more than a tool in shaping the concepts of nation and race [to rather construct] its object as an expression of the genius of a nation, of the people

7 These key phrases repeat throughout two relevant John Onians publications: “World Art Studies and the Need for a New Natural History of Art;” and “World Art: Ways Forward, and a Way to Escape the ‘Autonomy of Culture’ Delusion,” World Art 1, no. 1 (2011): 125–34, doi: 10.1080/21500894.2011.538227.

4

(peuple) or of the race across history. The autonomy of art thus appears as the autonomy of this national or racial genius.8

From its earliest beginnings, the discipline art history—risen intertwined with the modern nation-state—linked art with identity and identity with race: first, as a historical and cultural model emerging from within a set of specific national political, ideological, social and cultural frames underpinning the continued existence of specific traditions of art-historical knowledge that are nationally determined; next, as a follower of anthropological models in its identification and even enforcement of the “homogeneity and the continuity of “foreign” peoples.”9 As Athena Leoussi phrased it in “The ethno-cultural roots of national art,” art history transformed “ethnicity in nationality—a state-sponsored status—and the nation into art.”10

Herein lies the nation-state as an envelope for an ethnic community and an ethnic nationalism that holds “ethnie”—the “core” of ethnicity where the “quartet” of “myths, memories, values, and symbols” underpin “characteristic forms or styles and genres of

8 France Nerlich, “The invention of the homogeneity and continuity of peoples. Or the essential ethnicization of art history,” Review of Eric Michaud’s “Les Invasions barbares. Une généologie de l’histoire de l’art,” Journal of Art Historiography 20 (2019): 2.

9 Eric Michaud, The Barbarian Invasions: A Genealogy of the History of Art (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2019), 12. Herein lie two distinct academic disciplines: one for dealing with the “art of the civilized” and the other with “artifacts of the primitive.” Claire Farago, “‘Race,’ Nation, and Art History,” in Idée nationale et architecture en Europe, XVIIIe–XXIe siècle, Volume 2 / Architecture and National Identities in Europe, 1830– 1919, Volume 2, ed. Jean-Yves Andrieux, Fabienne Chevalier, and Anja Kervanto Nevanlinna (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2019), 19.

10 Leoussi draws upon the work of Anthony D. Smith on nations, national identity, and one particular type of nationalism—cultural nationalism—to argue works of art (especially painting and sculpture) as visual symbols of the nation: “agents of national integration and regulation” wherein high art is transformed into national art. Athena S. Leoussi, “The ethno-cultural roots of national art,” Nations and Nationalism 10, no. 1/2 (2004), 157, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1354-5078.2004.00160.x. Smith notes despite a period of “pre-modern “preparation”,” it was eighteenth and nineteenth century Britain and France, and also America, that hosted the rise of modern nations made possible by ripe social, political, and cultural conditions. Anthony D. Smith, The Nation Made Real: Art and National Identity in Western Europe, 1600–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 5.

5 certain historical configurations of populations”11—at the heart of an ethno-national art history. It is an art history based upon (unchecked) assumptions about cultural identities tethered to a racist model and belonging to “old assimilationist paradigms,”12 and one without exclusion: even those scholars working on marginalized regions and areas have had to operate within an ethno-nationalist paradigm. It is an art history that Claire Farago, a leading critic of the national culture paradigm to which ethno-national art history adheres, argues demands serious reconsideration if we are to “overcome the Eurocentrisms of our inherited academic practices.”13 She observes:

Nineteenth-century ideas of a “nation” or “national spirit” continue to impose on our thinking unstable categories that conflate sixteenth-century notions about time, geography, and culture with the nineteenth-century politics of colonialism, race, and the nation-state.14

According to Farago, if we are to address the Eurocentrisms of an art history based on ethnocentric categories embedded within the frame of the nation-state, we must pay “critical attention” to the “broadly diffused epistemic underpinnings” of the discipline of art history

“assumed neutral by so many art historians.”15 As transculturalist scholar Matthew Rampley notes, despite the growth of art history and visual studies as “sites” of active “transnational intellectual exchange,” the national paradigm continues to dominate casting “a long shadow

11 Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford, UK, and Cambridge, USA: Blackwell Publishers, 1986), 15.

12 Claire Farago, ““Vision Itself Has Its History”: “Race,” Nation, and Renaissance Art History,” in Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America 1450 to 1650, ed. Claire Farago (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), 68.

13 Ibid., 67.

14 Ibid., 71.

15 Farago, ““Race,” Nation, and Art History,” 17.

6 over present-day practices.”16 Indeed, to this day, most scholarship on the history of architecture, art, and visual culture continues to be conducted within the framework of the nation state,17 and claims that global contemporary art production is no longer the West’s

“prerogative”18 have been met with stern resistance and even backlash. As our present quickly becomes our past, the question of fixed categories of culture and nations, and how these institutional histories should be “brought to bear”19 on the subject of all the world’s art and the global contemporary art worlds, becomes more pressing.

World Art History presents as an alternative to the long-standing ethno-nationalist model for art historical discovery, and its lingering traces and global repercussions. In its challenge to the nation-state as the keystone of Western social and political identity, World

Art History questions not only the discipline’s ideological roots but also the attendant signature methodologies and theoretical frameworks that support and reinforce the nation- state archetype in order to reimagine the current Western-facing disciplinary frame in ways that reorient and widen it according to a new global perspective. Across a number of practical experiments—including an accelerating movement in recent scholarly and curatorial practice

16 Matthew Rampley, “Introduction,” in Art History and Visual Studies in Europe: Transnational Discourses and National Frameworks, ed. Matthew Rampley, Thierry Lenain, Hubert Locher, Andrea Pinotti, Charlotte Schoell-Glass, and Kitty Zijlmans (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012), 1–2, 6. Rampley discusses the continued practice of what he (echoing James Elkins) calls “normal” art history—“everyday art-historical research…conducted within the paradigm of the modern nation state and national art” (Elkins cites iconography, social history, style analysis, and archeological reporting as examples)—as the impetus for why European scholars have focused on the transnational exchange of ideas. Ibid., 3.

17 Rampley cites this as the impetus for his edited volume on the transnational. Ibid., 2.

18 A term used by Claire Farago to describe Hans Belting’s often cited claim. See: Farago, “Cutting and Sharing the “Global Pie”: Why History Matters to Discussions of Contemporary “Global Art”,” On Curating 35 (December 2017), https://www.on-curating.org/issue-35-reader/cutting-and-sharing-the-global-pie-why-history- matters-to-discussions-of-contemporary-global-art.html#.Xfq0vehKg2w.

19 Ibid.

7 towards investigating the stories and spaces overlooked by the discipline’s focus on the

West, and also via attempts at writing (and displaying) a more inclusive, multicultural, and/or intercultural art history—World Art History argues against making the European nation-state and, by association, the many hegemonies of the West, the axis around which the discipline of art history revolves and, in parallel with shifts in related fields and disciplines, seeks to widen the discipline’s scope by taking the whole of the world across all of time as its geographic and temporal framework.20

However, many critics view these widening moves as creating a significant epistemological break with the discipline of art history as it was conceived in the nineteenth century, and as presenting a serious and substantial threat. Indeed, the contention that a turn to World Art History will lead to estrangement from the discipline proper—at best, to a balkanization of the former culturally-specific and historically-particular model of art historical discovery,21 and, at the most extreme, in its shift away from traditional Western approaches and methodologies, to the discipline’s very demise22—stands as World Art

History’s central and most damning criticism. Implied is a claim that warrants careful scrutiny: that the Anglo-European discipline of art history cannot be separated from its connection to the nineteenth-century rise of the nation-state while simultaneously

20 It is important to note that World Art History stands not alone on this front but is part of a broader transcultural turn in the study of culture, one that aims to address the criticism that Eurocentrism persists in disciplines dedicated to the study of culture generally and art history particularly.

21 This is a view represented by the arguments of British art historian Jaś Elsner in Bahrani et al., “Questions on “world art history”,” 212.

22 James Elkins, Review of “Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism by David Summers,” Art Bulletin 86, no. 2 (2004): 377, doi:10.2307/3177423. Elkins writes: “It is hard to imagine a world art history starting in other cultures...is it possible to avoid borrowing Western ways of thinking when for a long time all influential styles of art history writing have derived from Europe?”

8 maintaining its identity. What is at stake in the current debate—at present, a series of competing ideas and rational disagreements surrounding the meaning, merit, and implications of a turn to a wider, transcultural approach—is an understanding whether the proposed turn to World Art History represents so extensive a shift in the discipline’s matrix of key theories, methods, values, and assumptions that the resulting model is no longer considered art history.

Yet the proposal for World Art History as it is evolving in the current debate can be reconciled with the traditional discipline of art history, and the two historiographical approaches brought into alignment. I argue that the turn towards World Art History— currently a set of research principles corresponding with notions of networks of connection and exchange—signals a paradigm shift within the discipline of art history. By shifting parts of the art historical discipline away from national histories and area studies towards modes that foreground connection and exchange—by moving away from the centrality of the nation-state as guiding protocol and towards the primacy of networks as new disciplinary protocol—World Art History frames and directs new types of research inquiries around the historical reality of the interconnectedness of art and its history across world regions, and establishes the fundamental basis for evaluating research findings generated from these newly-mapped and now visible connections.

The notion of a paradigm shift—a phrase which, at its most general, signals a fundamental change in approach or underlying assumption—is adapted from Thomas Kuhn’s

1962 philosophy of science, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.23 To explain his theory

23 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1962). Kuhn’s theory replaced the prevailing view of heroic science: that scientific change or progress was achieved by

9 of scientific change (that it was not uniform, but rather an oscillation between normal science and revolutionary science), Kuhn evokes the notion of a paradigm which has since been articulated as an “accepted model or pattern,” a “grammatical” model of the “right way to do things,” a “standard which is being followed,” and, in a corrective to the notion of replication or imitation implied by the use of the term grammar, as “common law.”24 According to

Kuhn, whereas normal science develops in direct relation to the ability of an existing paradigm to solve problems, in revolutionary science, in order to solve the accumulation of a particularly troubling anomaly (one that undermines normal practice), a revision to an existing scientific belief is required that stands as a new “disciplinary matrix” or framework—in essence, as a new exemplar or as the further articulation of a model of puzzle-solving. According to Kuhn, a paradigm is what one uses when the explicit rules of theory are “not there.”25 Kuhn explains:

On the one hand, [paradigm] stands for the entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques and so on shared by the members of a given community. On the other, it denotes one sort of element in that constellation, the concrete puzzle-solutions which, employed as models or as examples, can replace explicit rules as a basis for the solution of the remaining puzzles of normal science.26

way of an accumulation of truths and, sometimes, the correction of past errors according to a set of rules— progress guaranteed by the scientific method. Alexander Bird, “Thomas Kuhn,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, accessed May 24, 2017, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2018/entries/thomas-kuhn.

24 Vasso Kindi and Theodore Arabatzis, eds., Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Revisited (London: Routledge, 2012), 93.

25 It is important to note that despite the characterization of paradigms as exemplars, paradigms are never “instances of rules;” instead, paradigms are “concrete individual cases which are irreplaceable and indispensable in the process of instruction and initiation and in the building and carrying out of the relevant practice.” Kindi et al., Kuhn’s The Structure, 94.

26 Clarifications to his theory made available through his 1969 Postscript published in the second edition of Structure; see: Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1970), 175.

10

Kuhn’s concept of a paradigm shift is useful in characterizing the discipline of art history during the transcultural turn: the earlier model of puzzle-solving under an ethno- nationalist model of art history—in which the nation-state and all its subsequent categorizations serve as the organizing protocol—shifts in favour of a new model of puzzle- solving that foregrounds the disciplinary protocol of networks of connection and exchange. It is important to note that in turning away from nations towards thinking in terms of networks, a World Art Historical paradigm targets neither the discipline’s historical understanding of the function, acquisition, or dispersal of knowledge, nor does it offer, retract, or change what is thought of as true knowledge; rather, it reorients the approach to searching for and locating original art historical knowledge, and introduces new ways of thinking about that knowledge.

In the words of Kuhn: “to desert the paradigm is to cease practicing the science it defines.”27

It does not, however, entail the end of the practice of science.

Seeing World Art History as a paradigm shift and not as a kind of epistemological break posited by some scholars, and locating it within the discipline of art history rather than apart from or in competition with it, prompts the question of the relationship between a

World Art Historical paradigm and that of ethno-national art history. A World Art Historical or networks paradigm is incommensurable with the current art historical model that places the nation-state as central to the shaping of disciplinary knowledge and, with it, the centrality of ethno-nationalist discourse to art historical thinking—the two paradigms rely upon a wholly separate disciplinary matrix. In other words, the two paradigms cannot readily be compared: the art history that is developed under the disciplinary matrix of a “flexible”

27 Kuhn, Structure, 34.

11 networks paradigm is different from the art history that is developed under the disciplinary matrix of a “fixed” nation-state paradigm. Further, there can be no common measure for assessing the different “theories” as each uses its own set of “rules” to judge the other: rules for describing what is to be observed and scrutinized, rules for the kinds of questions that ought to be asked and probed for answers, rules for how these questions are to be structured, and rules for how the results of art historical investigation should be interpreted.

Despite this incommensurability, the shift towards a World Art Historical paradigm does not mean that the discipline’s signature explanatory powers to engage with the measurable “quantitative” problems of art’s history are lost or diminished; rather, they are preserved and equally maintained: any viable shift in paradigm demands as much. What stands as the strength, and, in fact, the necessity, of a World Art Historical paradigm to the discipline of art history in the twenty-first century is its capacity to advance the discipline towards addressing the “qualitative” problem of the critique of Eurocentrism. By challenging long-standing beliefs and practices around political and cultural boundaries, World Art

History strikes at the centrality of Euro-centred thought to the foundations of the disciplinary field and effectively responds to the critique of Eurocentrism.

The argument that World Art History represents a shift in paradigm within the field of art history yet is incommensurate with the current model of art historical discovery is significant for it locates key World Art Historical principles and practices squarely within the traditional discipline while simultaneously establishing World Art History as qualitatively different from ethno-national art history, and as its rival. Combined with the notion that the turn to World Art History is a shift the discipline must make to ensure the continued relevance of art history in a globalized twenty-first century, this argument brings perspective

12 to a long-standing debate surrounding the greatest challenge currently facing the discipline of art history in an age of globalization: contrary to some critics it is not the “problem” of

World Art History that represents the discipline’s most “pressing” issue,28 nor even is it the critique of Eurocentrism; rather, the top problem facing the discipline of art is the establishment of a paradigm capable of effectively addressing the critique of Eurocentrism.

Herein lies the importance of the proposed shift to World Art History for the discipline of art history.

The argument that the disciplinary matrix developed under a World Art Historical paradigm—a paradigm that privileges networks of connection and exchange—produces a different art history that holds the promise to not only significantly change the way the field is conceptualized but also how it is researched and applied into practice—draws attention to a growing disconnect between how the field of art history is increasingly being theorized and practised and the discipline’s origins in European nation-state ideology (specifically, an art history premised on the project of constructing Western selfhood). Frustrated by the discipline’s failure to substantially address the long-standing critique of entrenched

Eurocentrisms and unbeholden to its ties to national art history, each day a burgeoning cohort of scholars reimagine their research in terms of wider transnational and even transcultural art histories rendered possible by the spatio-temporal extension of a World Art Historical paradigm and, in so doing, test the legitimacy of art history premised on the nation-state thesis; namely, that absent the frame of the European nation-state, the discipline lacks its defining ideological structure thus placing its coherence and very identity at risk for

28 James Elkins, “On David Summers’s Real Spaces,” in Is Art History Global?, ed. James Elkins (New York: Routledge, 2007), 41.

13 obscuration and inevitable obliteration. But any concept put to such significant historiographical use deserves rigorous evaluation. The argument that the art history developed under a World Art Historical paradigm holds the promise to significantly change the way the field is researched, practised, and taught necessitates a thorough understanding of the implications of ethno-national art history, including the intellectual context out of which it emerged, and an examination of the validity of the assumptions that underlie it and the evidence put forward on its behalf. This understanding is important for the historiography of art history.

The argument that based on its singular ability to address the long-standing problem of the critique of Eurocentrism a World Art Historical networks paradigm bears the unique ability to qualitatively improve the discipline advances the notion that art historical progress is measured by the discipline’s increased capacity to solve its most troublesome problems and not, as recent scholarship seems to imply, its success in developing a more inclusive theory of art. Indeed, a turn towards a World Art Historical paradigm holds the promise not of some kind of evolution towards an ideal theory of art historical inquiry—one that approximates improved inclusion of all non-Western cultures weighed in competition with the traditional paradigm—but the development of a paradigm capable of addressing the obstacles to such inclusion. By denying coherence of the idea that any art historical theory can be regarded as more or less successful in delivering a true formula for inclusion, and the corollary, that the implied purpose of art historical theory and practice is to strengthen the discipline’s ability to claim truth and inclusion in its methods and approaches, a century-old methodological and conceptual hunt for the best art historical approach is replaced by a new conception of art historical progress: that the discipline of art history advances only on its

14 ability to effectively raise and respond to wider, more robust questions about all the world’s art. This non-standard or alternative view of the development of art history is important for the philosophy of art history.

Taken together these arguments confirm the urgency and the importance of coming to terms with the meaning of World Art History, assessing the impact of its theory and practice on the North American context and beyond, testing the claim that the discipline and its

European roots are inextricably tied, and measuring the effectiveness of the application of its research principles in practice in responding to the critique of Eurocentrism. Yet, in order to make the leap to a World Art Historical paradigm, a strong commitment on the part of the discipline’s scholarly community is required to shift a shared constellation of theoretical beliefs, values, and assumptions away from the dominant protocol of seeking art historical discovery in accordance with European nation-state conceptual frames and to reconfigure the disciplinary matrix to accommodate the significant spatial and temporal extension required by World Art History’s networks of connection and exchange model. An alternative World

Art Historical account of the world’s art’s history requires that the full spatio-temporal conceptual web be lifted up, extended, and laid down again before the task of establishing a formal research tradition can begin, and consensus for such a massive undertaking is not easily gained. For many, accepting World Art History means accepting that the loss of the nation-state as a conceptual category; for others, the networks paradigm is perceived as such a threat that any embrace of World Art Historical principles is equated with a slow erosion of the discipline leading to its eventual demise.

While there are signs of a great defection of art historians from the nation-state paradigm, and while in many academic circles the failure of the current art historical model

15 to adequately address the problem of Eurocentrism has devolved into a disciplinary crisis, it is important to gain an understanding of whether, in the proposed shift from nations to networks and in the resulting scholarship, the discipline’s deeply-entrenched Western biases and the obstacle of national identity are overcome in any meaningful way, and, further, to what degree, if at all, the application of World Art Historical principles results in the obfuscation and even the loss of the discipline’s identity. As art history struggles for relevance in the current age of globalization—a world no longer beholden to the cultural and geographic borders of the nation-state—and as the fields of visual culture and cultural studies challenge art history’s dominance as the discipline competent for the study of the object, the debate surrounding World Art History and its various practices requires serious consideration. This is the focus of this dissertation.

Overview

The body of the dissertation is organized into three parts. Part One inquires into what

World Art History is by examining the theory and practice of World Art History in the North

American context. Part Two argues the North American museum as a discursive institution powerful in framing (and reframing) narratives capable of redirecting the twenty-first century discipline of art history away from nations towards wider, more robust networks of connection and exchange. Part Three evokes the case of Canada to examine enduring notions nation, nationality, and nationhood lying at the heart of ethno-national art history’s relentless adherence to the nation-state paradigm. It also considers the ways in which the lens of World

Art History might serve to challenge and unravel the meaning and relevance of national identity.

16

PART ONE – THEORY AND SCHOLARSHIP consists of two chapters, “Chapter

Two: Debating World Art History” and “Chapter Three: Practicing World Art History.”

Together these chapters present a discursive analysis of the first two sites of art historical knowledge-creation considered in this dissertation—theory and scholarship—in order to begin to isolate key World Art Historical research principles underpinning the discourse of

World Art History as it is impacting Canada and the United States. Chapter Two presents key literature in the World Art History debate by critically analyzing the central arguments advanced by key scholars and their critics, and by tracing the logic of their positions and reasoning, in order to reveal a series of interconnected discursive platforms—the various ways World Art History is being debated in the twenty-first century—that together form the theoretical discourse of World Art History. It also, as preface to Part Three’s Canadian case study—a close examination of two series of biennial exhibitions of contemporary Canadian art that, across a key period of post-war nation-building and after, worked tirelessly to construct national identity while simultaneously (and perhaps unwittingly) deconstructing it—explores the implications of World Art Historical discourse on the global contemporary.

Part One’s Chapter Three, an examination of select scholarship that aligns with World Art

Historical theory, assesses research outputs and academic publications that respond to the call for a World Art Historical approach in order to uncover a number of scholarly practices that apply key moves signature of the spatio-temporal extension demanded by the turn to

World Art History, and that represent the scholarly discourse of World Art History.

PART TWO – THE MUSEUM also consists of two chapters: “Chapter Four:

Writing World Art History for the Public” and “Chapter Five: Displaying World Art

History.” These chapters continue the discursive analysis begun in Part One with a focus on

17 the third and final institution of art historical knowledge-creation considered in this dissertation—the museum—where they, as a counter-maneuver to James Elkins’ use of the introductory survey to test the viability of a world history of art, evoke the museum as a site of art historical practice uniquely positioned to actively progress the development of World

Art Historical research principles, and, further, lead their advancement in the twenty-first century. Part Two investigates two of the museum’s most public-facing narrative discourses—first, the online didactic essay interpreting one or more objects exhibited in an online virtual collection, and second, the curatorial display of a collection of objects on view in a physical museum exhibition—in order to examine whether, as a discursive device, stories reimagined according to and in line with World Art Historical approaches hold the possibility for alternative narratives capable of overcoming the critique of persistent

Eurocentrism in the discipline.

With the theoretical and scholarly discourses of World Art History isolated in the previous chapters, Chapter Four tests the application of emerging research principles that guide the theoretical and scholarly World Art Historical approaches in the twenty-first century. By critically analyzing a series of narrative experiments that seek to write art history away from the nation-state towards rather a World Art Historical networks paradigm—by approaching each narrative experiment as a text to be read: as objects of analyses and critical self-reflection—this chapter considers how writing about objects in a World Art Historical way differs in approach and process, as well as outcome and effect, from other more traditional forms of art historical writing, and evaluates what role media generally, and the application of key digital practices specifically, play in the effective communication of the spatio-temporal extension that is the hallmark of a shift to World Art History. Turning to the

18 physical display of objects, Chapter Five explores cutting-edge twenty-first century museological “stories of art” that employ a World Art Historical approach by surveying select permanent museum and gallery exhibition (re)installations at both national and global levels in order to expose the patterns of curatorial practice that engage with a networks of connection and exchange paradigm, and that shape the museological discourse of World Art

History.

PART THREE – WORLD ART HISTORY AND THE NATIONAL GALLERY

OF CANADA’S BIENNIAL EXHIBITIONS traces the historical account of two series of exhibitions of Canadian art organized and hosted by the National Gallery of Canada across key junctures on Canadian arts and cultural history in order to examine shifting notions of identity powering World Art History’s challenge to the authority of the nation-state. It consists of two chapters. “Chapter Six: Exhibiting and Collecting a National and

International Canada” considers Canadian identity at the mid-century mark and following by introducing the original biennial series—initiated amid the optimism of post-war nationalism and known collectively as the Biennial Exhibitions of Canadian Art, a total of eight exhibitions in which the National Gallery exhibited contemporary Canadian art from across the country and in turn acquired from it—and tracing the series’ rise in popularity to its apex with the fifth, open exhibition (and the last of its kind),29 in order to report on the National

Gallery’s changing conception of Canadian artistic identity and to inform on its role in brokering shifting notions of Canadianness. “Chapter Seven: Collecting and Exhibiting a

Global Canada” considers Canadian identity at the beginning of the twenty-first century in a

29 The three remaining exhibitions in the series held in 1963, 1965, and 1968 were curated by an external expert, and so are excluded from any analysis of the institution’s brokerage of artists and their attendant Canadianness.

19 climate of sharp anti-nationalism by presenting the second series known collectively as the

Canadian Biennial—a resurrection of the spirit of the first biennial exhibition series but organized in reverse format, as an exhibition of a select acquisitions of Canadian contemporary art across a total of four exhibitions—and examining it against the backdrop of a global artworld in order to investigate the National Gallery’s careful negotiation of its collection and exhibition of Canadian art, and, alongside it, its confrontation of the complexities of the identity of the contemporary Canadian artist in the age of globalization.

Together, these chapters, in conjunction with Part Two’s examination of the museum as a site key in the advancement of World Art Historical research principles, consider the agency and the authority of the museum as a discursive institution powerful in at once legitimizing

(false) narratives of identity and place tethered to the nation-state paradigm, and simultaneously leading the turn toward more complex and nuanced deconstructions of identity made possible under a World Art Historical paradigm.

The concluding chapter, Chapter Eight, summarizes and discusses the dissertation’s findings, drawing conclusions and indicating some of the implications of the findings.

Methodologies

This dissertation arrives at its various arguments using multiple and overlapping methodologies. Parts One and Two use critical discourse analysis in order to study the forms in which World Art Historical discourse is being institutionalized across various social, cultural and historical contexts, and then locate and isolate the research principles powering it. Parts One and Two also use historiographical analysis combined with argument analysis and evaluation to recognize and critically analyse the various contexts and structures that

20 shape World Art History discourse as a unique genre of art history, and as a body of philosophical thought and a theory of knowledge. Methodologies shift in Part Two’s Chapter

Four: in order to test in application emerging World Art Historical research principles isolated in the previous chapters, Chapter Four uses critical self-reflection to analyze the methods, aims, procedures, and biases of writing art history in a World Art Historical way.

Methodologies shift again in Chapters Six and Seven of Part Three to use a broad historicist approach to examine an original case study that confronts the question of national identity.

As a form of critical discourse analysis, namely, the study of a “group of ideas or patterned way of thinking which can both be identified in textual and verbal communications and located in wider social structures,”30 this dissertation treats World Art Historical discourse as one that is indivisible and unfolding across three sites of art historical knowledge-creation—theory, scholarship, and the museum: the theoretical discourse informed by contributions to the World Art History debate; the scholarly discourse shaped by research outputs and academic publications seeking to practice World Art History; and the museological discourse carried by the presence and application of World Art Historical approaches in permanent museum and gallery exhibition (re)installations.

As a form of historiographical analysis—namely, “the study and analysis of historical methods of research, inquiry, inference, and presentation used by more-or-less contemporary

30 Deborah Lupton, “Discourse Analysis: A New Methodology for Understanding the Ideologies of Health and Illness,” Australian Journal of Public Health 16, no. 2 (1992): 145, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1753- 6405.1992.tb00043.x. See also: Christopher Eisenhart and Barbara Johnstone, “Discourse Analysis and Rhetorical Studies,” in Rhetoric in Detail: Discourse Analyses of Rhetorical Talk and Text (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: bepress, 2008), 3–21.

21 historians”31—this dissertation uses an argument analysis approach, one that has been employed often and successfully within the discipline of history as well as by many fields of art history.32 It seeks to go beyond identifying major World Art Historical thinkers and their arguments to establish the connections between them, and track changes in the way the topic of World Art History has been approached over time. Because World Art History is an emerging field in flux, and because such leading scholars as James Elkins and David Carrier

(among others) rely upon a variety of argumentation strategies in challenging the possibility and even desirability of World Art History, alternative methodologies which follow historicist methods (i.e.: intellectual history) fall short of providing acute analysis for they require temporal distance to prove effective. By using a more robust approach to historiography—namely, pairing it with argument analysis and evaluation—this dissertation is able to separate the formal logic of constructed systems of argumentation embedded in

World Art Historical theory and practice to evaluate real arguments that deal in topics of controversy, disputed facts, and (im)plausible hypotheses to consider ambiguities, see how

31 Daniel Little, “Philosophy of History,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, accessed May 11, 2015, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2017/entries/history/.

32 Many fields of art history, ranging from African art history to European art history, accept the legitimacy and importance of historiographical inquiry in the advancement of their fields. Ashgate’s The Journal of Art Historiography is dedicated to the study of “art historical scholarship, in its institutional and conceptual foundations.” “Mission Statement,” Journal of Art Historiography, accessed May 24, 2015, www.arthistoriography.wordpress.com/mission-statement. In 2012 it also published a special issue on Islamic Art Historiography that sought to “contribute to the ongoing discourse surrounding the creation and definition of the term “Islamic art history” as a scientific field within the wider discipline of art history.” “Islamic Art Historiography,” Journal of Art Historiography, 6 (2012), guest curated by Moya Carey and Margaret S. Graves, https://arthistoriography.wordpress.com/number-6-june-2012-2. Also in 2012: a call was published for a special issue devoted to African Art Historiography guest curated by Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie with the express purpose of updating the field’s previous analyses and locating African art’s contemporary discursive practice within current global discourses, and a number of publications resulted. Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie and John Peffer, “Is African Art History?,” Critical Interventions 1, no. 1 (2007): 1–4, doi: 10.1080/19301944.2007.10781312. Finally, there is Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture, devoted to the “analysis of the metahistory and critical framework of African art history.” Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture, accessed May 24, 2015, https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?show=aimsScope&journalCode=rcin20.

22 diverse positions fit together, and assess the credibility of various proponents and begin to explain their thinking.

Parts One and Two use the Toulmin model and the Walton approach. The Toulmin

Method, a structural model in which rhetorical arguments are read analytically, is used to determine the basis for agreement or disagreement, and for discovering the argumentative strategies an author employs (the how and why) that leads us to respond to the content of the argument the way we do (the how). It is a type of textual dissection that allows the reader to break an argument in its different parts (such as claim, reasons, and evidence) and then make judgements about how effectively the different parts participate in the overall whole of the argument.33 The second model, an analytic framework advanced by Douglas Walton, is less mechanical: it is a dialectical method of argument analysis, pragmatic and informal, and one that can be used to supplement Toulmin’s structural approach to focus on the main thrust of the argument in order to evaluate its logic either for acceptance or for criticism. The Walton model of argument analysis is used to interpret the World Art History debate at a level deeper and more nuanced than formal logic, and to search for informal fallacies; namely, to seek and uncover generally-accepted opinions and the premises they start from, and follow the arguments through to the location where contradiction is reasoned. Further, Walton’s

33 The six parts of an argument according to the Toulmin Method: 1) claim, or the main point of the argument (thesis), what the author is trying to say; 2) data are the evidence, opinions, reasoning, examples, and factual information that backs up the claim (support); 3) warrants are assumptions, general principles, conventions of specific disciplines, widely-held values, commonly accepted beliefs, and appeals to human motives (note: most warrants are not stated in an argument but represent an unspoken understanding between the author and the audience); 4) backing is the support for the warrant (audience specific); 5) rebuttals are used to establish what is wrong, invalid, or unacceptable about an argument and address in order to strengthen argument by carefully qualifying the effect of these weaknesses on the general strength of the original argument; and 6) qualifiers, or words throughout the argument that quantify the argument (note: qualifiers can be a single word used to modify an argument allowing it to fit a broader range of situations). Stephen Edelston Toulmin, The Uses of Argument (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1958), 94–145.

23 approach is philosophical; namely, it articulates the goals of the argument and identifies the context in which they appear. According to Walton, an argument is evaluated according to whether in any given case it is reasonable, or not, and whether the argument contributes to the goals of the type of discourse to which it is a part.34

Having isolated emerging World Art Historical research principles and established the theoretical and scholarly discourses of World Art History in Chapters Two and Three, discursive analysis pauses and methodologies shift to focus on the museum as a key site leading in the development and advancement of a World Art Historical approach. “Chapter

Four: Writing World Art History for the Public,” an analysis of a three narrative experiments authored by me for the Smarthistory enterprise (see Appendices A.1, A.2, and A.3), engages with critical self-reflection in order to answer how writing about objects in a World Art

Historical way differs in approach and process, as well as outcome and effect from other, more traditional forms of artwriting, and whether and in what ways the scholarship developed according to World Art Historical approaches yields an art history different from that produced under the traditional paradigm. That is to say, by applying into practice the research principles established by the theoretical and scholarly discourses of World Art

History, this chapter critically reflects on whether—in an art history written to de-emphasize the nation-state in favour of a World Art Historical networks paradigm—“world art” and

“art” historians are doing the same thing, and considers the collective and individual practical and conceptual challenges, as well as the opportunities, of writing art history in a World Art

34 There is a four-step method: identify the argument, identify the context of the dialogue, establish the burden of proof, and evaluate its criticisms. Douglas Walton, The New Dialectic: Conversational Contexts of Argument (Toronto: University of Toronto Press: 1988).

24

Historical way. Critical discourse analysis resumes in Chapter Five to now isolate the museological discourse of World Art History.

Methodologies shift once again in Part Three to now examine the museum as host site for an original case study. Prompted by the many research innovations evidenced in the museum research publications explored in my study of the scholarly discourse of World Art

History in Chapter Three, and having established the site of the museum as uniquely positioned to actively progress the development of World Art Historical research principles in my examination of two public-facing museological narrative discourses in Chapters Four and Five, Part Three focuses once again on the museum as a discursive institution. But rather than considering the fiction of the nation-state, it considers its corollary: the meaning and relevance of national identity. Employing a broad historicist approach, Part Three traces the chronology of two series of biennial exhibitions of Canadian art from which the National

Gallery of Canada identified and selected Canadian artists for exhibition in order to critically examine the institution’s strategic negotiation of the meaning and significance of Canadian national identity. Specifically, it offers a detailed analysis of the identity of artists who were selected for exhibition for the meaning, significance, and prevenience of the assignment of the label of Canadian and against the series’ evolving objectives by focusing on which artists were selected for exhibition and/or collected (and, in the second series, on which collected artists were exhibited), and analyzing the grounds and rationale(s) for each artist’s assignment as Canadian. This chapter probes beyond the historical narrative and an analysis of the various taxonomies used to qualify Canadianness to critically examine the notion of national identity as a construct that is artificial and frequently contraindicated, challenged, and eventually deconstructed by the very institution brokering its meaning through the

25 biennial exhibition series as an expression of group identity. Via an examination of the spaces in between identity formation—namely, the tension between direct markers of identity signalling Canadianness and such indirect markers of plurality signalled by complex networks of connection and exchange—Part Three debates the limits of national approaches and the merits of World Art Historical approaches.

One model for a comprehensive analysis of the question of the national affiliation of artists selected for a group identity exhibition is “Biennials with Borders?” by critic and contemporary art and culture specialist Chin-Tao Wu.35 In her essay, Wu argues the persistence of Eurocentrism against claims of a de-territorialized international biennial by studying the national statistics of artist participation in the international art festival documenta between 1968 and 2007; specifically, Wu maps the direction of cultural flows between artist birthplace and city of residence—where an artist came from and to where they chose to emigrate (if they did)—and tracks these shifts over time as “indices of enduring hierarchy” to find the global art world concentric and hierarchical, and the former power structure of the contemporary Western art world quietly replaced by “a new buzzword,

‘global’.”36 To make her case, Wu, cued by the marketing strategies of organizers in highlighting the number and range of countries represented as evidence of the biennial’s wide and diverse reach, undertakes a close-looking empirical study of the quantitative data underpinning claims for an international biennial:

The question of national affiliation is critical to what the biennial (or triennial, or quinquennial) has come to stand for since the 1980s. An increasingly popular institutional structure for the staging of large-scale exhibitions—some refer to ‘the

35 Wu is an Assistant Research Fellow at the Academia Sinica in Taiwan and an Honorary Research Fellow of University College London. Chin-Tao Wu, “Biennials without Borders?” New Left Review 57 (2009): 107–15.

36 Ibid., 114.

26

biennialization of the contemporary art world’—the biennial is generally understood as an international festival of contemporary art occurring once every two years. Here the operative words are, of course, ‘international’ and ‘festival’. On the first of these depends the second: without the national diversity of its participants, there could be no real celebration or festivity.37

So too with the National Gallery’s biennial exhibition series. Just as the question of national affiliation is critical to the institution of the international biennial in terms of the claimed range of its participants—that artists are from around the world—the question of national affiliation is critical to the institutional structure of the national biennial in terms of the claimed identity of its participants—that all artists are “Canadian.” As such, in order to evaluate the National Gallery’s claim for the biennial as a group identity exhibition of

“Canadian” artists and the show itself a celebration of “Canadianness,” a close-looking analysis of the data underpinning claims for Canadian national identity is required; namely, an examination of the marker used by the institution to assign artists as Canadian, and, over time, the type and degree of Canadianness (or not) that was privileged in the artists selected.

To power such an examination of identity and its subsequent deconstruction, Chapters

Six and Seven rely upon quantitative and qualitative data collected from the biographies of artists exhibited across both series of biennial exhibitions and compiled from a number of primary and secondary sources, as well as qualitative data detailing each biennial exhibition’s format and purpose collected from a number of secondary sources.38 In terms of

37 Ibid., 108.

38 All quantitative data was arranged into tables according to biennial exhibition year and organized by both works selected for exhibition and by unique artists exhibited. For both series of biennial exhibitions the data compiled includes statistics on the total number of unique artists (and unique artist groups) by exhibition and overall; artist gender, place of birth, current lives and works location, and nationality; works exhibited; and works acquired according to collecting area (when known). In the second series, the data compiled includes additional statistics on artists marked for identity over and above (or separate from) nationality; and exhibition catalogue authorship. The statistics summarizing each biennial year were then used to populate a comparative

27 primary sources, the National Gallery of Canada’s collections management database offers a rich set of data for mining: close to 80,000 records of artworks including summary biographical data on artists held in the national collection.39 A second database was accessed as an ancillary resource in order to complete information gaps in artist biographies: the

Artists in Canada database, powered by the Government of Canada and compiled and maintained by the National Gallery of Canada Library, is a union list assembled from documentation files from twenty-three libraries and art galleries across Canada and containing information for over 42,700 artists.40 In terms of secondary sources, published documents such as exhibition catalogues and annual reports formally record each biennial exhibition: the former serve to provide an official list of artists selected for exhibition

(including the titles of works and artist biographical information sourced from the National

Gallery collections management database), detailed current lives and works locations (key for the argument of the international and then global network of the contemporary Canadian artist), and include curatorial introductions addressing each exhibition’s mandate and also artist essays of various scope and focus (one per artist or artist group exhibited); the latter contain executive summaries, key accomplishments, acquisitions, turnover of National

Gallery staff, as well as detailed financial summaries of each fiscal year. An additional

table that not only shaped a profile for each individual exhibition but generated an overall profile for each series (note: across all data percentages were rounded to the nearest hundred; in narrative form statistics were rounded up). Each comparative table was then surveyed for trends, patterns, and anomalies, and, together with the qualitative data collected outlining each exhibition’s format and purpose, formed the basis Part Three’s analysis and discussion.

39 This dissertation relies upon web-accessible, public-facing collections management records only: I was unsuccessful in my attempts to request organized data for artists exhibited in the biennial exhibitions from the National Gallery of Canada. See the National Gallery collections management database: https://www.gallery.ca/collection/search-the-collection.

40 See the Artists in Canada database: https://app.pch.gc.ca/application/aac-aic/description-about.app?lang=en.

28 secondary source is represented by the body of press surrounding each biennial exhibition and captured in the National Gallery of Canada’s archives.

Inevitably, compiling the research data for this chapter required making a number of decisions. A critical evaluation of works of art falls beyond the scope of this dissertation: while the biographies of artists selected for exhibition are examined in detail, works of art selected are considered only tangentially in order to inform, when relevant, an artist’s biography.41 Similarly, no consideration was given to a work’s style, medium, technique, or school in the sense of offering an evaluative analysis of an artist’s personal style. Also falling outside of consideration was an analysis of the National Gallery of Canada’s full portfolio of acquisitions: focus remained, in the first series, only on those artists exhibited in a biennial exhibition (with tangential consideration of works acquired), and, in the second series, on artists acquired for the national collection that were exhibited.

The Data Set

The National Gallery of Canada collections management database contains records for (most) works held in the national collection including the name of the artist, the date and medium of the work, and a field entitled “Category” which denotes into which collection a work was acquired.42 From each work’s record linking to the title brings up that work’s full

41 For example, the topic or subject matter of an artist’s work might inform their biography—specifically their identity: Elaine Ling, who exhibited in the 2017 biennial, is Canadian by nationality but the subjects of her photographs selected—the landscape of Africa—signal a global orientation, and might find mention in the discussion analysis.

42 Each of the eleven categories feeds one of five collecting areas plus the Canadian Photography Institute (a separate entity) falling under the direction of one of seven National Gallery curatorial departments: Early Canadian Art and Later Canadian Art are collected into/by Canadian Art; Contemporary Canadian Art and Contemporary International Art are collected into/by Contemporary Art; Indigenous Art is collected into/by Indigenous Art; Canadian Photography Institute is collected into/by Canadian Photography Institute; European

29 record including the artist’s name and nationality; the work’s title, date, medium, materials, dimensions, and means and date of acquisition;43 and an accession number. Most records include an image of the work. Linking to the name of the artist brings up that artist’s full record including a (frequently-appearing) artist statement narrative, the date and location of the artist’s birth (and, where applicable, date and location of death), and the artist’s nationality; this latter cluster of information is referred to in Part Three as an artist’s summary biography. Both sets of full records are interconnected—work and artist—so a search for an artist yields all works collected by the National Gallery for that artist. The database is further searchable via such filters as artist, medium, category, and time.

But the National Gallery collections management database is often incomplete and/or reveals gaps. Since a majority of artists selected for exhibition in the first series of biennials did not have their submitted works acquired by the National Gallery, not all of these biennial-exhibited works appear in the database; however, because many of these artists had works acquired for the collection outside of the biennial series, these collected artists do appear in the database and so artist biographical information can be scraped from the database. For artists not appearing in the database, to locate and secure accurate and parallel biographical information that could populate such data captures as place or birth or nationality, a secondary search was required in the default Artists in Canada database. A

and American Painting, Sculpture, and Decorative Arts, and Historical Asian and Non-Western Art are collected into European, American and Asian Art by European Art; and Canadian Prints and Drawings, and European and American Prints and Drawing are collected into/by Prints and Drawings. One category (and one department) remains: the National Gallery of Canada Library and Archives; and the Library, Archives, and Research Fellowship Programs respectively. “Collecting Areas,” National Gallery of Canada, accessed May 24, 2017, https://www.gallery.ca/collection/collecting-areas. See also the National Gallery collections management database: https://www.gallery.ca/collection/search-the-collection.

43 The title of this field is labelled “Credit line” and indicates the means of acquisition (purchase, gift, or other) and the date of acquisition.

30 similar gap of information presented for artists in the second biennial series. For one or more reasons many works exhibited in the Canadian Biennial—by definition, works held in the national collection—do not appear in the collections management database. Likely the culprit is data entry backlog. One other possibility for a missing work is simply an incomplete collections record: if one field is missing (for example, the name of an artist), a search for a work by that field will yield no hits (yet a search via another field attached to the record, if known, will lead to the record).44 For all these reasons, a number of National Gallery collections management database records presenting as missing and/or incomplete required a certain amount of human thinking and some manipulation and/or estimation in order to yield the data necessary to populate data evenly for a full analysis.

In the first series, biographical data for an artist’s current lives and works location was not included in the exhibition catalogue—the information was simply not recorded as a stand-alone field in artist profiles in exhibition catalogues of the day (as they are now: a standard and even expected temporal capture of information signalling an artist’s current orbit of artistic engagement and key to the contemporary artist’s professional profile); rather, the information was (sometimes) included in passing as part of the catalogue essay for an artist’s work. When such information was explicitly stated (or satisfactorily inferred), the data was captured; when unclear or simply missing, the field was left blank. Similarly, with regard to such other missing biographical details as year and/or location of birth or death, and nationality, across both series of exhibitions, in cases where the National Gallery did not hold

44 Case in point: MIRIAD Island (2012) by Philippa Jones. A record of the work exists, but there is no artist assigned to it; hence, a search by the artist’s name, “Philippa Jones,” returns no hits. There is a ghost of an artist record, however, as the field for nationality populates with “British.” See the National Gallery collections management database: The National Gallery of Canada, “MYRIAD Island,” accessed January 12, 2017, https://www.gallery.ca/collection/artwork/miriad-island.

31 an artist in the collection and in instances where the record for said artist was incomplete in the (ancillary) Artists in Canada database, a tertiary search was conducted to attempt to complete the data set. In all cases, estimates for missing data were based on patterns and predictions, and were signalled as such: in the absence of reasonable certainty fields were left blank; when reasonable certainty existed (but could not be verifiably assured), the field was completed but a question mark was added.

For the second series only, two last data capture areas required some estimation: first, determining which collecting area had acquired an artwork exhibited in a biennial, and second, which curatorial department had authored an artist’s catalogue essay—fields key in supporting an understanding whether and in what ways an artist’s nationality (or nationalities) influenced the curatorial categorization of their work, and how these infrastructural systems corroborated or contradicted an artist’s identity. For works that appeared in the collections management database, the collecting area automatically populated; for works that did not, once again patterns and predictions were used to form estimates. In terms of which curatorial department was responsible for an artist’s essay, in some years where an author’s name (rather than a curatorial department) was listed, some tracing of each individual author to their home in a curatorial department was required.

Key Terminology

The following terms appear frequently in the literature surrounding the World Art

History debate, and in the ensuing scholarship. Because meanings vary depending on

32 scholarly context and the concepts sought for explanation,45 this section focuses on the interplay between practical meaning and the terminology used most often to capture it.

Although the list of terms below follows a certain logic of sequence in terms of building upon one to the next and in anticipating points of overlap and potential confusion, it is by no means comprehensive or authoritative. It is included herein for clarity and reference, and to ensure a common understanding of key concepts and terms used in the context of this dissertation.

The term world art signifies art from all ages, and of all possible provenances—

“every form or work that humanity created” as proof of individual creativity on a universal scale.46 World art is an old idea: it includes most non-Western cultures which had previously been omitted and which bring with them their own traditions and narratives. By way of the term world art, the “European invention” of art is revealed as a “European idea” and a

“social institution”: constructed in the eighteenth-century Age of Enlightenment, thought by

European and American thinkers to be universal, and taken for granted to this day carrying with it “an entire system of concepts, practices, and institutions.”47 The term art serves principally to divide—to segregate the category of “primitive art” as denoting the creativity of the peoples of Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific, and to split apart the categories of

“fine art” from “craft and popular arts” (and by association the “artist” from the “artisan”)—

45 Often quoted is this rationale: “concepts are never held or used in isolation, but in constellations which make up entire schemes or belief systems. These schemes or belief systems are theories.” James Farr, “Understanding Conceptual Change Politically,” in Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, ed. Terence Ball, James Farr, and Russell L. Hanson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 33.

46 Belting, “Contemporary Art as Global Art,” 4.

47 Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 3–6.

33 all to assign to the “fine arts” a “transcendent spiritual role of revealing higher truth or healing the soul.”48

The term world art studies is proposed as an envelope for world art, as a new, comprehensive approach to the study of art from around the world. The research scope and framework for World Art Studies seeks to respond to the current globalization of art and the need to globalize art history,49 and is both interdisciplinary (drawing on such fields as anthropology, evolutionary biology, and neuroscience) and global (including artistic expressions from all over the world and throughout the ages). While it shares many of the same topics and concerns as World Art History, it addresses these in an interdisciplinary way.50

In distinction, the term global art references “new” art since contemporary art (of the last twenty-five years). Global art is separate from modern art, and, in contrast to world art, was conceived as art. Similar to World Art History, global art has been prompted by the forces of contemporary globalization. Free in its flow of information and opinion, global art blurs borders between mainstream art, popular art, Western art, and ethnography. One contemporary art scholar, Hans Belting, argues that due to its loss of geographical, cultural,

48 Ibid., 6.

49 Doris Bachmann-Medick, Horst Carl, and Wolfgang Hallet, eds., Concepts for the Study of Culture (CSC). The Trans/National Study of Culture: A Translational Perspective (Berlin, DEU: Walter de Gruyter, 2014), 253.

50 In her work with World Art Studies, Kitty Zijlmans acknowledges the connection and the distinction: “World art studies shares the topics and concerns now being examined in the developing field of world art history, albeit world art studies tends to construe the investigation of its issues, when appropriate, in interdisciplinary terms.” Kitty Zijlmans and Wilfried van Damme, “Art History in a Global Frame: World Art Studies,” in Art History and Visual Studies in Europe: Transnational Discourses and National Frameworks, edited by Matthew Rampley, Thierry Lenain, Hubert Locher, Andrea Pinotti, Charlotte Schoell-Glass, and Kitty Zijlmans (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 222.

34 and religious focus there is a significant challenge in applying into accounts of global contemporary art any continuity to the Eurocentric view of art—namely, art history and its narrative.51 But this view is frequently and vehemently challenged, placing the meaning and implications of the World Art History debate, in particular its argument for the necessary

“scrutiny and reconceptualization” of art history’s institutional structures including its legacy of universalism, in a position of paramount importance to global contemporary scholarship where calls to incorporate history into accounts of global contemporary art are frequent.

It is important to differentiate between global art and the term global art history.

Global art history is not concerned with global art, only art history on a global scale: the global and transnational considerations of art history. Global art history draws many parallels with the field of global history, including a shared concern for exclusions and absences;52 it also shares the view that the notion that art and visual culture arises out of transnational networks. Global art history seeks to emphasize in its questions and approaches transcultural encounters and exchanges through the study of circulations—of materials, people, and ideas—for a historical materialist perspective. Stretching beyond the borders of national artistic identity, global art history is concerned with notions of cultural mixing, interchange, and decentring to view the world’s history of art as the result of a horizontal and “ceaseless

51 Belting, “Contemporary Art as Global Art,” 2. Also see: Hans Belting, “From World Art to Global Art: View on a New Panorama,” in The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds, edited by Hans Belting, Andrea Buddensieg, and Peter Weibel, 178–85 (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2017), 181–2.

52 See Maxine Berg, “Global History: Approaches and New Directions,” in Writing the History of the Global: Challenges for the Twenty-First Century, ed. Maxine Berg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 1–18; and Domenic Sachsenmaier, Global Perspectives on Global History: Theories and Approaches in a Connected World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

35 transformation and adaptation of ideas”53 rather than as the product of diffusion and influence by designated cultures advanced by the hierarchy-producing vertical centre- periphery paradigm. Global art history is often confused with non-Western art history specialists’ call for inclusiveness. Yet the reverse side of global art history is national art history premised on the separateness of cultures, and the limitations imposed by similar categorizations. This movement away from nationalism is a shared goal of World Art

History, transnationalism studies, and aspects of transcultural art history.54

The term transnational became important to the discipline of history in North

America in the early 1990s as a means of questioning and ending the fixation on national history, yet in the years following the term’s meaning earned no clear agreement other than by way of its negative definition: namely, as an alternative to still-dominant concentrations on a historiography structured around the nation.55 More successful than any conceptual debate in securing meaning, however, has been the application of empirical studies that as an

“angle or perspective” deal with transnationalism; namely, the “links and flows...of...people, ideas, products, processes and patterns that operate over, across, through,

53 Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Catherine Dossin, and Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, “Introduction: Reintroducing Circulations: Historiography and the Project of Global Art History,” in Circulations in the Global History of Art, Studies in Art Historiography (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), 1.

54 Ibid., 18.

55 The term is full of irony: the transnational “presumes that national borders are those to be transcended.” Christer Jönsson, “Capturing the Transnational: A Conceptual History,” in Transnational Actors in Global Governance: Patterns, Explanations and Implications, ed. Christer Jönsson and Jonas Tallberg (UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 22. Interestingly, the “national” as a frame and horizon for history writing was never hegemonic. Since the late 1880s the study of “interactions between civilizations” rejecting “the autonomy of national histories as a fiction” has driven large swathes of international scholarship arguably enhancing capacity “by adding the history of entanglements between countries to the checklist of national history writing.” Pierre- Yves Saunier, Transnational History: Theory and History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 2.

36 beyond, above, under or in-between polities and societies.”56 In its direct connection between the local and the supranational or transcontinental, transnational history defies the logic of a layered local, regional, and national history set against a global history.57

Transnationalism narrows the focus of global art history to consider primarily transfers culturels (cultural transfers),58 a term coined in the mid-1980s by historians Michel

Espagne,59 one of the founders of the transnational approach, and Michael Werner,60 a proponent of histoire croisée (or interconnected history, see below). The study of cultural transfers proposes replacing the focus of nineteenth-century comparative studies on the

“juxtaposition and comparison of two objects”—the search for differences and similarities— with the study of “forms of cultural mixing, interpenetration and hybridization.”61 That is to say, cultural exchange is not the circulation of objects and ideas as they “already are” but their “relentless reinterpretation, rethinking, and re-signification…. In the process of transfer

56 Akira Iriye and Pierre-Yves Saunier, quoted in Klaus Kiran Patel, “Transnational History,” in European History Online (EGO) (Mainz: Institute of European History (IEG), 2010), http://ieg-ego.eu/en/threads/theories- and-methods/transnational-history.

57 Ibid.

58 Manuela Rossini, “Cultural Transfer: An Introduction (with Michael Toggweiler),” Word and Text: A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics IV, no. 2 (2014): 6. The context was the “transfer of elements” of a “French National Culture” to Germany and its reception there during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann and Michael North, “Introduction,” in Artistic and Cultural Exchanges between Europe and Asia, 1400–1900: Rethinking Markets, Workshops and Collections, ed. Michael North (Germany: Ernst Moritz Arndt University Greifswald), 1.

59 Michel Espagne is a Germanist with the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, and the Director of Research for the National Centre for Social Research in France (CNRS). His focus of research is the history of translation and the circulation of knowledge between France and Germany in the late nineteenth century. “Michel Espagne,” École Normale Supérieure,last modified November 2012, accessed June 11, 2019, http://www.ens.fr/en/node/33.

60 Michael Werner is a professor of modern European cultural history at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales and research director at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique in Paris.

61 Discussing Michel Espagne’s lecture on May 26, 2014, on the subject of cultural transfer.“What is Cultural Transfer?,” European University at St. Petersburg last modified 2014, accessed May 26, 2014, https://eu.spb.ru/en/news/14094-what-is-cultural-transfer.

37 and migration from one cultural situation to another, any object falls into a new context and takes on a new meaning.”62 In place of such normative concepts as nation and country (and in order to combat normative notions of national entities and identities), Espagne proposes that cultural transfer takes place across fluid and in flux cultural zones—a conditional phrase that denotes that cultures do not exist in homogeneous form but are the result of mixing different cultural elements. Espagne’s research also rethinks the relationship between centre and periphery; namely, the notion of incoming and outgoing parties and the attendant relationships of influence and power to propose the plural, mutual, and circulatory nature of influence: even in the case of colonization, influence is always “a two-sided and creative process.”63

Also seeking to refuse the bounds of the nation is world art history. While the term was originally conceived in the nineteenth century to describe attempts at writing a universal history of art,64 drawing criticism the discipline ceded its concern to national or area studies and, despite periodic efforts to challenge this paradigm, has largely remained centred on the

62 Ibid.

63 Ibid.

64 It was in the late nineteenth century that art history made serious efforts to include in its canon works from select cultures from around the globe. However, these reductive additions resulted in sharp critiques to the discipline’s proper scholarly progress. In response theorists experimented with universalist assumptions, foretelling the end of the discipline (yet the discipline, and its critiques, continued). These are the precursors of the World Art Studies proposition—efforts that Onians, in response to the concerns of the contemporary world, redirected. One such example in the German-speaking tradition: Ulrich Pfisterer offers a detailed historiography of marginalized authors and texts dating back to the 1880s and 1890s which advanced a “world art history perspective and consequently a methodological revision of a traditional art history.” Ulrich Pfisterer, “Origins and Principles of World Art History—1900 (and 2000),” in World Art Studies: Exploring Concepts and Approaches, ed. Kitty Zijlmans and Wilfried van Damme (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2008); 69–89. British and American scholars as well cite precursors to the latest interest in a worldwide approach: John Onians credits Michael Baxandall and Ernst Gombrich; Whitney Davis names two since the 1960s: George Kubler’s typological and seriational order in the “history of things” as presented in The Shape of Time (1961), and Michel Foucault’s concept of the genealogy of the conjunction. There are as well examples of globalizing efforts in literature, music, philosophy, design, architecture, and history, among others.

38

Western nation-state and has developed many of its concepts and methodologies accordingly.

When John Onians proposed World Art Studies as a new broad discipline—a framework for studying objects from across the globe and across cultures and from all periods—he initiated a conceptual and methodological debate on what it meant to study all the world’s art in the twenty-first century. For many, the project of constructing a world history of art hinges on the question of the competence of World Art History, in the words of Hans Belting “as a discourse or as a narrative…a method suitable for discussing art regardless of its age or provenance.”65 One example is David Summers’ Real Spaces: World Art History and the

Rise of Western Modernism,66 an attempt at writing a world art history using universalizing concepts. It is important to note that James Elkins has criticised Summers’ narrative, as well as his own, Stories of Art, as succeeding only in extending Western art history across the globe.67

World Art History engages with such questions as “whose art history,” “from what perspectives,” and “with what historiographical traditions,” and thus shares many of the theoretical concerns of global art history. But unlike global art history, World Art History draws little from the discipline of history and remains in nascent development. While World

Art History is frequently tied to art history as an act of narrative, “to put the world into a

65 Belting, “Contemporary Art as Global Art,” 5.

66 David Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (New York: Phaidon, 2003).

67 Elkins argues that the “local practices” of art history that exist throughout the world are not recognizable as “Western art history;” rather, in his opinion, art history is global in the sense that Western art history is taught throughout the world. James Elkins, “Art History as a Global Discipline,” in Is Art History Global? ed. James Elkins (London: Routledge, 2007), 4, 22–23.

39 book,”68 it also operates at another level: in the scholarly venue of research, World Art

History often connotes a new spatial and methodological framework wherein the nation-state is problematized based on sophisticated understandings of a complex, globalized world. In this guise World Art History is often discussed as transcultural art history.

The term transcultural art history stands not only as a synonym for the research approach of World Art History, but, when conceptualized transculturally, also for global art history. As stand-alone terms transculturalism (also related to cosmopolitanism—a breaking down of cultural boundaries rather than their re-enforcement, as in the case of multiculturalism)69 and also transculturality (“a process of transformation that unfolds through extended contacts and relationships between cultures”70), either as concrete object for study or as analytical method, bring to the fore the notions of encounter, interaction, and movement, or the connectivity of people—all acute aspects of a relational approach to history-making. Joined with the discipline of art history, then, a transcultural history of art

“goes beyond the principle of additive extension [herein the concepts of “influence,”

“borrowing,” and “transfer,” are implicated] and looks instead at the transformatory processes that constitute art practice through cultural encounters and relationships, whose

68 The phrase is attributed to John Onians at the “Compression versus Expression: Containing and Explaining the World’s Art” conference held April 6–8, 2000.

69 In 1965 Fernando Ortiz (a Cuban essayist, anthropologist, ethnomusicologist and scholar of Afro-Cuban culture dedicated to exploring, recording, and understanding all aspects of indigenous Cuban culture) defined transculturalism as a “synthesis of two phases occurring simultaneously, one being a de-culturalization of the past with a métissage with the present. This new reinventing of the new common culture is therefore based on the meeting and the intermingling of the different peoples and cultures. In other words, one’s identity is not strictly one dimensional (the self) but is now defined and more importantly recognized in rapport with the other. In other words one’s identity is not singular but multiple.” Donald Cuccioletta, quoted in Lucia-Mihaela Grosu, “Multiculturalism or Transculturalism? Views on Cultural Diversity,” Synergy 8, no. 2 (2012): 108.

70 “Interview with Monica Juneja about Global Art History,” TRAFO—Blog for Transregional Research, last modified March 8, 2018, accessed May 22, 2018, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/567.

40 traces can be followed back to the beginnings of history.”71 Another expression of transcultural art history is “connected history;”72 also related is “entangled history” and

“histoire croisée.”73 Each of these terms is understood to overcome the limits of the nation inherent in the term transnational in which the movement of groups, goods, technology, and people is imagined across national borders only (for a comparative approach), to instead consider processes that are “made in different places but...are constructed in the movement between places.”74

Finding the term transfer inadequate for describing encounters between cultures— namely, the multi-directional and (sometimes) one-sided nature of the flow of information and objects—the term “cultural exchange” (singular, but better plural as “cultural exchanges”) was proposed although it too implied that a cultural good was “simply handed over” as if unchanged. Under the critiques of post-colonial studies, the term “cultural transfer” is designated Eurocentric as it signals reception as passive and not, as in fact, an active process. In its place the shared term entangled history was proposed wherein emphasis is placed on the “process of production of difference in a world of culturally,

71 Monica Juneja, “Global Art History and the Burden of Representation,” in Global Studies. Mapping Contemporary Art and Culture, ed. Hans Belting, Julia T. S. Binter, Peter Weibel, Andrea Buddensieg, and Jacob Birken (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2011), 281.

72 Consider the work of Sanjay Subrahmanyam to “direct attention to conjectures, circulations and vocabularies that plugged polities and societies into one another in early modern Eurasia.” Saunier, Transnational History, 178.

73 Dominic Sachsenmaier, “World History as Ecumenical History?” Journal of World History 18, no. 4 (2007): 465, 469, http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/stable/20079449.

74 One further limit of the term transnational as noted by Chris Bayly, a British historian specializing in British Imperial, Indian, and global history: before 1850 large parts of the world were organized not into nations but rather according to such constructs as empires, city-states, diasporas, and so on. C. A. Bayly, Sven Beckert, Matthew Connelly, Isabel Hofmeyr, Wendy Kozol, and Patricia Seed, “AHR Conversation: On Transnational History,” The American Historical Review 111, no. 5 (2006): 1442, doi: 10.1086/ahr.111.5.1441.

41 socially, and economically interconnected and interdependent spaces.”75 Also in response

Michael Werner, together with Bénédicte Zimmermann, developed the concept of histoire croisée76 for “the analysis of historical processes that interact simultaneously on the global and local level”—not bilateral transfers but “multilateral entanglements” within a spatial and temporal framework wherein an array of actors interact “on different levels, in different directions” across a number of dynamics including the political, the economic, the intellectual, the artistic, and always the human.77

All these terms signal the efforts of transcultural research: the development of more plural visions of the past that take into account alternative perspectives by including local historical contexts and approaches as strategies for overcoming the critique of

Eurocentrism.78 Whereas World Art History as a universalizing narrative is largely a concern of North American scholars, transcultural or World Art Historical research as a paradigm for exploring beyond national or cultural boundaries and away from the limits of Western art history is practised throughout the world.

The term ethnocultural art history was proposed as a field of study in the 1990s by scholars at Montreal’s Concordia University to reference a new pedagogical direction

75 The genealogy, subsequent evolution, and ongoing debate surrounding the use of these terms is discussed by Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann and Michael North as a preface to North’s edited volume wherein various essays seek to put into practice such entanglements. DaCosta Kaufmann et al., “Introduction,” Artistic and Cultural Exchanges, 1–2.

76 Developed at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales; see: Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, “Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity,” History and Theory 45, no. 1 (2006): 30–50, http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/stable/3590723.

77 DaCosta Kaufmann et al., “Introduction,” Artistic and Cultural Exchanges, 2.

78 In other words, not a dual but rather plural and mutual interpenetration of cultures. “What is Cultural Transfer?”

42 recently added to its curriculum: the concerns of ethnic and cultural identity in art and art history.79 Distinct from the study of non-Western art and culture (a curricular initiative of the

1980s that does not preclude a continuation of the traditional overall focus on teaching the

Western canon), ethnocultural art history is said to hold the potential to meet the demands for a curriculum that addresses the politics of “inclusion, recognition, and reclamation”80 by engaging with what Hans Belting has coined as global art histories:81 the “complexities and contradictions of non-Western, diasporic, and Indigenous art histories,” part of a “larger undertaking” to “make Western art history global” by “racing art history” in counter to the dominant Euro-American tradition and in a post-colonial framework into order to “world” art history.82

The term multiculturalism is also understood as cultural pluralism, the ideological foundation of several nation-states including Canada in the 1970s. Its foremost meaning is political: the management of cultural diversity of all minority ethnic and racial groups.83 The

79 Alice Ming Wai Jim, “Dealing with Chiastic Perspectives: Global Art Histories in Canada,” in Negotiations in a Vacant Lot, ed. Lynda Jessup, Erin Morton, and Kirsty Robertson (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2014), 73–74. The Ethnocultural Art Histories Research working group (EAHR, see http://ethnoculturalarts.org/), an organization Jim helped found but which is now entirely run by students (some eighty active members in the Montreal area from Concordia and beyond), facilitates opportunities for exchange and creation in the examination of and engagement with issues of ethnic and cultural representation within the visual arts in Canada.

80 But not always, according to Jim. Jim, who teaches at both the undergraduate and graduate levels and is the instructor of record for ARTH 398—“Issues in Ethnocultural Art History: Race, Citizenship & Art in Canada,” a special topics course she has taught several times as an examination of the politics of “representation, redress, and recognition,” notes that she remains mindful of the ways in which “such courses and those like it are no less ambivalently reductive and recuperative an academic measure on many cultural, socio-political, economic, and pedagogical levels. Despite the internal struggles to negotiate diverse terms of cultural engagement, the problem is that these types of courses more often than not emerge as a misfired offshoot of the more common academic offering of the non-Western art history course.” Ibid., 74.

81 Belting, “Contemporary Art as Global Art,” 5–7.

82 Jim, “Dealing with Chiastic Perspectives,” 75.

83 Grosu, “Multiculturalism or Transculturalism?,” 103.

43 term can also refer to the dynamic of competing ethnic and racial minority groups.84

Multiculturalism has been critiqued for emphasizing segregation and stressing divide, and isolating rather than integrating—a “cultural straightjacket, forcing those described as members of a minority cultural group into a regime of authenticity, denying them the chance to cross cultural borders, borrow cultural influences, define and redefine themselves.”85 The critique of multiculturalism challenges the assumption that cultures are static, unmoveable, and stereotypical.

Complementing these finite terms and concepts, at the centre of this dissertation are three interconnected worldview terms and their corollaries that require contextualization in order to make clear their meaning and reference in the context of any discussion exploring the discipline of art history during the transcultural turn. Each worldview term carries a complex historiography, herein highlighted and abbreviated as introduction to a larger body of scholarship, and as direction for related exploration and discovery.

The term Eurocentrism broadly implicates any gesture that carries the “assumption of European centrality in the human past.”86 Political economist Samir Amin has examined

84 Multiculturalism relies on its descriptive meaning when used in sociology to identify diverse racial and ethnic minorities who define themselves as different and wish to remain as such; its prescriptive meaning references an ideology of celebrating cultural diversity; in intergroup dynamics various minorities compete for support of their ethnic or racial difference. Ibid., 103–4.

85 Ibid., 107.

86 Lewis and Wigen, The Myth of Continents, 104. Another useful definition: “the privileging of European perspectives, historically or conceptually…. Eurocentrism assumes that there is a universal truth defined by its own worldview, which is articulated in the construction of a single canon, single timeline, and single philosophical centre to any global scholarship.” Aja M. Sherrard, “The Practice of Cartography: Imagining World Art Studies After Eurocentrism” (Master’s thesis, University of Montana, 2017), 14–15.

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Eurocentrism as a fabricated worldview, “ideological deformation,”87 and “mythic construct”88 offering damning critique of its historiographic use—namely, that by linking ancient Greece with modern Europe, the Eurocentric thinking that marks the “dominant capitalist culture”89 ignores the achievements and developments in the “intervening millennia”90—as well as other histories including, but not limited to, the dynamic role of the

Arab Islamic world91—to, by the twentieth century in both academic discourse and curricula, equate world history with European history.92 One example from popular culture widely troubled at the time as Eurocentric yet simultaneously (and very quickly) forgiven even to this day in the name of a “good story” exemplifies the profound ideological underpinnings of

Eurocentric thought. The much-watched—in over sixty countries—BBC production

Civilization (1969) narrated by British art historian Kenneth Clark “blithely” dismissed other cultures (not to mention women artists everywhere) to focus on the achievements of “western man,”93 yet even as the series was resurrected in 2018 under the globalized title

87 “Review of Eurocentrism: Modernity, Religion, and Democracy: A Critique of Eurocentrism and Culturalism,” Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine, accessed November 16, 2019, https://monthlyreview.org/product/eurocentrism/.

88 Samir Amin, Eurocentrism, translated by Russell Moore (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1989), 11.

89 Ibid., 104.

90 Lewis and Wigen, The Myth of Continents, 104.

91 Up until the Renaissance Europe belonged to a regional system that included Europeans, but also Arabs, Christians, and Muslims, and the greater part of Europe was located outside this system, on the periphery, with the eastern end of the Mediterranean basin as centre. But from the Renaissance on the capitalist world system shifted towards the Atlantic leaving the Mediterranean on the periphery. Amin, Eurocentrism, 10.

92 It was Hegel who influentially suggested that history travels East to West, but the notion was in use as early as Roman times under Virgil through the Middle Ages, to, by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, come to be widely accepted as true and accurate. Lewis and Wigen, The Myth of Continents, 106–9. Hegel’s claim that only Europe has “Spirit” in history is deeply entrenched in philosophic thought and is quite possibly irrevocable.

93 “Clark’s series wasn’t merely Eurocentric, it was even more narrowly focused than that. The filming took place in a mere 11 countries and Clark spent most of his screen time discussing the artistic and cultural

45

Civilizations—to mark as a “truly universal story of civilizations”—some reviewers continued to argue Europe as star and necessary backbone: “If you throw away the scaffolding of European art’s relentless drive to change and its amazing characters, how can you tell a compelling story? Civilizations has sacrificed story to space. What it gains in global richness it loses in narrative drive.”94 Art critic Gerardo Mosquera is quick to dispel the notion that Eurocentrism is simply myopic ethnocentrism: “[Eurocentrism] refers not only to the ethnocentrism exercised by a specific culture, but to the often forgotten fact that the world-wide hegemony of that culture has imposed its ethnocentrism as a universal value, and has persuaded us of it for a long time.”95

Standing alongside the historical and post-colonial critiques of Samir Amin and others are scholars who offer equally compelling critiques of Eurocentrism on geographic grounds. Martin Lewis and Kären Wigen argue that considerations of Europe as “a unique geographic unit, not only as a continent on par with Asia or Africa but as an archetype and first among continents,”96 falsely present it as the most progressive product of a

achievements of Italy and France. Germany perhaps came in third, Britain didn’t get much of a look in…the complete omission of Spanish art was regarded…as a national insult…. However, the rest of the world—Asia, Africa, Oceania and South and Central America—was conspicuously absent. Clark was criticised for this even at the time.” David Olusoga, “Opinion: Civilization revisited,” The Guardian, February 4, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/04/civilisation-revisited-kenneth-clark-television- landmark-series-art.

94 Jonathan Jones, “BBC looks beyond the west to retell the story of civilization,” The Guardian, February 24, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2018/feb/24/bbc-civilisations-1969-civilisation-tv-global-art- history.

95 Gerardo Mosquera, “The Marco Polo Syndrome: Some Problems Around Art and Eurocentrism,” in The Biennial Reader, ed. Elena Filipovic, Marieke van Hal, and Solveig Øvstebø (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2010), 417. Mosquera continues: “Eurocentrism is the only ethnocentrism universalized through actual world- wide domination by a metaculture, and based on a traumatic transformation of the world through economic, social, and political processes centred on one small part of it.”

96 Lewis and Wigen, The Myth of Continents, 104.

46

“metaphysical order of history.”97 While the continental system eventually divided from the initial three-continent scheme to a system of seven,98 the “near-universal acceptance of the

European view of the divisions of the world”—notably evident by the “continuing invisibility of the “world island” encompassing Europe, Asia, and Africa”99 as guarantee of

Europe’s uniqueness and distinctiveness—has advanced largely unchallenged into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

It is important to note that Eurocentrism does not hold the status of theory—not even social theory that, as Amin puts it, integrates “various elements into a global and coherent vision of society and history”100—and nor is it the “sum of the prejudices, errors, and blunders of Westerners with respect to other peoples.”101 Rather, the doctrine of

Eurocentrism is a system and “a prejudice that distorts social theories”102 and is but one dimension a larger cultural phenomenon. The neutral position of world historical approach is an ecumenical or cosmopolitan perspective.

97 “Review of Eurocentrism.”

98 North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Oceania (Australis plus New Zealand), Africa, and Antarctica.

99 Lewis and Wigen, The Myth of Continents, 33. If continents are defined as more or less discrete masses of land then Asia and Europe must be considered as one, as Eurasia. Yet this is not the case even among geographers who argue that European civilization is “distinctive enough to warrant extended consideration as a continent.” As Lewis and Wigen summarize: “Viewing Europe and Asia as parts of a single continent would have been far more geographically accurate, but it would have failed to grant Europe the priority that Europeans and their descendants overseas believed it deserved. By positioning a continent division between Europe and Asia, Western scholars were able to reinforce the notion of a cultural dichotomy…that was essential to modern Europe’s identity as a civilization.” Ibid., 36.

100 Amin, Eurocentrism, 90.

101 Ibid., 104.

102 Ibid., 90.

47

It is by way of the “product” of “Eurocentrism vision” that the dominant culture invented the rhetoric of “the eternal West” or simply “the West”103 presented in national media, popular literature, and academic discourse as exceptional and “unique since the moment of its origin.”104 Despite few doubts of its legitimacy as a conceptual category—it is often described as an “artificial conception” and, like Eurocentrism itself, a “mythic construct”105—“the West” (frequently contrasted with “the rest” and the fable of its enduring binary counterpart, “the East”) has persisted in the imagination of scholars and historians for centuries,106 and continues to this day albeit under arbitrary and unstable boundaries and temporalities depending on an author’s seizure for argument to, like

Eurocentrism, rely on a metageographical frame to exist (with deep implications for the metahistorical107). Corollaries include the notion of Western civilization itself and one of the most popular received ideas: the accepted version of Western (art) history narrated as “a progression from Ancient Greece to Rome to feudal Christian Europe to capitalist

Europe.”108 Each of these constructs slights the balance of the history of the non-Western

103 Ibid., 89–90. The four constituent elements of the Eurocentric construct of ‘the West’ are: 1) a relocation of Ancient Greece from the Orient to now arbitrarily belong to Europe; 2) the persistence of a “mark of racism” underpinning “European cultural unity;” 3) the privilege of Christianity as binding European cultural unity; and 4) a constructed vision of the Near East also along racist lines.

104 Ibid.

105 Ibid., 89, 11.

106 The seven metageographical versions of ‘the West’ are enveloped by three “distinct referents”: 1) Latin Christendom derived from the Western Roman Empire, specifically ancient Greece; 2) a supra-European West comprising European settler colonies across the Atlantic; and 3) as a proxy for much of the developed world (here ‘the East’ is replaced by the Third World). Lewis and Wigen, The Myth of Continents, 50–52.

107 Equating ‘the West’ with modernity has had devastating implications for histories of the non-Western world to damningly reveal the construct of ‘the West’ as the “colonizer’s model of the world,” a phrase coined by J. M. Blaut to describe a process of “geographical diffusionism” where progress is seen as flowing out of Europe as centre towards the peripheries. Ibid., 7.

108 Amin, Eurocentrism, 90.

48 world (yet another fickle and unstable construct) manifesting most notably in academic curriculum where, despite the efforts and progresses of the discipline of history, in many institutions departments remain doggedly concerned with Europe and North America relegating courses on all other world regions to segregated regional or area studies and their programs.109

The nation-state is an equally abstract and arbitrary construct (equally) guilty of essentializing complexity and, like the myth of continents (and its imaginary descendants, each arguing for essential nature),110 concealing more than it reveals. As a derivative of the nation—“the historically-evolved, ethno-cultural community”111 famously described by

Benedict Anderson as “imagined”112—the myth of a homogenized nation-state, “the assumption that cultural identities (nations) coincide with politically-sovereign entities

(states) to create a series of internally-unified and essentially equal units,”113 replicates many of the fallacies of continental thinking: namely, seeking uniformity in diversity and concealing “internal difference” via a dubious and “debilitating” geographical unit.114 If the

109 Lewis and Wigen, The Myth of Continents, 110.

110 The basic building blocks of a global geography. As metageographical units of analysis the standard seven- part continental scheme is the largest scaled in the historical imagination followed by the three-worlds model (the political-economy categories of First, Second, and Third Worlds) linked to the North/South divide (where the North is considered developed and the South less so, even if some countries in the South are assigned First World status: consider Australia and New Zealand). Ibid., 1–7.

111 Leoussi, “The ethno-cultural roots of national art,” 143.

112 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, second edition (London, England, and New York: Verso, 2006), 48–50. The nation is a socially constructed or “imagined” community: a cohesive and coherent unit based on shared cultural and/or historical criteria that works to establish who belongs and who does not.

113 Lewis and Wigen, The Myth of Continents, 8.

114 Ibid., 8, 7. Anthony D. Smith offers working definition of nation as description (the specific features of a historical type of human community that is “autonomous, unified, and distinctive” at a particular time and place) with the cautious caveat that it is a highly-abstract concept: “a named and self-defined human community

49

East versus West division typically references the cultural and the political (the West reason and progress, and the East spirituality and stagnation115), then the nation-state, an essential tool for analyzing political affairs, when applied to patterns of human culture or even economics in an attempt to present each nation-state as unified and distinct, stretches beyond any usefulness. Further, the continental myth and the nation-state myth, when left unchecked and unexamined, combine “together…work to consistently and unduly exaggerate the importance of Europe” swelling the “Western” portions of the globe and shrinking others as

“visual propaganda for Eurocentrism.”116

One antidote to the artificial nesting of geographical units shaped under the myths of the continents, the East-West and North-South divisions, and the nation-state as oversimplifications of a global geography is a consideration of world regions: “multicountry agglomerations, defined not by their supposed physical separation from one another (as are continents), but rather (in theory) on the basis of important historical and cultural bonds.”117

Yet the scheme of world regions can only function when able to avoid reifying the nation- state by, when necessary and as needed, violating its borders, and by adhering to difference and immensurability while resisting the urge to replace overgeneralized units of analysis with yet another (artificial) construct.118

whose members cultivate shared myths, memories, symbols values, and traditions, reside in and identify with an historic homeland, create and disseminate a distinctive public culture, and observe shared customs and common laws.” Anthony D. Smith, The Nation Made Real: Art and National Identity in Western Europe, 1600–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 6–7.

115 Lewis and Wigen, The Myth of Continents, 6.

116 Ibid., 10.

117 Ibid., 13.

118 Ibid., 13–14.

50

Contributions to the Field

This dissertation contributes to the discipline of art history a new and original discursive analysis of the emergent discourse of World Art History across three key sites of art historical knowledge-creation impacting the North American context during the transcultural turn—theory, scholarship, and museums—in order to consider the sum of

World Art Historical theory and practice as part of a larger project to mount a multi- disciplinary response to the critique of Eurocentrism. Chapter Two’s consideration of the

World Art History debate is the only study that brings together, via the rigorous and systematic methodology of argument analysis and evaluation, a synoptic analysis of the theoretical positions of the (arguably) four core World Art History scholars and their many colleagues and critics weighing arguments together and against one another in a coherent and productive understanding of the underpinning intellectual assumptions of the proposed turn from art history into World Art History in order to clarify and contextualize the language being used to articulate each critic’s thinking, and extract meaning. Chapter Three’s examination of the recent turn in scholarship production away from nations towards a new paradigm of networks of connection and exchange not only documents the rise of World Art

Historical approaches in cutting-edge research and publication, but it is the first study to locate and define a number of dominant scholarly practices that can be identified as powering the growing body of art historical knowledge understood to be transcultural in orientation, and evaluate their effectiveness against claims for anti-Eurocentric strategies. Lastly, the focus of Chapters Four and Five on the institution of the museum as site for the development of World Art Historical research principles advances the museum as an innovative model for the theoretical advancement of the turn towards World Art History. To date no study has focused on the museum as a discursive institution active in the (re)consideration of ethno-

51 national art history’s stubborn adherence to the nation-state both in narrative and in museological display.

To the nascent field of World Art History, this dissertation contributes a proposed model for its relationship with the discipline of art history; namely, as neither a competitor nor an heir but rather as a shift in paradigm. While there has been no dearth of publications seeking to come to terms with the proposed turn to World Art History, no study seeks to bridge the (perceived) divide between models and hypothesize a relationship that could address the increasing fragmentation and even erosion of the discipline’s authority to study the world’s creativity as an endeavour linked and connected across time and space. By presenting World Art History as representing a significant shift in paradigmatic thinking within the discipline and the resulting art history produced as different from that produced under ethno-national art history’s adherence to the nation-state, this study moves to recognize the discipline’s ability and, further, its capacity, to self-correct and affirm its competency in the twenty-first century. It also advances a viable challenge to moves that increasingly seek to declare its obsolescence.

To the field of art historical writing, this dissertation makes an original contribution of knowledge to the online museum or gallery didactic essay, a museological output unique in its ability to put into effective application World Art Historical research principles.

Specifically, this dissertation offers a model for how a series of theoretical principles might be applied in practice by making ideas tangible, showing how something might work in practice, and examining limitations. To date no scholarship exists that examines the narrative genre of the didactic essay. While there are a number of studies exploring in-museum and/or gallery text panels and similar forms of public-facing educational writing, these are at best

52 guides for technical best-practices. Within the museum, the online didactic essay’s closest narrative cousin appears to be the more artist-centred exhibition catalogue essay; outside of the museum, its closest content-output is the first-year survey text. Yet the online didactic essay is more than some kind of cross-breed of these two outputs; rather, it is a unique and sophisticated form of art historical writing that merits a closer look in light of the increased frequency in which the genre is being used not only by the museums and galleries that author them to present works of art and communicate their context to their growing cohort of online audiences, but also by parallel institutions of art historical thought such as colleges and universities across North America and abroad that are increasingly including them as required reading in their introductory art history curricula.

To the field of Canadian Art History, this dissertation is the first to consider Canadian art history in terms of World Art History discourse via an original case study; namely, an investigation of the sum of two series of biennial exhibitions organized and hosted by the

National Gallery of Canada as expressions of negotiated Canadian artistic identity. Only one other study has explored the National Gallery’s biennial as a topic: my master’s thesis, “The

Ideal and the Pragmatic: The National Gallery of Canada’s Biennial Exhibitions of Canadian

Art, 1953–1968,” examined the format, organization, and oversight of the first series of exhibitions as expressions of the National Gallery’s institutional role and identity as a national art museum.119 In distinction, Part Three delves beyond the exhibitions to consider

119 Nathalie Limbos-Bomberg, “The Ideal and the Pragmatic: The National Gallery Canada's Biennial Exhibitions of Canadian Art, 1953–1968” (Master's thesis, Carleton University, 2000), https://doi.org/10.22215/etd/2001-04741. One follow-up article by Katie Cholette took up the topic in summary form, addressing much of the same content and many of its arguments regarding regional representation; see: “The Beleaguered Biennials,” RACAR: Revue d'art canadienne / Canadian Art Review 35, no. 2 (2010): 21–34, http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/stable/42631306.

53 the “Canadianness” of the artists selected across both series of biennials to trace how notions of Canadian national identity shifted under the agency and authority of the National Gallery’s brokerage leading up to and during the transcultural turn. While at times Chapter Six

(necessarily) relies upon certain elements of the socio-historical framework of the National

Gallery’s organization of the biennial series through mid-century Canada as narrated by my master’s thesis, Part Three’s consideration of the full slate of biennial exhibitions moves aggressively beyond to investigate processes of Canadian national identity-formation across a span of seventy years via a close-looking and detailed analysis of previously-unexplored artist biographies and artist networks of connection and exchange. In addition, Part Three’s examination of the National Gallery’s attempt to locate the institution on a global stage by harnessing the power of “biennialization” offers the beginnings of an understanding of the national biennial as an institution that remains a largely unexamined extended-relation of the international biennale, and the National Gallery, in its brokering of the biennial amid efforts to leverage the institution in an global art world, as a transcultural actor.

Together these contributions shape an understanding of World Art History that, by tracing the discourse of World Art History as it unfolds across three interconnected institutions of art historical knowledge—theory, scholarship, and the museum—and implicating the nation-state, nationhood, and national identity (and new, global identities), argues the turn to World Art History as a paradigmatic shift capable of confronting the deeply-entrenched Eurocentrisms that have long plagued the discipline’s intellectual underpinnings, and its legacies leading into the global contemporary.

54

PART ONE – THEORY AND SCHOLARSHIP

55

Chapter Two: Debating World Art History

With its first issue of 2014, The Art Bulletin editor-in-chief Kirk Ambrose, noting that the journal ought to “take into account the global aspects of art history, both in terms of its objects of study and in terms of its practitioners,” invited scholars from “across the globe” to consider the question “Whither Art History?”120 The new and recurring feature, narrowing the focus of the previous and more generic exercise in disciplinary self-reflexivity under the title “Regarding Art and Art History,” was intended to usher in a second century of publication, but the forum’s decision to dedicate intellectual space to specific consideration of the “global aspects” of the discipline—what it considered the most important discussion in art history—marked more than the journal’s centenary. It signalled the heft and breadth of an uneasy conjecture that was, after considerable momentum, being made explicit within the pages of the journal: that the discipline was in trouble and in urgent need of reconsideration.

To what place, and to what result and what end, did the world’s art historians imagine the future of the discipline?

It is not surprising that the journal appropriated the global as disciplinary salvation. In the issues leading up to the first “Whither” release scholars ruminated on the many limitations entrenched in the discipline’s legacy, a list topically outlined by David Summers in one of the last contributions before the journal shifted its reflections towards the global: “It does not take long to see that the history of art—like many other disciplines—was implicated in nineteenth- and twentieth-century nationalism, colonialism, racism, and sexism.”121 To

120 Kirk Ambrose, “The Art Bulletin's Next Century,” The Art Bulletin 96, no. 1 (2014): 7, doi: 10.1080/00043079.2014.877300.

121 David Summers, “Regarding Art and Art History,” The Art Bulletin 95, no. 3 (2013): 356, doi: 10.1080/00043079.2013.10786078.

56 remedy art history’s seemingly endless, obsessive, and problematic self-examination of its own tradition (which had, to date, yielded little in the way of tangible progress), Summers proposed a redirection of the discipline towards an intercultural art history: not only the study of many art traditions, but their location among others and their “mutual awareness and interaction.”122 Summers’ proposal was not isolated, but formed part of a larger interest in the discipline at the turn of the century in a global or World Art History—the culmination of decades of interest in seeking to move art history beyond its traditional boundaries.

Yet not all scholars accepted that art history was in crisis, nor the proposals advanced that sought redemption from outside the discipline. The first scholar to speak to The Art

Bulletin’s question was Griselda Pollock. Feeling that the methodologies that characterized the discipline continued to hold rich potential for the field, she rationalized the turn towards the global and the pull of a world art history:

I detect a certain reconsolidation of the old ways or, rather, signs of a deep blocking of the recent innovations by an obduracy that can weaken any critique through prolonged indifference and a real failure to accept that its arguments need to be digested and incorporated. At the same time it is, paradoxically, constantly searching for some novelty.123

For Pollock, the proposal for a world history of art amounted to not much more than

“globalizing massification managed through reductive categorization.”124 To challenge the hegemony of art history, both androcentric and Eurocentric, she argued, as she had for

122 Ibid.

123 Griselda Pollock, “Whither Art History?” The Art Bulletin 6, no. 1 (2014): 14, doi: 10.1080/00043079.2014.877301.

124 Ibid., 21.

57 decades in feminist scholarly practice, for critical debates around difference facilitated by the plurality of art’s histories.125

In the following issues contributors did just that. With keen attention to their world region and against the backdrop of their specialization, scholars evaluated the potential for global approaches in the practice of “their” art history. Although agreeing that the most urgent task facing the discipline was the inclusion of non-Western scholars in shaping the discipline’s future,126 contributors were divided on the usefulness of World Art History with many articulating problems of relevance, comprehension, and also translatability and commensurability that characterized the inadequacy of Western art historical theories relative to their practice. With every issue select authors from across the world reflected critically on the discipline’s global future and debated the desirability, the need, and the mode of a new global theory of art.

Writing from India, Parul Dave Mukherji criticised the notion of expanding art history into a global discipline for he saw the effort not only as impossible,127 but as suffering

125 Pollock made a second argument: a “virtual counterconcept” to the global based on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s notion of the planetary; quoting Spivak: “I propose the planet to overwrite the globe. Globalization is the imposition of the same system everywhere…[t]he globe is our computer. No one lives there. It allows us to think that we can aim to control it…[t]he planet is a species of alterity, belonging to another system: yet we inhabit it, on loan.” Ibid., 14.

126 It is significant to note that the Bulletin deliberately and strategically positioned “Whither” as an inclusive dialogue beyond the centre by soliciting the perspectives of scholars from the peripheries, the absence of which had, since the debate’s beginnings, plagued the project to transform the discipline into a global enterprise. Elkins, also, was attentive to this critique: his edited texts are built on conversations across scholarship beyond the West: in Is Art History Global? more than sixty scholars in over thirty-five countries were invited to respond to the roundtable discussion; forty did, published as assessments. James Elkins, “Can We Invent a World Art Studies?” in World Art Studies: Exploring Concepts and Approaches, ed. Kitty Zijlmans and Wilfried van Damme (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2008): 108.

127 Mukherji considered the purported achievement of the postethnic, a term coined by Hans Belting wherein such new “disciplinary terrains” as World Art Studies, World Art History, and global art history seek to include the other, as a false step towards the progress of the discipline as not only ethnocentric, but also essentialist, reductivist, and tokenist. Addressing the “burning question” of studies of global art history, namely whether

58 from “an insidious ethnocentrism”—a continued centring of the West in the desire to progress the discipline, and one that served only to fortify ethnicity via the us versus them binary.128 Claudia Mattos, from her position as an art historian in Brazil, cautioned against the recent trend to address the current “crisis” in the discipline via a global art history— posited by looking outside traditional, secure boundaries to non-Western art history for new ideas—for regardless of the desire for inclusivity the West continued to hold all the power in the field.129 Contrasting these perspectives, Chinese scholar Cheng-Hua Wang lauded the intellectual progress of the global turn: by confronting Eurocentrism via new lines of thought enabled by comparative art history (a consideration of shared features among artworks on a global scale) and an examination of cross-cultural artistic interaction (advanced by

“connected art histories”), not only had her study of Sino-European interactions increased in importance, but a “major revision...of the dominant narrative” had resulted.130 Youngna Kim described the immediate concern of Korean art history to lie in its intellectual infrastructure,

“native intellectual frameworks” could be used to study non-Western art history, Mukherji rejected the notion for it would result in a number of insular discourses: for art history to be global it must enable dialogues across languages and disciplines. Instead of one “overarching story of progression and canonization,” Mukherji proposed local and regional focuses best conducted as case studies. Parul Dave Mukherji, “Whither Art History in a Globalizing World,” The Art Bulletin 96, no. 2 (2014): 153–4, doi: 10.1080/00043079.2014.898992.

128 Ibid., 151.

129 Mathos was citing the early twentieth century when in profound dissatisfaction artists looked to non- European traditions for inspiration with the result of art viewed strictly on European terms and the creation of a “radical” other that was imagined as strong, innocent, and connected to real life. According to Mattos, the most urgent task is to facilitate the circulation of knowledge in an “extended netlike system that could eventually dissolve the established positions of a “center” and a “periphery”” by including art historians working in the borders of the field in central debates on theories and methods. Mattos also advocates for an expanded canon. Claudia Mattos, “Whither Art History? Geography, Art Theory, and New Perspectives for an Inclusive Art History,” The Art Bulletin 96, no. 3 (2014): 259–60, https://www.jstor.org/stable/43188880.

130 For Wang the “core issue” of the global turn is the “dialectical relation of particularism and universalism.” Her case study illustrates the notion of how appropriation gives agency to local actors and is thus a response to Eurocentrism in art historical research for it breeds an understanding of local agents. Cheng-Hua Wang, “Whither Art History? A Global Perspective on Eighteenth-Century Chinese Art and Visual Culture,” The Art Bulletin 96, no. 4 (2014): 379, https://www.jstor.org/stable/43188891.

59 not necessarily the theoretical debate: establishing graduate education in art history and qualified professors of Korean art history, addressing the lack of proficiency in English and other foreign languages, and, most importantly, affirming the uniqueness, independence, and validity of Korean art history in the face of Japanese occupation and the dominance of

Chinese art history. Kim considered the development of a global art history as assisting in this last concern.131

In their essays contributors sought to claim a space for their art histories within the discipline that so many had trained under yet found inadequate for their current research needs; indeed, the discipline’s very foundation and signature methodologies were brought into question and measured in varying degrees of prolificity. Central, and always guiding their assessments, were specific case studies that located the local within the global as a measure of the potential applicability of one theory of art (be it Western, global, or other) to various world regions.132 The range of responses highlight both the impossibility of and possibilities for a wider, more global approach in the discipline, and serve as a microcosm of the fuller, fragmented debate now over twenty years old. Most significantly, they serve to signal the breadth of rejections and rebuttals that would follow—many of which would

131 Youngna Kim, “Whither Art History? Korea’s Search for a Place in Global Art History,” The Art Bulletin 98, no. 1 (2016): 7–13, doi: 10.1080/00043079.2015.1074842.

132 Other scholars similarly adopt a case study approach in their move towards the global: Florina Capistrano- Baker examined three Philippine-born artists whom she termed “transnational” in order to make an argument for a theory of global art history as a theory of art in diaspora for it tackles issues of identity politics and notions of identity: 1) by dissecting the “dynamics of global entanglements” of the present, global art history is redirected away from the elusive quest for the “authentic;” 2) specific case studies illuminate “larger patterns of cultural engagements, entanglements, translations” that would “shed light on the intertwined art histories of centers and peripheries;” and 3) new and valuable insights and “(re) discoveries” lie in wait as a result of “sustained communication, collaboration, and mutual respect” among European and American scholars at the centre and non-Western scholars in the peripheries. Florina Capistrano-Baker, “Whither Art History in the Non- Western World: Exploring the Other(’s) Art Histories,” The Art Bulletin 97, no. 3 (2015): 255, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43947739.

60 assume post-colonial, decolonial, and critical race critiques to seek to displace the positioning of the all-white, all-male discussants jockeying for centrality, if not dominance, in the twenty-first century World Art History debate.

The World Art History Debate

The literature related to the World Art History debate is wide and varied: a myriad of books, articles, and essays, and also a number of series of edited volumes and roundtable discussions that inform the North American scholarly community’s reckoning with the meaning and implications of a turn to World Art History. Yet any analysis of this debate requires first an understanding of the relevant disciplinary and scholarly contexts surrounding the proposed transformation of art history into World Art History. By tracing key pivot points in the trajectory of scholarly engagement surrounding the proposal for World Art

History, it is possible to identify, across four marked developmental phases, distinct practices and dominant narratives useful in guiding a synoptic analysis of the World Art History debate.

The first phase is proposal: although the epistemological roots of the call for a world history of art were laid at key junctures in the discipline’s historiography,133 the genesis of the twenty-first century World Art History debate can be located in Onians’ proposal for a wider frame through which to study the world’s art—namely, its impetus and driving motivations. The second phase is critical engagement: scholars across the world quickly become occupied with a question born from an increasingly globalized world yet one

133 The genealogy of world art history, dating back to the beginning of the twentieth century, is explored by Pfisterer as context for its re-emergence in the twenty-first century. Pfisterer, “Origins and Principles of World Art History,” 69–89.

61 yielding no simple answer: what does it means to study the world’s art in the twenty-first century? The third phase, theorizing and refining approaches, presents in a fitful cycle of attempts to formulate in theory and shift into practice one or more approaches capable of responding to the critiques of Eurocentrism while simultaneously holding fast to the core values of the discipline. Lastly, in the fourth phase, new criticisms emerge challenging the nation-state thesis and taking the form of a series of refusals and rebuttals that demonstrate the evolution and maturation of the twenty-first century World Art History debate.

Phase One: Onians’ Proposal

The World Art History debate of recent decades was arguably set in motion in 1996 by John Onians’ call to reimagine the traditional discipline of art history. Onians made two interrelated proposals: one was for the creation of a new broad discipline he called “World

Art Studies”—global in orientation and multidisciplinary in approach, and capable of enveloping and promoting cross-fertilization among the specialist disciplines of art history, anthropology, archaeology, and cultural studies; the other was for a parallel “reassessment” of traditional cultural approaches to the study of art in favour of a new “natural history” of art—a new field grounded in humanity’s shared biology and the search for an approach competent for the study of ”world art.” Onians imagined that the new disciplinary envelope of World Art Studies—a “radical” expansion of the existing discipline resulting from the adoption of a “worldwide perspective” both in terms of material and approach learned from

62 studies of art in Asia, Africa, Oceania, and Latin America—would be defined in the course of the development of his (new) “natural” theory of art.134

Onians’ theory relied upon the most basic premise for the study of art worldwide, one blind to matters of origin and identity: that all humans make art, and that the need to engage in artistic practice was rooted in biology. By viewing art-making as a worldwide activity of

Homo sapiens understood through its “basis in human physiology and psychology and the human relation to the natural environment,”135 Onians argued the limits of a purely cultural understanding to unite all of humanity under one banner of understanding: why do we make art? Building upon the work of neuroscientists concerned with art and working in collaboration with them, Onians saw a new field emerging, framed it as an understanding of the making or viewing of art as an act of the human brain—that nature (as revealed by genetics and neuroscience) and the environment (geography and biology), rather than culture, were key influences—and termed it “neuroarthistory.”136 It was an approach purported to

134 Onians described his proposal as “a new natural history of artistic activity…one element in a new broad discipline, World Art Studies.” Onians noted that his proposal—a “radical expansion” from the concerns of specialists in art history, anthropology, archaeology, and cultural studies…a new framework”—was not powered by imported theory or some kind of political motivation, but rather by the diversity of the objects in the Sainsbury collection at the University of East Anglia, a body of material from around the world dating from c.4,000 BCE to present day: “works of art from all regions of the globe and from all periods have compelled a reassessment of traditional approaches to their study.” Onians, “World Art Studies,” 206–9.

135 Ibid., 208. Onians asserted that the most important conclusion to be drawn from recent publications and conference proceedings (likely a reference to the 2000 Clark Conference) was that the “study of art worldwide requires an acknowledgement of the limitations of a purely cultural approach. It is impossible to understand art worldwide without an appreciation of the influences of human nature and of the nature of the environment.” Onians, “World Art,” 125.

136 As a concept neuroarthistory is discussed in a number of Onians’ later publications: “A Natural Anthropology of Art,” International Journal of Anthropology 18, no. 4 (2003): 259–64, https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02447910; and Art, Culture and Nature (London: The Pindar Press, 2006). Onians laid the ground for neuroarthistory in recounting the reaction to receiving the Sainsbury collection: “its impact on the central nervous systems of both staff and students proved so profound as to encourage a redefinition of the department’s activities.” Onians, “World Art Studies,” 206. Neuroarthistory, and all its disciplinary descendants, utilize a “neural approach…a more conscious commitment to look behind…assumptions and find out as much as possible about what it is that goes on in our brains, how it goes on and why.” John Onians,

63 help art historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists understand why a certain work, in a particular time, place, and style was made and in turn generated interest in others.

Yet it is important to note that while World Art Studies garnered some appreciation and would spark interest in fostering a new kind of world history of art advancing in recent decades the study of art as a universal product of human nature,137 not all critics accept the neuroarthistory advanced by Onians as grounded in either fact or (neuro)science. Matthew

Rampley has emerged as a leading critic of Onians, and has raised a number of theoretical objections accusing Onians and other advocates of evolutionary and neuroscientific analysis of engaging in “shallow interdisciplinarity”138 in seeking to (very simplistically) link the science of the brain with art, and of trading in “crude environmental explanations” to rely on the conditional and even the speculative. One example: Onians’ claim that the Greeks were

“angular” while the Romans were “rounded” (in evidence Onians cites the Roman arch but not their fondness for gridded roadway infrastructure). Referencing these and other examples, Rampley dismisses many of Onians’ conclusions as “empty generalities”:

In methodological terms the basic difficulty with this approach is that it lacks a means of articulating the relation between, on the one hand, the generalized categories of the brain and its functions and, on the other, the individuated historical artistic and cultural processes it purports to explain. The result is that every historical case

“Neuroarthistory: Making Sense of Art,” in World Art Studies: Exploring Concepts and Approaches, ed. Kitty Zijlmans and Wilfred van Damme (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2008): 265, 271. Onians credits Michael Baxandall with being the first to take a conscious neural approach: his period eye in Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy (1972).

137 A number of studies and scholars are cited by Matthew Rampley in his review of Onians’ second study of neuroarthistory, European Art: A Neuroarthistory (2016); see: “Fish, volcanos and the art of brains,” Review of “John Onians’ European Art: A Neuroarthistory,” Journal of Art Historiography, no. 15 (2016), doi: 10.13140/RG.2.2.16546.22721. Onians’ earlier work, Neuroarthistory: From Aristotle and Pliny to Baxandall and Zeki (2008), sought to outline the intellectual genealogy of the field.

138 Matthew Rampley, The Seductions of Darwin: Art, Evolution, Neuroscience (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017), 105.

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discussed boils down to the same thing: the impact of environment on the brain…[determining] the aesthetic preferences of members of specific cultures.139

Despite his critiques of Onians—and while the implications of Rampley’s criticism of

Onians’ neuroarthistory remain unclear for World Art Studies—in his own work Rampley does advance the project of explaining the history of art by Darwinian means by arguing an evolutionary origin for the capacity to make art and its attendant aesthetic sensibilities we call “taste.”140 To this end Rampley lauds David Summers’ attempt at a natural history of art in Real Spaces (discussed in Chapter Two) as holding more promise and potential than

Onians’ (limited) Atlas of World Art (explored in Chapter Three).141

Beyond servicing an understanding of art worldwide via neuroarthistory, Onians held that his natural theory of art possessed the power to transform the discipline of art history itself via a new broad discipline he entitled “world art studies.” Onians outlined the parameters of his conception: World Art Studies would in spatiality and temporality include art from around the world and across all time (the latter the global element, in order to

“situate recent international developments in art within the context of encounters and exchanges between art traditions that have occurred in humanity’s past”),142 and in

139 Rampley, “Fish, volcanos and the art of brains.”

140 Rampley, The Seductions of Darwin, 21, 25.

141 Ibid., 39–43. Rampley credits Onians’ Atlas as signalling the transnational traffic of artifacts but stops at the fact of objects circulating (rather than examining their fate).

142 Zijlmans et al., “Art History in a Global Frame,” 222. As his way forward into World Art Studies Onians proposes to begin with the broadest view of what consists of the most visually-interesting material, a review of the total potential field—a variation of concentration on different forms of art throughout time and across cultures. With this broad view generating both a reappraisal of available visual materials, as well as approaches, Onians expects the results to be “a new and larger disciplinary frame that reflects less the accidental constraints of institutional formation and more the essential complexity of art as a worldwide phenomenon.” In other words, to open in theory and methodology the field of works previously considered by art history. Onians, “World Art Studies,” 207.

65 methodology encompass a number of sub-disciplines capable of exploring art-making as a worldwide phenomenon.143 In setting out the terms of such a radical expansion of the discipline’s established boundaries Onians recognized a long tradition of broad views of the world noting that while wider perspectives largely waned in the twentieth century (with the discipline “forgetting” global overviews in favour of specific area studies144), his work and that of others stood as evidence that the notion of World Art History was again gaining traction in the twenty-first century.145 He argued that a worldwide perspective “rapidly exposes the underlying disunities and incompatibilities within what we consider the single discipline of Western art history” to only “immediate advantages”: while accommodating established canons, a wider frame was able to respond to experimentation and intuitively seek the unknown. Further, under a “new and larger…frame that reflects less the accidental

143 In other words: open in theory and methodology the field of works previously considered by art history. Ibid.

144 In the nineteenth century: Franz Kugler’s Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte (1842) and Heinrich Wölfflin’s Prolegomena zu einer Psychologie der Architektur (1886); in the twentieth century: George Kubler’s The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (1962), David Freeberg’s The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (1989), and Hugh Honour and John Fleming’s A History of World Art (1984). John Onians, ed., Compression vs. Expression: Containing and Explaining the World’s Art (Williamstown, Mass.: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2006), viii.

145 Onians became convinced of the validity of a broad approach to art through a lifetime of specialist studies. He observed that the traditional expert art historian was no longer safe within the isolation of the discipline, but had been replaced by scholars with wider perspectives that took into account “full context”: whereas in the past generalists risked the quality of their scholarship, now it is the “narrow specialist” who took the greatest risk “knowing neither the full range of possible parallels to what he is studying nor the full range of possible explanations for them.” Onians, “World Art,” 129–30. Onians’ area of specialty is Italian Renaissance architecture, and Greek and Roman art. He recounts how he was encouraged in his interest to broaden his perspective by two scholars before him: Gombrich (under whom he trained for his Ph.D.) and John Boardman. Each had abandoned their respective specialties upon which their reputations were based to adopt a global approach because “it was the only perspective that allowed them to see the full context of the phenomenon they were studying.” In hand with a broader perspective “new explanatory perspectives” were derived, ones which pushed each to abandon the widely-held belief in the concept of the “autonomy of culture”: namely, that the freedom of the human mind generated cultural expressions that were autonomous from X. Rather, in their later publications, Gombrich and Boardman came to see “cultural freedom as substantially constrained by nature.” In The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art (1979), Gombrich saw culture as constrained by man’s inner nature (inner biology); in The World of Ancient Art (2006) Boardman tested a model in which culture was constrained by the nature of the environment. While both did not abandon culture, in studying large patterns of data in a global perspective (by considering the strong influence of nature), each augmented the explanatory model that culture alone influences art. Ibid., 130.

66 constraints of institutional formation and more the complexity of art as a worldwide phenomenon,” the “Western” discipline of art history was able to move past its own academic interests and standards and an “excessive concentration” on its own culture in order to reveal new areas of inquiry and new questions.146

However, according to Onians, most significant in the shift to a worldwide perspective was a realization on the part of the West that their academic interests “do not necessarily set standards.”147 He wrote: “Art history, with its freight of assumptions deriving from European roots, provides an inadequate paradigm.”148 Concluding, Onians stressed the simultaneous importance of change: “The concepts of world art and World Art Studies, with their inherently greater flexibility and openness, empower people anywhere...to develop approaches that suit their own needs.”149 Despite the discipline’s limitations, Onians admitted the issue most likely to stall its continued progress: “How is it possible to rise to the new challenge of embracing a vastly greater field of knowledge than that accepted by ethno- cultural art history without losing the depth of presentation and intellectual reflection with which the discipline is associated?”150 Considering the phases of debate that would follow,

Onians was in effect asking: can World Art History could still be art history?

146 Onians, “World Art Studies,” 206–7.

147 Ibid.

148 Onians, Compression vs. Expression, ix.

149 Ibid.

150 Ibid.

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Phase Two: Critical Engagement

This was a question taken up by American art historian James Elkins, one of the first

(and one of the most active) critics of the proposed widening of art history’s established boundaries. Driven by a concern that increasing pressure to include within the art historical enterprise non-Western stories, methods and approaches, and terminologies—what Elkins

(and others) termed a turn towards a “multicultural” art history—would effect a distortion on the discipline effectively rendering it no longer art history, Elkins argued against Onians’ proposal for a widened discipline by problematizing a specific art historical output he de facto equated with the discipline: the method and discipline of writing art history— specifically, the writing of an inclusive art history by way of “putting the world in a book.”151

Arguing that a “non-Eurocentric narrative”—what Elkins, in a slow reframing of the project of World Art Studies as World Art History, would come to describe as “radical”: an art history attentive to both non-Western concepts and methods152—risked “deliquesce” of the discipline “leaving only traces of its former sense of methods and objects,”153 Elkins admitted his fear: that the resulting proliferation of local practices (which, he is clear, do not

151 A key phrase coined at the 2000 Clark Conference: “to put the world in a book.” Elkins, “Can We Invent a World Art Studies?,” 107. At this early stage of the debate Elkins took world art history to reference large one- volume texts in the genre of Gombrich’s “one” story of art: no matter what would become of the debate, if world art history were to take hold it would need to “fit” into a book: “the education of art historians begins with large-scale introductory narratives, and as inadequate as they may be, our stock-in-trade of specialized monographic treatments only postpones the moment when it will be necessary to say what those introductory narratives really should look like.” Elkins, Is Art History Global?, 22.

152 Elkins enumerated five possibilities for world art history “in order of increasing radicalism, from the intellectually conservative option of retaining art history intact to the radical proposal that art history should dissolve entirely in order to accommodate new cultures and practices.” Elkins, Review of “Real Spaces,” 378.

153 Elkins, Stories of Art, 377.

68 amount to a world history of art) would effectively divide and disperse the discipline, rendering it almost unrecognizable.154

Elkins built the foundations of his argument against a world art historical narrative in

Stories of Art (a play on Ernst Gombrich’s effort more than fifty years earlier and still a touchstone today)—an exploration of the “shapes” of art history: the various “plots, or the outlines, of the stories of art.”155 Elkins found there was but one “standard story of art”: the standard story began in Egypt and wound its way across time, unifying all the “threads of history”156 into one coherent narrative organized according to chronology, divided into periods and mega-periods, and classified by style; while there were “variants,” the basic storyline had remained fundamentally unchanged since its canonization under Gombrich in the mid-twentieth century. Further, he found that the standard story was inelastic: when

Elkins applied a number of “thought experiments” to the narrative—efforts to reorganize and reimagine it in new ways—not one managed to satisfy long-standing critiques while remaining “true” to the Western art historical psyche.157 He concluded that the standard story of art was inseparable from the Western story and its narrative formula too “flawed” to hold

154 His case in point: Summers’ Real Spaces: “art history as it is presented in Real Spaces is becoming harder to recognize.” Elkins, Review of “Real Spaces,” 378.

155 Elkins, Stories of Art, xii. Elkins did not reach his conclusion that world art history represented a significant break from the traditional discipline of art history without comprehensively examining the field for attempts at writing art history in new ways, and even trying his hand at conceptualizing a world history of art: he explored intuitive stories, the mental maps individuals carry with them as an semi-conscious manifestation of their art historical education; old and familiar stories, including those told by Vasari and Gombrich, who established the narrative paradigm for the West; new and revised stories where such authors as Stokstad and Janson responded to calls for inclusion, resulting in megalithic volumes that read increasingly like encyclopaedias; and, lastly, obscure stories, from outside of the West (largely unused and unread) that either ignored, or were ignorant of, Western art.

156 Ibid., xi.

157 Elkins summarized a number of goals for an “optimal book of art history” in order to address its critiques: the first was to “reduce the emphasis on European art and acquire some principle of fair representation.” Ibid., 118.

69 together anything other than the standard story: “[a]rt historians love the West and need the

West, and there is no other viable history of art.”158

In coming to declare the standard story of art as intrinsically Western, Elkins freely accepted the critique of Eurocentrism and admitted it remained a problem to be solved; yet his thinking also betrayed a simultaneous acceptance and even a normalization of the discipline’s Western roots—without apology. Struggling in his various thought experiments to find a “viable” alternative narrative that could answer the “problem” of “fairly representing all cultures”159—an art history capable of speaking for traditions across the world (yet simultaneously satisfying the quiet caveat of “telling a story of art that is our story, fitted to our culture and our needs”160)—Elkins advocated only one as “an acceptable account” of all the world’s art: a “perfect” story that privileged “complex cultures” on the basis of their “sense of history” established via the development of a visual language or tradition of their own.161 According to Elkins, such an approach would “make a theme out of the concept of history itself” and would be capable of avoiding certain Western biases in order to answer the “major deficiencies of Eurocentrism in a consistent and defensible manner.”162 The result would be a truly multicultural narrative. Yet at this critical juncture—

158 Ibid., 147, 149–50.

159 Ibid., 117.

160 Ibid.

161 Ibid., 147.

162 Ibid., 144–7. Elkins proposed a table of contents that would make a theme out of the concept of history itself but would remain basically chronological: “It would also express one of art history’s fondest interests by privileging artworks that are intellectually and socially complex.” Further, inclusivity would be cast widely: “The emergence of a sense of history would be the plot of the book. The central chapters would explore those cultures that developed indigenous historiographic traditions, narrated their own histories, and named their own techniques, periods, and meanings.”

70 just as Elkins conceded the critique of entrenched Eurocentrisms in the standard “Western” story of art and proposed a “multicultural” version in response—he delivered his ultimate thesis: the discipline’s desire for inclusivity aside, Elkins concluded that a multiculturalist art history was unwanted by art historians, and that even if wanted, in both theory and practice multiculturalism was impossible. To this situation Elkins attributed the very enterprise of art history as a Western idea: a Western construct that can not be dismantled or challenged for fear it would result is a loss of dominance, self-assuredness, and safeness of the Western

“self.”163 The sum of Elkins’ position: art history was “irredeemably” Western; no other art history stood a chance of succeeding.164

North American scholar David Carrier agreed.165 Like Elkins, Carrier judged art history to be at its very core a Western discipline and its narrative the “backbone;” yet, in contrast to Elkins, he demonstrated some willingness to see both institutions bend and extend in order to solve the “puzzle” of how to address art worldwide. Carrier responded to Elkins’ call to focus on complex cultures while avoiding Western interpretative strategies in A World

163 Here Elkins invokes an essay by Stanley Fish on a type of “topical” multiculturalism, his diagnosis of Western art history’s ails: “Boutique multiculturalism is characterized by its superficial or cosmetic relationship to the objects of its affection. Boutique multiculturalists admire or appreciate or enjoy or sympathize with or (at the very least) “recognize the legitimacy of” the traditions of cultures other than their own; but boutique multiculturalists will always stop short of approving other cultures at a point where some value at their center generates an act that offends against the canons of civilized decency as they have been either declared or assumed…Another way to put this is to say that a boutique multiculturalist does not and cannot take seriously the core values of the cultures he tolerates. The reason he cannot is that he does not see those values as truly “core” but as overlays on a substratum of essential humanity.” Stanley Fish, “Boutique Multiculturalism, Or Why Liberals are Incapable of Thinking about Hate Speech,” Critical Inquiry 23, no. 2 (1997): 378–95.

164 Elkins identifies the legacy of Hegel’s thinking, persistent even in himself, as being at the crux of all art historical thinking no matter the cultural heritage of the art historian; add to this his earlier observation that “only specialists on non-Western art spend more than half their time looking at art made outside Europe and America” and what becomes clear is that Elkins has little expectation that in his lifetime art history can meaningfully be rethought without losing its core self. Elkins, Stories of Art, 147–53.

165 Carrier is perhaps most well-known for Principles of Art History Writing (1991), a book on the methodology of art history.

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Art History and Its Objects166 where, in advance of attempting to overcome the challenge, he voiced his thoughts on the limits of the discipline’s Westernness in service to a decentred

World Art Historical narrative: “It is hard to imagine a world art history starting in other cultures...is it possible to avoid borrowing Western ways of thinking when for a long time all influential styles of art history writing have derived from Europe?”167 To answer the question

Carrier devised his own narrative scheme. Whereas Elkins created stories of art by inserting new material into the existing narrative formula (a familiar format: a tidy, thematically- organized and chronologically-ordered narrative divided according to cultural tradition), in an attempt to deny the one Western timeline and demarginalize non-Western art as a whole

Carrier proposed intersecting, at key junctures in their respective timelines, the “rare art traditions” of China, India, and Islam with that of Europe as a “rough first sketch of a comprehensive world art history.”168

In developing his intersecting narrative model Carrier diagnosed the discipline’s key fault: “monoculturalism”—the belief in a single tradition of art and but one binding and canonical way of understanding it. Indeed, more so than Eurocentrism—defined by Carrier as “arguments that rely too exclusively on European ways of thinking,” specifically the

Christian European tradition—it was monoculturalism that was “inhibiting” art history’s

166 Like Elkins’ Stories of Art, Carrier’s title is a play on traditional art history: Wollheim’s Art and Its Objects (1968). Richard Wollheim was a British philosopher whose study of art and psychoanalysis (the mind and emotion as it related to the visual arts, especially painting) was renowned in the field of philosophical aesthetics. Carrier directly credits his text as being in Wollheim’s style of analytic philosophy; quoting Wollheim: “Art, and its objects, come indissolubly linked. And if we sometimes feel that the concept only obscures the object and could as well be dropped: or alternatively, that the concept is all we need and that the day of the object is over; in neither case do we progress far beyond a gesture.” David Carrier, A World Art History and its Objects (University Park, Penn.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008), xvii.

167 Ibid., 146–7.

168 Ibid., xii.

72 development.169 His remedy was “multiculturalism,” but, unlike Elkins’ cumulative version

(soon also to be called a world art history), Carrier’s sought a “full account of the interrelationships of visual cultures”170 by taking as the object of concern points of connection across traditions.171 Here he applied three broad criteria: first and foremost, world art history could not simply be the accumulation of stories, but had to seek the integration of histories all the while avoiding broad comparisons and the blind application of the same basic concepts; second, its overall framework had to accommodate the structure of each individual tradition in order to permit the foregrounding of connections between histories and between artworks that had come to stand for a culture’s aesthetic worldview; third and final, it had to consider intersections by following the “trail” of artworks that resulted from previously monocultural traditions merging together to produce import, borrowings, and translations that in effect “changed” each culture moving forward.172 On balance, Carrier’s world art history—privileging integration, and significant points of connection and intersection—took direct aim at Elkins’ additive one:

There can be no universal monocultural history of art, no account telling the story of the developments in China, Europe, India, and Islam in one continuous story. It is not possible to extend the story of art, in the way that Gombrich extended Vasari’s

169 Ibid. Carrier argued: “Not until writers abandon the Christian European tradition can we properly understand art from cultures with other religions.” Ibid., xxiv.

170 A narrative goal set by Larry Silver and David Levine in their seminal article regarding the failure of the introductory art history survey text; see: Essay on ““Quo Vadis, Hagia Sophia?” Art History's Survey Texts,” CAA.reviews, doi: 10.3202/caa.reviews.2006.134.

171 Specifically, Carrier focused on their merging when in 1522 Magellan’s ships completed the first circumnavigation of the globe: a “unified art world began to be created” and each tradition became “connected” to Europe. At that point each of the formerly monocultural narratives connected to one another to form one multicultural narrative. Carrier, A World Art History and its Objects, xi–xii.

172 These criteria are identified and discussed by John Rapko in his review of Carrier’s text; see: British Journal of Aesthetics 50, no. 2 (2010): 209–10, https://doi.org/10.1093/aesthj/ayp063.

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narrative, to encompass art from all cultures. Once we seriously study art from other cultures, then we have parallel stories.173

In addition to the shift away from an aggregated narrative written from within the

Western formula to a new structure that sought out nodes of connection across multiple and parallel histories, Carrier’s approach was novel in its demand that each history be written from within that tradition expressly using its own unique concepts. While deeming this caveat essential, Carrier tread carefully: he admitted the dangers of writing another’s history and acknowledged that no one art historian knew enough to write a full visual history of all cultures. In evidence, Carrier described his own attempt as incomplete in its exclusion of the arts of Africa, Oceania, Pre-Columbia America, and Japan—he did not see how they “fit”174

—and even went so far as to concede the notion of a world art history as an “entirely

European concern.”175 Nevertheless he persisted, stressing the morality of understanding other cultures “on their own terms”176 in order to begin to appreciate the “value of their art”:177

Advancing beyond [previous, traditional art historians’] monolithic way of thinking, multicultural art history exemplifies mutual respect. When we display art from all cultures and narrate a world art history, we show respect. Recognizing that the art of China, India, and the Islamic world differs from ours, we aim to interpret it on its own terms, without imposing our ways of thinking. Reciprocity means I acknowledge you as you, in turn, acknowledge me.178

173 Carrier, A World Art History and its Objects, 44.

174 Ibid., xii.

175 Carrier quotes from the preface of a 2004 Chinese translation of his Principles of Art History Writing (1991): “Present-day Western scholars are very sensitive to the dangers of Eurocentrism. We are aware that any adequate theory of art must deal with the art of all cultures.” Ibid., xi.

176 Ibid., xiii.

177 Ibid., xiv.

178 Ibid., 132.

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Yet some critics found cause to challenge Carrier’s approach, viewing it as hopelessly essentialist, relativist, and universalist. From the United States Terry Smith wrote:

Carrier believes…art historians should write “parallel stories,” thus producing “a multicultural art history”…he is using a civilizational model of history, so each civilization has already generated its own art history to interpret and narrate its art…. The problem is that a pile-up of parallels would bring his account perilously close to the essentialist generalizations of the “clash of civilizations.”179

Carrier defended his effort. Encouraged by the discipline’s demonstrated capacity to adapt over time180 and believing this to be a positive indicator of its likelihood of surviving globalism, Carrier foresaw that from the process of the discipline’s “migration” out of the

West181—his metaphor for a decentred world art history—a transformed discipline would emerge. But not as of yet. “[I]t is too early to write a full visual history of all cultures,”182 wrote Carrier, declaring that a multicultural history of art would not be possible until

Chinese, Indian, and Muslim art historians wrote their own narrative histories: “I call upon future scholars to develop a world art history.”183

179 Terry Smith, “David Carrier’s “A World Art History and Its Objects,” College Art Association (2009), doi: 10.3202/caa.reviews.2009.108. Smith is an Australian art historian who currently holds the position of Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. “Terry Smith,” Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Science, Department of History of Art and Architecture, University of Pittsburgh, accessed December 13, 2019, https://www.haa.pitt.edu/people/terry-smith.

180 Carrier credits this suppleness to the discipline’s strong roots established by Giorgio Vasari in his Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, from Cimabue to Our Times (1550). David Carrier, “What Happens When Art History Travels,” in Is Art History Global? ed. James Elkins (London: Routledge, 2007), 287. He summarizes: “the history of Western art since Vasari is the story of relentless expansion of the basic narrative he developed.” Carrier, A World Art History and its Objects, 145.

181 “Like people, languages, political institutions, religions, and scientific theories, works of art migrate from one culture to another. When they do so, they usually are transformed.” Carrier focused his thinking on two inseparable concerns: how art history would understand non-Western art, and how it would root itself in cultures outside of Europe and North America. Ibid., 286–9.

182 Ibid., xxv.

183 Ibid., xxvi.

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It was at this juncture that David Summers,184 in Real Spaces, the first full-length attempt at “putting the world in a book,” engaged, experimenting with yet another approach to North American “world art historical” writing. He took up the long-standing problem of accounting for art historical change by reconsidering the implications of continuities and patterns in art across the world, and, in a deliberate counter to the discipline’s parochial reliance on certain categories for addressing Western art, devised a narrative structure that did not rely on chronology as the central ordering principle. Instead, Summers focused on a concept capable of crossing space and time without reference to the epistemology of any one culture: he mobilized the “spatial arts”—specifically, the six spatial concepts of “fracture,”

“place,” “centre,” “image,” “planarity,” and “virtuality”—and harnessed them as “critical tools”185 effective in setting works from across the world into “spatial and temporal order.”186

The result, according to Summers, was a “conceptual basis for a history of art” in service to an emergent “intercultural conversation” that contributed to “a broader historical and cultural understanding” from within the discipline—a post-formalist art history. Summers explained the externally-narrated homogenized story of art he was seeking to avoid in favour of an internally-devised world art history that was his goal:

184 David Summers is emeritus William R. Kenan Jr. professor of art history (art theory and Italian Renaissance art) at the University of Virginia. “Faculty & Staff: David Summers,” McIntire Department of Art, University of Virginia, accessed October 3, 2017, http://www.virginia.edu/art/faculty.

185 The term “critical tool” was used by James Elkins in his review of Summers’ Real Spaces, 374.

186 Summers, Real Spaces, 12. In his theory of world art Summers recognized the influence of Kubler’s The Shape of Time: “it is a premise of the book that there is no ‘absolute’, universal art historical chronology, and that traditions of art constitute independent (or interactive) ‘shapes of time’.” Summers also cited Hans Belting’s The End of the History of Art? where Belting wrote “we have arrived at the threshold of an anthropologically grounded conception of artistic production as a paradigm of human activity.” Linking Kubler and Belting together against the previous tradition of iconography in art (Panofsky), Summers argued that Kubler’s “historically localized traditions” can be modified and brought into a “continuous relation to iconography by a reconsideration of the uses and purposes of works of art.” Ibid., 11–16.

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The World Art History of the subtitle is not a global history (which I think is both undesirable and impossible), but the discipline of art history itself, now faced with the task of providing the means to address as many histories as possible nearly enough in their own terms to permit new intercultural discussion.187

In his review of the book Elkins heightened his tone of the Western ownership of art history, further entrenching himself in the position on the irredeemable Westernness of the discipline of art history. He praised Summers’ tackling of world art history—“[f]ar and away the most pressing problem facing the discipline of art history”188—but expressed considerable consternation at the underlying premise of his approach:

The question for a world art history modeled on Summers’s [sic] is whether that universality (given, for the sake of argument, that it exists) can make effective contact with the “specific ways” that it is formed.189

Elkins held that any attempt at positioning a universal concept as a master trope for a single language of art risked losing historical specificity, and that any non-historical conceptual analysis such as Summers’ (an analysis that sought a conceptual equalizer across world art traditions without the aid of history’s chronology or its other “institutional habits”) resulted in a certain misalignment from historical narratives.190 Yet Elkins’ most pronounced critique was his rejection of Summers’ claim of the neutrality of the specific concept of “space” in

187 Ibid., 12.

188 Elkins, Review of “Real Spaces,” 280.

189 James Elkins quoting David Summers. Ibid., 376.

190 Elkins betrayed himself as a traditionalist in his need for the narrative and chronological backbones of mainstream art historical analysis: “It is conceivable that even though the day-to-day writing of art history calls for analyses such as Summers’s [sic], the reverse is not true, and art historical writing may not take nourishment even from those conceptual analyses that grew out of art historical writing…it will be interesting to see if Summers’ book is taken as a facilitator for world art history. The reception of other conceptually based works, including George Kubler's Shape of Time and Gombrich's Sense of Order, remain problematic in that regard.” He concluded: “Whenever [Summers] implies that a concept can be used to speak about art throughout the world, Summers risks—as he knows very well—losing historical specificity. I recognize both the allure and the problematics of this conditional release from art history…. Art history seems to engender conceptual meditations and abstractions but does not always take them as nourishment.” Ibid., 376.

77 service to a world art history. According to Elkins, “space” was a wholly Western idea: the conceptualization of objects in spatial terms held neither the equivalent intellectual weight nor the parallel conceptual privilege in world art traditions across the globe. Further, and perhaps most damning, the terms “space” and “fracture” described not only Western-origin concepts but persisted as concepts accepted by the discipline of art history precisely because they were Western. While Elkins conceded that by including a selection of works from across space and time Summers had widened and even extended the discipline’s breadth of works for consideration, he argued that in seeking to “construct a single intellectual edifice”191 for all the world’s art Summers had failed to achieve convincing grounds for the disciplinary extension he had sought.192 The resulting world art history was thus not a denial of the West but its very opposite: the full extension of Western thinking including all attendant Western baggage and inherent biases, and nothing more than a “Eurocentric attempt.”193 These and Elkins’ later ideas on the Westernness of the art historical discipline would prove influential on the next phrase of the debate, which included much more focused attempts to address the perceived shortcomings of the discipline only occasionally by way of its narrative.

191 Ibid., 377.

192 Also implied in his critique was a further entrenchment of Western norms: in rejecting a specific universalizing concept and casting doubt on the use of universals generally, Elkins, by extension, denied the viability and even the possibility of a non-chronological solution to the problem of organizing a grand narrative of art.

193 Ibid. Elkins offers three reasons for the failed approach: 1) the concept of space is too easily conflated with personal senses/experiences of space—which are the “real spaces,” Elkins asks; 2) non-spatial “space” is under- considered in the whole of visual arts; and 3) space is often unconsciously ingrained in “ways we cannot conceptually manage.” Ibid., 376.

78

Phase Three: Theorizing and Refining Approaches

While in North America experiments with narratives capable of replacing Gombrich’s

“one story of art” assumed the fore—narratives seeking to tie all the world together, ranging in concern from the “multiplication” of the traditional art historical narrative to its

“intersection” with parallel and multiple histories, and, eventually, its full reconceptualization in spatial terms—many European scholars wrote extensively on the methodical-theoretical possibilities of reorienting the disciplinary framework away from its traditional “western cultural perspective” towards a new global perspective, and thereby extending its reach.194 Two in particular, Kitty Zijlmans195 and Wilfried van Damme,196 have collaborated extensively on the development and application of concepts and approaches capable of shifting the traditional monocultural study of art to one that is intercultural. While both Zijlmans and van Damme position their research within the intellectual territory of

Onians’ call for World Art Studies—a “new field of study” global in orientation and multidisciplinary in approach197—and in line with Summers’ thinking, they argue that the

194 Kitty Zijlmans, “Pushing Back Frontiers: Towards a History of Art in a Global Perspective,” International Journal of Anthropology 18, no. 4 (2003): 206, https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02447905.

195 Kitty Zijlmans is professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the School of Art History at Leiden University, and director of the Leiden University Institute for the Cultural Disciplines. Her main interests are contemporary art, theory, and methodology. She also focuses on the particular contribution by women to art and culture, as well as on processes of globalization and the increasing role of intercultural dimensions in art and the art world. “Prof. Dr. C.J.M. (Kitty) Zijlmans,” Leiden University Faculty of Humanities, accessed June 25, 2019, https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/staffmembers/kitty-zijlmans#tab-1 and Global Art and the Museum, “Person: Kitty Zijlmans,” accessed January 12, 2013, http://globalartmuseum.de/site/person/242.

196 Wilfried van Damme is a part-time lecturer in the Faculty of Humanities at Leiden University; he was formerly a Visiting Fellow at the University of East Anglia (2000) and a Visiting Professor of African Art at the University of Ghent (2005–2013). Between 2010 and 2014 Van Damme served as Extraordinary Professor at the University of Tilburg in the Netherlands. While his research focus is World Art Studies, he is also interested in the historiography of the Western scholarly interest in art and aesthetics outside the West. “University Lecturer Wilfried van Damme,” Leiden University Faculty of Humanities, accessed June 25, 2019, https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/staffmembers/wilfried-van-damme#tab-2.

197 Onians, “World Art Studies,” 206–9.

79 discipline’s best opportunity for advancing a non-Eurocentric world art history lies in its identification of “underlying concepts of art”198 capable of locating “universalist and relativist departure points.”199

In this shift, Zijlmans and van Damme departed from Zijlmans’ earlier research focusing on the deployment of World Art Studies as “comparative art history” in which she advocated for “not a single clear-cut approach, but a broad area of research where a more integral, comparative study of global art and material culture is sought;”200 specifically, a focus on the development of “a theoretical frame of reference for studying art throughout the world” wherein a “network of relevant disciplines” cooperate in bringing together a “number of perspectives” in seeking “affinity and analogies” across cultures in order to recognize the reality of “interaction, exchange and influence.”201 Anticipated in Zijlmans’ comparative approach is the belief, much like Summers, that a “common language” for art history was needed. New, however, and inspired by Onians’ call for World Art Studies, Zijlmans also saw the importance of emphasizing connection across world art traditions albeit in service of comparisons: “It is worth seeking affinity and analogies with other cultural areas because cultures are not autonomous, they are mutually connected and—on certain points—they can be compared with each other.”202

198 Zijlmans, “Pushing Back Frontiers,” 203.

199 Ibid., 208.

200 Ibid.

201 Ibid., 205–6, 208.

202 Ibid., 208.

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The emphasis Zijlmans placed on the role of connection and exchange in studying art in a global perspective would persist in her later collaborations with van Damme, and would be refined into two threads: the notion of intercultural comparative analysis in which a

“conceptual apparatus that is ‘culturally neutral’”203 is employed (the project of Summers’

Real Spaces); and the related phenomenon of “interculturalization in the arts” wherein artistic exchanges between cultures taking the shape of “influences that are exerted by one culture or tradition on another...the mutual artistic cross-fertilization that takes place between two or more such analytical entities” are examined.204 In each thread, Western art history’s long- standing preoccupation with acculturation—the one-way traffic of influence—is rejected in order to investigate a new way of viewing the world: a reciprocal two-way process of cultural and artistic exchange via a flexible model of centres and peripheries.205 Joined with Onians’ original focus on shaping an interdisciplinary understanding of the biological origins of art and combined with a sharpening of his idea of the discipline’s necessary expansion in order to achieve “global coverage across time and space” (articulated by Zijlmans and van Damme as a “spatiotemporal extension” of the existing discipline in order to counter its parochial focus on the arts of the Western tradition),206 Zijlmans and van Damme’s conception of

World Art Studies worked to construct a new global frame for the study of world art.207

203 Zijlmans et al., “Art History in a Global Frame,” 223.

204 Ibid.,” 223–4.

205 This model denies one fixed centre with a “hierarchically-subordinated periphery,” or the model of ‘the West and the rest’. Zijlmans, “Pushing Back Frontiers,” 208.

206 Wilfried van Damme, “Introducing World Art Studies,” in World Art Studies: Exploring Concepts and Approaches, ed. Kitty Zijlmans and Wilfried van Damme (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2008), 54–55.

207 Zijlmans’ definition of World Art Studies: “not a single clear-cut approach but a broad area of research where a more integral, comparative study of global art and material culture is sought.” Zijlmans et al., “Art History in a Global Frame,” 208.

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In response to these turns in the World Art History debate, Elkins translated his earlier and very practical arguments regarding the inalienable Westernness of the art historical discipline (its master narrative, roots and origins, and intellectual tradition) into a series of probative questions capable of serving as a discursive platform in support of a wide and robust discussion on the proposed transformation of art history into World Art History.

His strategy served a number of purposes. Not only did it change the direction and tenor of the debate by pushing the discussion onto more subjective terrain—one with a high tolerance for opinion and argument (and a stark contrast to the debate’s previous adherence to firm methodological and process-oriented grounds)—but it also effectively changed the question away from “Can we invent a World Art Studies?” to “Is art history global?” In other words, focus was diverted away from the mechanics of change, specifically the array of concepts and approaches advanced to date, to the discipline’s appetite and capacity for transformation.

A second purpose behind Elkins’ probative questions lay in the rhetorical nature of each. While presented as seemingly simple binaries, each question implicated a wide range of topics and issues enabling Elkins to explore the complexities of his thinking without necessarily revealing his position (or, at least, delaying the moment of its reveal) thus reinforcing his impartiality (or, at least, the appearance of impartiality). Lastly, by initiating arguments and raising concerns within a system of communication exchange in which he set the rules for engagement, Elkins crafted a new role for himself in the World Art History debate: while previously he was but one voice amid a number of scholars, Elkins now became the discussion’s host and, most importantly, its moderator.

As a means for once again establishing the discipline as Western (a precondition for his ultimate argument surrounding the effects a turn to world art history would have on the

82 discipline of art history), Elkins steered the discussion towards the question of the discipline’s globalism—the “worldwide conditions and prospects of art history”208—using it as an opportunity to weigh art history’s options for transformation against the costs, and lay bare his prediction for the dispersal of the discipline. It was a similar intellectual path to his earlier arguments around the standard story of art’s inseparableness from the Western story, yet this time the focus was the discipline proper. In Is Art History Global? Elkins began by asking whether as an “enterprise”—the sum of its methods, concepts, and purposes—the discipline of art history had a recognizable shape wherever it was practiced. After presenting evidence on both sides of the question he resolved that arguments in favour of a globalized art history were more compelling, and that art history was indeed a single, fairly cohesive enterprise of basic assumptions, purposes, critical concepts, and narrative forms no matter where it was practiced in the world.209 Further, he found that by and large no matter how far it had travelled, the discipline remained Western. Concluding that art history was ubiquitously and hegemonically Western, and that only Western art history “counted” as

208 Elkins, “Can We Invent a World Art Studies?,” 107. In his reference to a globalized art history, Elkins imagined some kind of worldwide discipline commensurable with Onians’ concept of World Art Studies yet phrased as a question: whether across languages, cultures, and time the world’s art was or could be studied as a single global enterprise without betraying its shape. Elkins, “Art History as a Global Discipline,” 3–23.

209 A conclusion Elkins supports by demonstrating Western art history’s hegemony in the areas of teaching, publication, writing, and methodology. He draws upon four areas of evidence to assert that art history is not only a Western discipline, but that the Western discipline is becoming global: considering the countries where art history is taught it is still very much a North American and western European phenomenon (for this and his other conclusions Elkins references the statistics drawn from a University College Cork database begun in 2004 under his direction: 516 art history departments in Europe and North America compared to 264 across the balance of the world); the art historical publications of Western authors is widely circulated and held in international databases while in the opposite direction there is a dearth; despite an increase in non-Western subjects, the canon of the one story of art persists in most art historical writing as “variations on the basic model;” and regarding methodology, formal art historical theory is spreading ensuring a consistent disciplinary methodology. James Elkins, “Canons and Globalization in Art History,” in Partisan Canons, ed. Anna Brzyski (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 55–73. From these statistics Elkins draws a troublesome conclusion for world art history: that the “standard Western story is the backbone of the discipline.” Elkins, Is Art History Global?, 151.

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“real” art history (with all other practices something “else”), Elkins turned his attention to its

“suitability” for the study of art outside of Europe and North America.

Elkins’ next question was very specifically targeted: he asked not only whether across languages, cultures, and time the world’s art could be uniformly studied by way of a globalized art history, but whether, if at all, there could exist a globalized discipline competent for the study of all art everywhere—either Western, or, as was being proposed, as world art history—that did not betray the very essence of the discipline as it had come to be known in the West.210 In other words: could a world art history exist that did not betray the discipline’s founder—the West? On this question Elkins found that in order for world art history to engage fully with art history—in order for it to translate the discipline outside of the Western paradigm and into a globalized context by way of “the most promising and intellectually difficult”211 approach: an art history that, in addition to finding non-Western concepts to guide its interpretation of artworks, sought to simultaneously “avoid Western interpretative strategies” for the result of a “[s]cholarship that is attentive to non-Western concepts and methods”212—the resulting non-Eurocentric narrative would entail such a

210 Ibid., 3–5.

211 Five principal approaches are presented in order of increased radicalism, with the first betraying the risk that plagues and prompts Elkins to necessarily embrace world art history: the possibility of art history remaining unchanged as it moves into world art (which is seen as inevitable). In this “de facto position” art history will augment traditional subject matter with new material and “trust” that organic changes in the discipline’s interpretative methods and politics will result. The move towards new narratives will result in more global conversations but the discipline’s “sense of itself” would remain intact with non-Western art “dispersing.” Denying the opportunity of world art history, art history will “once again” shut itself off from the most interesting intellectual discussions of the time. Elkins, Review of “Real Spaces,” 377–88.

212 Western methodologies as well as Western terms, categories, and critical concepts would be avoided in this model. Ibid., 378. Elkins states that one way world art history might “deserve its name” is if local practices were to reach deeper into the discipline to achieve methodological connections across time and space (connections deeper than iconography and style which ought to remain part of local practice) which he calls a “worldwide set of practices identifiable as art history.” Elkins, “Art History as a Global Discipline,” 22–23.

84 significant epistemological shift that it would oppose the “traditional” discipline and represent a substantial threat.213 His reasoning lay in his estimation of the discipline’s deep roots and his own loyalty to the discipline:

I think the methods, concepts, and institutions of art history exert a tidal pull. We hardly know how to think about art history without them…I do not think that anyone has invented effectively new ways of thinking about art in relation to history that can be recognized as ways of thinking about art’s history. We are not as inventive as we like to think, and we are not as free.214

Indeed, for Elkins the outstanding issue in the proposed transformation of art history into

World Art History rested with the question of Westernness weighed down by art history’s methodologies, institutions, and terms:

Art history, as it currently is practiced is itself certainly an impediment to thinking about worldwide ways of telling art’s history. The roundtable conversation in Is Art History Global? kept to questions recognizable as art history, but…some things can’t be solved without thinking more widely. Art history can’t diagnose its Westernness without taking in other perspectives, and without being willing to see itself dissolve.215

As evidence Elkins noted that even the “most reflective, multinational, multicultural writers do not move beyond Western interpretative methods. This is all the more true of art history.

The art of all nations continues to be interpreted using the toolbox of twentieth-century

Western European and North American art history.”216 Elkins’ ultimate conclusion: if art

213 Elkins’ bottom line: “Scholarship that is attentive to non-Western concepts and methods is arguably the most promising and intellectually difficult future for a world art history.” But he adds its inevitable effect: art history will disappear as a field. Elkins, Review of “Real Spaces,” 378.

214 Elkins, “Can We Invent a World Art Studies?,” 116. His solution to the likelihood of the dispersal of the discipline? Elkins has decided to step away from art history beginning in 2016, to focus on experimental writing as art history; see: http://www.jameselkins.com/index.php/component/content/article/16-vita/258-writing- schedule.

215 Ibid., 112–5.

216 Further, “virtually all contributions to the problems of globalism are written by scholars who work in Western-type universities…. We all…attend conferences, publish in refereed journals, attend international conferences, and write according to international protocols. We are all of us inside that bubble…. I am afraid

85 history was indeed global, even if only in pockets of the world large and small, then in these instances the West’s hegemony had prevailed, Eurocentrism was assured, and a genuine world art history was impossible.217

Phase Four: Challenging the Nation-State Thesis

Elkins’ views did not go unchallenged. A growing cohort of interdisciplinary scholars rebutted and refused, in terms of race and Eurocentrism, the positions and arguments of not only Elkins, but also Onians, Summers, and Carrier, as well as a number of other scholars who, in keeping with their thinking, argued that regardless of efforts to “dissolve boundaries” and approach the discipline with a “more open, global perspective” via cross-cultural and comparative approaches, a non-canonical art history was, and continues to be, “impossible both in theory and in practice.”218 For a discipline deeply entrenched in its founding epistemological and institutional structures—formations that taxonomize geography, periodization, and collective identity—these challenges, of which the critics and critiques discussed below represent but a few, signal not only the debate’s broad reach, but the increasingly minority positions of four scholars who, in varying guises and with various implications (yet all with staying influence), were among the first to take up arguments for,

we are all stuck.” Terms too are entangled with the West: “terms are not sufficiently capacious or malleable to embrace world art production…they are moored in the deep waters of the recent Western past.” Ibid., 112–5.

217 Elkins also explores the opposite finding—that art history is not global—and concludes there are equal, consequential difficulties in devising a truly world art history. Elkins, “Canons and Globalization in Art History,” 73.

218 Daniel Savoy, “Introduction,” in The Globalization of Renaissance Art: A Critical Review, ed. Daniel Savoy (Boston: Brill, 2017), 8. Savoy’s introduction references a full bibliography of relevant scholarly examples.

86 but mostly against, a non-Eurocentric world art history with great protections for the West, and assuring its continued hegemony.

There is, for instance, Shigemi Inaga’s sharp counter to Summers’ Real Spaces in Is

Art History Global?—one of several cases he makes as part of his response to Elkins. Asking whether art history is “globalizable,”219 Inaga took up the issue of the (in)translatability of operational concepts—what he claimed was the “exploitation of “relevant” foreign terminologies (always “relevant” for Western scholarly discussion) for the West’s own benefit.”220 Arguing against attempts that perpetuated and defended European understandings of universality, Inaga called for the specificity of cultural spheres when seeking to direct the meta-concepts of time and space globally. It is a critique likewise taken up by Keith Moxey:

“[t]he unquestioned assumption of the discipline of the history of art since its creation…is that time unfolds chronologically, in an orderly manner leading somewhere.”221 Here, evoking Hegel’s notion of the “Spirit” winding its way through the ages and through history,222 Moxey struck out at the European imposition of temporal universalism, and the unquestioning acceptance of its competence and legitimacy:

Just as important as the notion of chronology is the issue of whose chronology we are talking about. Is chronology a universal phenomenon; does the passage of time flow at the same speed in all places? If chronology is, as we suggest, a necessary social construct…then how is time’s passing conceived in non-western cultures, and, most importantly, how can we relate one form of time to another?223

219 Shigemi Inaga, “Is Art History Globalizable? A Critical Commentary from a Far Eastern Point of View,” in Is Art History Global?, ed. James Elkins (New York: Routledge, 2007), 268–76.

220 Ibid., 277.

221 Keith Moxey, “Introduction: Telling Art’s Time,” in Time in the History of Art: Temporality, Chronology, and Anachrony, ed. Dan Karlholm and Keith Moxey (New York: Routledge, 2018), 1.

222 Ibid.

223 Ibid., 3.

87

To these scholars, the protectionist impulse of Elkins and other similar champions of nineteenth century art history was a behaviour likely attributable to “the politics of the discipline”224—an instinctive desire to safeguard art history’s identity lest one compromise its hegemony. Its corollary, however, was the safeguarding (and safekeeping) of the discipline’s troublesome Westernness,225 a strategy stingingly challenged by a leading proponent of transcultural research applied across various disciplinary interests including art history: Monica Juneja.226 Describing Elkins as an “extreme relativist” for the “arrogance” of his claim that in order to stave off Eurocentrism non-European histories ought to avoid

“Western” interpretative frameworks to instead draw upon “indigenous” disciplinary and theoretical models, Juneja took sharp aim at Elkins’ (and the very discipline’s) use of

“discrete cultural units—be they national or civilizational” and such pretences as “influence,”

224 Gupta, “Assessments: Territorial Anxieties, 241. Rather than individuals reflecting on specific intellectual positions, invitees presented themselves via their professional affiliation and seemingly as representatives of the “institutional practice of the discipline itself.” Issues that fell outside the mainstream were abandoned in favour of those that furthered Elkins’ thesis.

225 Evidence of the West’s hegemony lays firmly in Elkins’ perception of the discipline’s global redress representing the “most pressing” issue: while the proposition for a world art history greatly preoccupied the West, for scholars in the so-called peripheries urgency lay rather with issues of relevance and impact, as well as particular challenges located within their own art histories. Ladislav Kesner provided his own account of urgent issues, including the purpose of the discipline, the trivialization of knowledge and values, and the diminishing public for art history. Ladislav Kesner, “Is a Truly Global Art History Possible?” in Is Art History Global? ed. James Elkins (New York: Routledge, 2007), 81. It was Chika Okeke-Agulu who pointed to the West’s self- interest by asking “Whose art history?” was preoccupied with the discipline’s expansion: “Globalism is the most pressing issue of art history only if we mean Western art history;” Africa was concerned otherwise. Chika Okeke-Agulu, “Assessments: Art History and Globalization,” in Is Art History Global? ed. James Elkins (New York: Routledge, 2007), 204–5.

226 Monica Juneja is Professor of Global Art History at the University of Heidelberg. She is also a member of the “Cluster of Excellence: Asia and Europe in a Global Context. The Dynamics of Transculturality” which brings together scholars across various areas of expertise committed to investigating the connected histories of Europe and Asia from the perspective of “transculturality;” that is to say, using not the framework of nation states but rather such frames as religious practice, modern media, the production of knowledge, or art practice— frameworks that transcend boundaries between cultures and regions. “Prof. Dr. Monica Juneja,” Cluster of Excellence: Asia and Europe in a Global Context, University of Heidelberg, accessed June 16, 2019, http://www.asia-europe.uni-heidelberg.de/en/people/person/persdetail/juneja.html.

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“borrowing”, and “transfer” to ignore the many possibilities of a global art history conceptualized transculturally:227

Do concepts not need to be recovered from a broader dynamic between text and practice that have evolved historically? ...Elkins’ extreme relativism does not take account of the ways disciplines and concepts themselves have travelled beyond their points of “origin” and in the process grown beyond their parochial roots. Transcultural histories—of concepts, disciplines, and art practices—unfortunately do not find a place within a program to write an additive world art history by placing entire “cultures” or “civilizations,” both terms whose nineteenth century genealogies remain unquestioned, next to each other as distinct units, treated as incommensurable.228

Indeed, for Juneja the nation-state framework was more than fiction of nationhood but also an affirmative tool used in the project of European hegemony yielding a “flattening” of the processes that connect the world through the circulations and entanglements resulting from the movements and flows of people between places—processes lying at the core of a transcultural world and its natural state of being:

While art history in the West has been practiced as a grand Hegelian narrative of progress, a narrative that emerged with the Enlightenment and the industrial nation- states of the nineteenth century and evolved in tandem with museums to construct a model history of Western heritage, the newly independent postcolonial nations of the non-West assiduously cultivated a narrative framed by the nation, with their museums buttressing through their displays the idea of unique and incomparable achievements of ancient civilizations, now cast as the nation’s heritage.229

With these grounds for challenge underlying key assumptions of the discipline— many of these grounded in the European understandings of universalism revolving around the nation-state as grand category—scholars shifted to a consideration of the discipline’s underlying Westernness safeguarded by firm resistance to a world art history that would

227 Juneja, “Global Art History and the Burden of Representation,” 280.

228 Ibid.

229 Ibid., 281.

89 create a space for the critical (self-)examination of its own institutional structures. Once again it was Inaga, this time recounting his experience as a Japanese scholar operating within art history’s Westernness, who illustrated the West’s hegemony for the benefit of the West by describing the “alienation” and “irony” of a “double refraction” with devastating consequences for Japanese art history:

While in the West you are expected to behave yourself as an authority and connoisseur of Japanese art history, when you return to your own country, you have to manifest your perfect mastery of the latest Western scholarship…. To pretend to be universal, one is forced to deny the cultural value of art (one’s own art, as it were) that has been highly appreciated by one’s own Western teachers.230

The result of this subjugation of art and identity—what Aruna D’Souza describes as a forced

“canting” against “indigenous aesthetic dialects”231—is an “elliptical orbit” with little chance of break: the non-Western art historian becomes little more than an informant for the West.232

In his concluding remarks Inaga summed up the core issue from his perspective:

It is not my intention to accuse [the appropriation of foreign concepts] of Eurocentrism, self-aggrandizement, or auto-justification. But I am not of the opinion that an appropriation of the Other for the benefit of one’s own interest can lead to a G.A.H. [Global Art History]. Is this a limit of G.A.H.?233

The question of “othering” was raised in a second rebuttal in Is Art History Global?, this time from a post-colonial Indian perspective. Atreyee Gupta and Sugata Ray wrote of an initial “great hope” in reading of the sympathies of Summers and Elkins regarding the discipline’s treatment of the non-West, but one that dissipated and quickly replaced with

230 Inaga, “Is Art History Globalizable?,” 253.

231 Aruna D’Souza, “Introduction,” in Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn, ed. Jill H. Casid and Aruna D’Souza (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014), ix.

232 Inaga, “Is Art History Globalizable?,” 254.

233 Ibid., 276.

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“trepidation and a postcolonial unease with the burden of genuineness, authenticity, and purity.”234 They wrote of what they read in each of their writings, which was the exclusion of the non-Western modern, the creole, the hybrid, and the mestiza:

“Genuine” world art history, a project by and for the West, is a meticulous “mining” (in Elkins’s word) of representative concepts and ideas from indigenous knowledge pools, in order to negotiate, in Summers’s words, “differences between the modern West and other cultures … between the modern West and its own foundational institutions as well as its historical consequences.”235

Turning from art history to art historians, and evoking a critique similar to that used by

Inaga, Gupta and Ray defended the appropriation of so-called Western methodologies by such post-colonial scholars as Gaytri Chakravorty Spivak and others—characterized as a

“reliance” and a “dependence,” and heavily criticised by Elkins. The authors wrote: ““we,” the non-West, are asked to perform “our” pure Chineseness or Indianness “based on their

[‘our’] interpretative methodologies from the culture they [‘we’] study.”236 Just as critics before had observed that Elkins behaved as if the discipline of art history was the exclusive property of the West, Gupta and Ray now added the project of Enlightenment itself: “[t]he result is a Euro-American claim to an exclusive sovereignty over products of its own discourses.”237 Rejecting Elkins’ and Summers’ demand for a “pure” non-West, Gupta and

Ray rejected their terms for a world art history as well.

One further challenge among the countless mounted in rebuttal to the World Art

History debate as shaped by Elkins and others is a thinking series bringing to date the

234 Atreyee Gupta and Sugata Ray, “Assessments: Responding from the Margins,” in Is Art History Global?, ed. James Elkins (New York: Routledge, 2007), 349.

235 Ibid.

236 Ibid., 350.

237 Ibid., 351.

91 scholarly dialogue initiated three years earlier with The Art Bulletin’s “Whither Art History” feature. In “The Global Challenge,” a special issue of the transdisciplinary journal the Artl@s

Bulletin devoted to examining the internationalization of art history following the publication of Elkins’ Is Art History Global?, scholars from around the world shared their perspective on the state of the “famous ‘global turn’ in the history of art.” Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel prefaced the collection of essays:

[T]here is no convincing reason that the canon cannot be replaced by something else. People crave narratives, and grand ones at that. Without stories that are clearer, more convincing, and more seductive than those of the canon, the ‘global history of art’ risks leaving the current state of affairs largely intact and being more dislocated and ‘dislocal’ than global.

Where would these new stories come from? We have sought to interrogate actors from the world over who are interested in new and global practices of the history of art. We have looked to discover how they view the state of the discipline which the global history of art has become, and more generally how they consider the artistic and academic globalization that has accompanied its emergence.238

Among the “actors” invited to cast their views was Nuria Rodríguez Ortega, who, writing the from the University of Málaga in Spain, spoke of the global turn as a paradigm shift, one that demanded a “change in attitude and thinking.” She wrote:

This is not only intended to broaden the scope to include other realities, but also to change the way we think about these realities—including the ‘Western’ ones—and redefine our position in the world, our relationship with others, in an increasingly expanded scenario.239

Confronting not the “impossibility” of a world art history in theory and practice but rather the very appetite for disciplinary reconsideration, Ortega moved to clarify the phenomenon of

238 Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, “The Global History of Art and the Challenge of the Grand Narrative,” Artl@s Bulletin 6, no. 1 (2017): Article 9: 3, 5. The Artl@s Bulletin is devoted to spatial and transnational questions in the history of the arts and literature; see: https://artlas.huma-num.fr/en/.

239 Nuria Rodríguez Ortega, “Art History and the Global Challenge: A Critical Perspective,” Artl@s Bulletin 6, no. 1 (2017): Article 3: 12.

92 the intersection of twenty-first century globalization with the discipline of art history: “[t]he critical point of the globalization (or the global turn) of our times is not to ‘expand’ or

‘integrate’ (which remains a colonial point of view) but to ‘cohabit’ and live together.”240 Yet despite this optimism, when asked what the most important challenge facing the international field of art history today, Ortega tunneled to the very core of the critiques of Onians,

Summers, Elkins, and Carrier and expressed her greatest concern: “if the global is a framework of thought created by Western culture to meet its own drives and needs, could the global turn become a new instrument of Westernization?”241 It was a question that drove to the very heart of the World Art History debate.

World Art History as Theoretical Discourse

Within this broad chronological outline of the World Art History debate two sets of art historical practices can be discerned intersecting with three interlocking narrative threads: while in terms of focus of analysis and attendant approach the North American reception of and response to the proposal for a world art history differs significantly from the thinking of scholars trained within the intellectual boundaries of continental Europe, dialogical narratives of progress, loss, and return link efforts across scholarly practices to engage with the risks and merits of a World Art Historical approach.242 Although these constructs are important for gaining an understanding of the ways in which embedded assumptions intersect with wider

240 Ibid., 13.

241 Ibid., 19.

242 These themes are adapted from Clare Hemmings’ analysis of historical feminist writing wherein she argues that over the past couple of decades across a number of feminist journals themes of progress, loss, and return have come to dominate Western feminist theory. Clare Hemmings, Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011).

93 institutionalizations of the discipline specifically and scholarship generally, in some respects they belie the intellectual complexity of the World Art History debate and the ensuing response of and impact on the North American art historical enterprise. Nevertheless, an appreciation of the role that differences in art historical practices play in the formation of

World Art Historical schools of thought, and an awareness of the discursive power of narrative to collect and define ideas central to the proposed transformation of art history to

World Art History represent useful departure points for the more nuanced analysis of the discourse of World Art History in the chapters that follow.

In a little over a decade the World Art History debate progressed from one oblique proposal originating in the UK to a robust discussion encompassing much of the English- speaking world—and, as will be shown, one deeply implicated in the global contemporary.

Baited by the prospect of the Western-facing discipline of art history finally accepting a redress of its disciplinary roots scholars debated the question of whether, whatever its guise—as art historical writing taking the shape of grand narrative, as theory (either comparative or intercultural), or, as will be explored in subsequent chapters, as scholarly and museological practice—World Art History was still art history. There was little agreement.

In North America Elkins maintained that any attempt at “worlding” would result not only an unrecoverable loss of disciplinary integrity but an erosion of the art history’s very credibility.

Carrier held a more malleable position yet concluded that a progressive alternative narrative was not yet possible due to an uneven disciplinary landscape. Summers, too, argued his way through the puzzle-problem of narrative by conceptualizing a neutral antidote, but his proposal attracted the criticism of Elkins who felt Westernness was in fact not evaded but only further entrenched. In Europe, in a counter to the nation-state and where the focus of

94 scholars remained on transnational discourses,243 Zijlmans and van Damme based their proposal on a return to the whole of the world across time in order to effect a spatio-temporal extension of the existing discipline.

Yet were all scholars debating the same topic? In order to understand the depths of

Onians’ question—whether World Art History was still art history—a closer look at a number of key aspects of the debate is necessary in order to outline the intellectual premises upon which the proposal for World Art History was scaffolded, constructed, and mobilized.

Once again largely following chronology but organized here around three themes—the various ways World Art History is being debated in the twenty-first century: as intellectual formation, field of study, or grand narrative; as world, or rather global art history; and as a

(Western) global enterprise—these outlines inform a series of three interconnected discursive platforms that together form the theoretical discourse of World Art History.

Art History, The Study of Art, and the History of Art

At the heart of Onians’ call for a worldwide perspective was the contention that

Western traditional approaches to the history of art were inadequate for the study of objects from “all regions of the globe and from all periods,”244 and that a new theory of art was required—one that could overcome the discipline’s Eurocentric origins and expand its

243 See: Matthew Rampley et al., eds. Art History and Visual Studies in Europe: Transnational Discourses and National Frameworks (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 1–2. In other words, a focus on the impact of the national context on the whole of the discipline in turn allows for a refocus on Europe in a wider frame. In this regard Rampley acknowledges the efforts of CIHA.

244 John Onians, “World Art Studies,” 206.

95 competence beyond a narrow understanding of a canon of Western objects.245 But it is important to note that while Onians identified many of the shortcomings of the “single discipline of Western art history”246 and sought with his proposal for World Art Studies to directly address these (Eurocentrism, but also a narrow definition of art and national priorities, among others), the focus of his theory was not the discipline of art history (the intellectual formation) but the very specific frame of “renewing” the study of art (the field studied by the discipline).247 In contrast to many scholars who would engage with his proposals, Onians was interested not in expanding or repairing what he judged to be the

Western-centred discipline of art history founded uniquely for the study of Western art, but in advancing a new, neutral theory that could, at last, contain and explain the world’s art.248

James Elkins was among the first scholars to respond to Onians’ distinction. He saw

Eurocentrism not a something to be overcome or innately undesirable, but as necessarily embedded in the discipline—as intractable. His contribution to the World Art History debate introduced a third focus, one separate from yet simultaneously implicated in the discipline’s intellectual formation. In Stories of Art, a text Elkins likened to a number of contemporary efforts to “put the world in a book”249—narrative experiments in addressing the discipline’s

245 Onians described these as understanding the influence of educational, social, political, economic, religious, philosophical, technical, as well as other factors. Ibid., 208.

246 Ibid.

247 Onians articulates this distinction for him in his later contribution to the first issue of the journal World Art: “World Art, Ways Forward, and a way to escape the ‘autonomy of culture’ delusion,” 126. Griselda Pollock’s clarification is also useful: ‘Art History’ refers to the institution and discipline (the intellectual formation) that studies a field, the ‘History of Art’. Pollock, “Whither Art History?,” 9.

248 Onians, Compression vs. Expression.

249 A phrase attributed to John Onians during the Clark Art Institute conference on the theme of art historical writing entitled “Compression Versus Expression: Containing and Explaining the World’s Art” held April 6–8,

96 current state and shaping it to fit the world—Elkins explored the history of art as grand narrative. But Elkins’ text stood apart from other attempts to fit the world in a book in one very important way. While purporting to investigate how to incorporate non-Western stories into the story of art, Elkins’ trajectory of reasoning remained focused rather on a very specific argument: namely, the question whether a viable alternative to the “Western” story of art—“the” story of art—indeed existed. Elkins could not help but find against this question for he linked the shape of the grand art historical narrative—the standard story of art performed in books and in classrooms through its avatar, the survey—with the discipline of art history itself. According to Elkins, if the survey—the “basic framework” for the discipline and its “backbone”250—was tampered with too much, a parallel and concurrent incoherence effected on the discipline. For Elkins, writing was the true test of any proposal for disciplinary expansion: “The only answer is to write art history, concentrating on the works and the ideas.”251 Indeed, Elkins conceived of the art history survey as both necessary guide and destination: it at once formed the basis upon which the very education of the art historian was built, and simultaneously held the key to the discipline without which art history would quickly unravel. And by focusing his argument on the discipline’s most recognizable, outward-facing discourse—its narrative persona—and conflating it with the intellectual formation of art history—the discipline itself—Elkins positioned himself as the champion of

2000, as quoted by Elkins, Review of “Real Spaces,” 379. Elkins cites Summers’ Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (2003) and Onians’ Atlas of World Art (2004) as two such attempts.

250 Elkins, Stories of Art, 130, 151. Elkins argued that in parts of the world that relied on translated versions of Western texts using Western models such texts are so influential and so formative that they shaped the whole of an art historian’s education, and in turn the discipline as developed: “To me, it is hard to overestimate the importance of the standard “story of art.” James Elkins, “The Art Seminar,” in Is Art History Global? ed. James Elkins (New York: Routledge, 2007), 124.

251 Elkins, Stories of Art, 85.

97 a narrative (and an art history) that was at once no longer tolerated but, at the same time, in

Elkins’ view, irreplaceable.

World Art History or Global (Art) History?

While the term “world art history” has appeared throughout art’s history—beginning in the 1800s it referenced one universal art history—it was only later, in the early 1980s, that it began appearing in the titles of popular North American survey textbooks carrying new meaning: that of including art from around the world.252 While never completely uprooting from its epistemological beginnings, the term emerged quietly in the context of the World

Art History debate of the last two decades, and has evolved several times in both meaning and implication.

It was Elkins who first used the key phrase “world art history”—only once, in

Stories—to describe a book seeking to survey the world’s art; that is, large, one-volume art history textbooks that treat post-secondary students as key audience.253 One year later, David

Summers, in his book Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western

Modernism,254 introduced the phrase as the basis for reimagining the discipline of art history; he wrote: “‘World Art History’...is not a global history (which I think is both undesirable and

252 In 1982 Honour and Fleming released their narrative revision of Gombrich’s The Story of Art (1950); the text was evaluated on the basis of its world coverage: “A World History of Art means what it says. This book begins with the limestone figure of the Woman from Willendorf...and ends with a contemporary Japanese house; and if it does not, as advertised, allocate quite half its space to non-western art, it gives considerably more than a third.” Peter Burke, “A World History of What?” Art History 6, no. 2 (1983): 214, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8365.1983.tb00807.x.

253 Elkins, Stories of Art, 85.

254 Elkins had read a much more elaborate, pre-publication version of the manuscript that “stood a good foot and a half” on his desk, but it is unclear whether the key phrase “world art history”’ had yet been decided for the subtitle. Elkins, Review of “Real Spaces,” 374.

98 impossible), but the discipline of art history itself, now faced with the task of providing the means to address as many histories as possible nearly enough in their own terms to permit new intercultural discussions.”255 It is significant to note that when Summers posited a term in opposition to world art history—global (art) history—and assigned it meaning in context—one coherent (art) historical narrative: a sweeping story of all the world’s art narrated together and sequentially (as Elkins was seeking to do)—he separated his thinking from Elkins: while Elkins was in search of a satisfying narrative structure through which to frame an inclusive and comprehensive story of art, Summers, like Onians, was interested in the development of a new theory upon which to explore the world’s art.

For Summers, no matter the organizational principle, one multicultural narrative could never amount to a world art history; the term evoked, rather, an intercultural perspective and a means by which to study art history in a global perspective; Summers wrote: “a scheme that permits the address of a great array of specific cultural choices, patterns, and traditions...not possible with the analytic and interpretative tools presently available.”256 In his approach to a world art history, Summers was joined by a small group of

European scholars. Kitty Zijlmans picked up on principal difference between the troublesome implication of homogeneity imbedded within a world art history, and what it truly meant to study art history globally; she wrote, “World art history for me is not an end in itself but an attitude, an awareness of the complexity and interrelationships of art production

255 Summers, Real Spaces, 12.

256 Ibid., 13.

99 and reception worldwide. My contribution to the debate will be the exposition of an intercultural perspective for the study of art as a global phenomenon.”257

When in 2008 David Carrier published his “prolegomena” in direct conversation with and in continuation of Elkins’ ideas on the challenges of an inclusive art history, he adopted the phrase “world art history” to represent his interest, namely, the design of a narrative formula that could explain the world.258 In A World Art History and Its Objects, Carrier sought to write a world history of art by intersecting the timelines of China, India, Islam, and

Europe—a multicultural, rather than monocultural art history.259 In contrast to Zijlmans, and like Elkins, Carrier believed that narrative, and not theory, was the way forward, and in line with the Western world’s deference for linear storytelling, proposed a narrative formula based on parallel histories intersecting a key historical moments. When unable to incorporate all the world, he attributed the limitations of his approach to a gap in scholarship: Carrier believed that only once had all cultures written their own narrative histories could a world art history—a “full account of the interrelationships of visual cultures”—be crafted.260

257 Kitty Zijlmans, “Assessments: An Intercultural Perspective in Art History: Beyond Othering and Appropriation,” in Is Art History Global? ed. James Elkins (New York: Routledge, 2007), 290.

258 Carrier addressed critics who argued “[a] totalizing world history...is an entirely European concern; thanks to identity politics...we should recognize that such a history is impossible to write.” His attempt admitted numerous limitations but focused on the possibilities: “I call upon future scholars to develop a world art history.” Carrier, A World Art History and its Objects, xxvi.

259 While Carrier focused on a multiplicity of traditions and the shared relationships between them (the discipline of history served as model and the method of philosophical debate was intended to yield progressive thinking), he placed objects secondary to narrative, and held the Western approach to storytelling—narrative— as normative across all cultural traditions. This contrasted Summers’ core approach, which sought to overcome any and all Western tropes by harnessing what he argued were universalizing concepts within which objects were primary. Elkins attempted various approaches, beyond these two, as test cases; none satisfied him.

260 Carrier, A World Art History and its Objects, xiii. Carrier went further to address the challenges of writing a world art history: “no one could master the commentaries devoted to art in China, Europe, India, and the Islamic world. Philosophers and cultural historians who write about the politics of multiculturalism do not usually also seriously study art history. Introductory texts surveying world art history are creations of

100

The wake of implications flowing from the one phrase “world art history”—including the old idea of one universalizing narrative, a product or a “thing” that is the story of art; and the new one, a means by which to finally come to terms with art from around the world (a method or approach, a new theory of art)—represents a significant divergence in the debate.

Complicating this multiplicity of implications was the introduction of “global art history” as a synonym for world art history as a universalizing narrative. Over time several scholars began to interchange “global” for “world,” seemingly based on personal preference, but moving more systematically to the term “global” when questions of economic, material, and cultural exchange—the factors of globalization—were at play.261 Simultaneously, the phrase

“global art history” was substituted for “world art history” as a means of distancing ideas on new approaches to the history of art from the previous ones associated with a universalizing narrative, and to denote a new methodological approach. As such, a “global art history” came to be used in reference to the challenge presented by frameworks required by a globalized world: the act of “globalizing art history.”262

committees, for no one knows enough to write a full account.” Carrier goes further: “As yet, it is too early to write a full visual history of all cultures. A full narrative of art covering China, Europe, India, and the Islamic world would be a very fat book.” Ibid., xxv.

261 In his reflection on world art history wherein he argued for the methodological soundness of a geography of art in the cross-cultural approach to art history, Kaufmann drew a distinction between writing a world or a global art history: when questions of economic, material, and cultural exchange are at play—globalization— then the choice is made to refer to a global art history. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, “Reflections on World Art History,” in Circulations in the Global History of Art, Studies in Art Historiography, ed. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Catherine Dossin, and Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), 34.

262 Here Whitney Davis’ analysis serves to clarify: “going-global in art history” references attempts at an updated survey of arts from around the world while “worlding art in art history” signals a methodological project making sense of the what, where, and when of art worldwide (versus an empirical one where the concern is what art, where and when). For Davis “worlding” art history involves the difficult task of moving an already global art history (wide, inclusive, non-Western) into “new art worlds of study;” namely, “to draw as much on non-aestheticist or non-historicist traditions in European thought about vision, making, or representation...as non-European traditions of thought about art, beauty, or ‘making [things] special’.” Whitney Davis, “Comment: World Without Art,” Art History 33, no. 4 (2010): 712.

101

(Western) Art History as a Global Enterprise

Despite this looseness in terminology and a significant range in attendant meaning according to the focus and concern of scholars, a sharpened question arose from the debate that divided the interests of theorists. “World art history, as a discourse or as a narrative, claims competence as being a method suitable for discussing art regardless of its age or provenance,” wrote Belting. He went further, isolating the older, nineteenth-century idea to reveal a new thread targeting the discipline itself: “we encounter today a new debate about world art history, in the sense of a world wide competence of the Western discipline of art history.”263

It was Elkins who led this frame of the debate. While in Stories he asked whether there was a viable alternative to the familiar story of art (recall that he concluded there was but one story, inseparable from the West and the discipline of art history itself), in Is Art

History Global?264—an examination of the shape or shapes of art history across the world via an analysis of the discipline’s principal methodologies, scholarly outputs, canon of artists, and narratives265—Elkins asked whether the “methods, concepts, and purposes of Western art

263 Belting, “Contemporary Art as Global Art,” 5.

264 The third volume in The Art Seminar, a series intended to address the most challenging subjects in art writing; each volume is based upon a transcription of a roundtable conversation subsequently edited by participants. In this title, although the leading question was presented as an either/or (art history is either global, or it is not), Elkins’ method of discovery and conclusions were based on an assessment of the degree of the discipline’s globalization: if deemed to be a global enterprise, the discipline would comprise of a worldwide set of practises (methods, form of the text, questions) identifiable as art history; if not, if art history was in fact divided into local practises, varying from one place to another, it could be said that the discipline had globalized. The resulting scenarios—a (single) global enterprise, or a globalized (dispersed) discipline—could both be reached from the same question. Elkins, Is Art History Global?, 4–5, 21.

265 Achieved conversationally through “ten informal talking points”: five reasons why art history might be considered to represent “several different practices, which vary from one place to another;” and five in favour of it comprising “a single, fairly cohesive enterprise—not one that its homogenous certainly, and not one that is distributed evenly around the world, but a field that shares some basic concepts and purposes.” Ibid., 3–23.

102 history [were] suitable for art outside Europe and North America.”266 In forming this question Elkins focused on art history as an enterprise: he found that the methodologies that persisted across the world were unequivocally Western, and concluded that on balance the discipline was developing globally into “a field whose subject matter changes with its location but whose assumptions, purposes, critical concepts, and narrative forms remain fairly consistent around the world.”267 Having established the global reach of Western art history and declaring globalism art history’s most “pressing” issue,268 Elkins weighed the discipline’s future against the proposal to reimagine art history as World Art History and invited scholars to respond to five potential approaches hinging on the flexibility of the discipline to renegotiate its traditional boundaries in order to accommodate new cultures and practices. Elkins imposed one, key caveat: the transformed discipline must retain its shape

“as art history.”269

Scholars admitted to the existence, and, further, to the pervasiveness of the art history

Elkins described—a discipline of “recognizable form wherever it is practiced”270—but challenged key assumptions underlying Elkins’ sense of the institution and his case for its globalization. Elkins held that it was the “methods of art history”271 that unified the field, and, in light of his finding that the art history that was practiced across the world was

266 Elkins, “Art History as a Global Discipline,” 3.

267 Ibid., 15, 21.

268 Ibid., 126.

269 Ibid., 20.

270 Ibid., 3.

271 Ibid., 15.

103 exclusively based on American and European protocols of scholarship,272 concluded the developing globalization of a Western-type discipline. He then proceeded to then build his proposal for the range of possibilities available to a world history of art upon this conception of the discipline. In scenarios that began with the discipline remaining unchanged and increasing in “radicalness”—from redefining and adjusting and even adopting non-Western concepts, to resisting Western interpretative strategies, and finally, dissolving completely273—Elkins equated the art history that had globalized with the discipline of art history proper, and, in so doing, revealed not only his assumption that there was but one art history—a singular identity, unified and ubiquitous across the world—but his assumption of its inherent Westernness. Elkins wrote: “There are ways of writing about art’s history that developed in India from the seventh century, and in China from the Han Dynasty; but those texts are not recognizable as art history.”274 Elkins offered “proof” that there was only one art history that mattered in the world:

[N]o North American or European university has hired a specialist in Chinese art whose work follows historiographically Chinese interpretative norms. Scholars are chosen for their expertise in Chinese art and their command of the relevant Western scholarly and interpretive protocols.275

272 These protocols were defined by such thinkers as Wolfflin, Baxandall, and Clark, and also Derrida, Foucault, and Benjamin.

273 The five approaches are: 1) art history can remain essentially unchanged as it moves into world art; 2) art history can redefine and adjust its working concepts to better fit non-Western art; 3) art history can go in search of indigenous critical concepts; 4) art history can attempt to avoid Western interpretative strategies; and 5) art history can disperse as a discipline. Elkins, Review of “Real Spaces,” 377–8.

274 He explained: “a simple proof of their distance from current practice is that no art historian who chose to emulate those texts could get a permanent position in a university. None of the Chinese specialists I know who teach in Western universities were hired because of their ability to deploy indigenous historiographic methods; but part of their qualifications would normally be the ability to negotiate the principal Western methods. Elkins, “Art History as a Global Discipline,” 20.

275 Elkins, “On David Summers’s Real Spaces,” 62.

104

The net result of Elkins’ reasoning was the positioning of the art historical discipline of

Western origin and identity as the only legitimate art history. Like the one narrative “story of art,” Elkins’ conception of the one discipline of “art history”—the enterprise developing globally in the twenty-first century—not only relied upon Western methodological approaches, but was Western to its very core; there was no viable alternative: “Perhaps the most surprising fact about worldwide practices of art history is that there may be no conceptually independent national or regional traditions of art historical writing. Chinese art history, for example, demands expertise in very different kinds of source materials and formal concepts, but its interpretative strategies remain very Western.”276

Several scholars challenged Elkins’ assumption that the whole of the discipline was oriented towards the West, and further, was its exclusive property. “Something is not quite right here,”277 wrote Suman Gupta, regarding the discourse developing in response to Elkins’

(Western) art-history-is-global thesis: “[T]his discussion is conducted within a bound disciplinary space, with a presumed acceptance of the priorness and discreteness of the discipline of art history.”278 In addition to stifling disciplinary restraint and further, imposing unproductive disciplinary territoriality, Gupta found that fierce loyalty to the discipline’s received discourse limited the discussion regarding art history’s future and its global responsibilities, and fostered such acute disciplinary guilt that productive debate was

276 Elkins supported his argument: “Chinese art historians, both in China and in universities in the West, study Chinese art using the same repertoire of theoretical texts and sources—psychoanalysis, semiotics, iconography, structuralism, anthropology, identity theory. They frame and support their arguments in the same ways Western art historians do: with abstracts, archival evidence, summaries of previous scholarship, and footnoted arguments.” Elkins, “Art History as a Global Discipline,” 19.

277 Suman Gupta, “Assessments: Territorial Anxieties,” in Is Art History Global? ed. James Elkins (New York: Routledge, 2007), 247.

278 Ibid., 241.

105 crippled: on the one hand, there was an expressed wish for disciplinary progress and innovation, yet, on the other, unquestioned deference to an art history “scaffolded” on its allegiance to the “priorness” of the discipline279—none the least, its core Western identity.

Huw Hallam diagnosed a third issue: the denial and displacement of all other art historical practices. Referencing Elkins’ advancement of a hybrid of two possible approaches to a world art history in which a “consistently non-Eurocentric” art history would result—the avoidance of Western interpretative strategies in conjunction with an attentiveness towards non-Western concepts and methods280—Hallam revealed a significant limitation in Elkins’ conception of a reimagined art history. He wrote:

The very idea of world art history appropriating ‘indigenous critical concepts’ presupposes that these concepts exist and are relevant to art historical inquiry, whilst simultaneously falling outside the realm of art history. To what realm does Elkins suppose that these concepts relevant to art history might belong, if not precisely art history?281

Once again, the question driving the World Art History debate was whether World Art

History remained, at its core, a shift within the discipline of art history or an epistemological break. This aspect would prove key in understanding of how the World Art History debate intersects with the global contemporary.

279 One example Gupta gave from his analysis of the “academic discourse of the seminar”: rather than individuals reflecting on “specific reasonable intellectual positions,” invitees presented themselves via their professional affiliation and seemingly as representatives of the “institutional practice of the discipline itself,” resulting in a positioning that was generalized, and “collective, geopolitically distinct.” Ibid., 238–9.

280 Elkins, “On David Summers’s Real Spaces,” 61, 59–63.

281 Huw Hallam, “On the Politics of World Art History,” emaj 2 (2007): 4.

106

World Art History and the Global Contemporary

When, in his edited volume The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New

Artworlds,282 Hans Belting wrote of a “worldwide contemporaneity without limits” across a

“multiplicity” of art worlds that “coexist and compete” in the global practice of contemporary art to “oppose” and “replace” the colonial history of “world art,” he famously declared the independence of twenty-first century art from the “western privilege of history”:

Today’s art presents itself not only as new art, but also a new kind of art, and art that is expanding all over the globe. Art no longer aims at the avant-garde position of modern art, but presents itself as contemporary, in a chronologically, symbolical, and even ideological sense.283

Taking in evidence the hundreds of biennials worldwide where “traveling curators operate as global agents, present packages of international plus regional art to a cosmopolitan audience in ever-new venues” and in the process “map” identity against a previous “geographical definition of cultures” to now exhibit a new “global mobility of cultures” for a identity that

“escapes” the “racist prejudice of being “different”,” Belting exposed a blind spot in his conception of the global contemporary: namely, his belief and even his investment in the ahistorical nature of contemporary art. At issue was not only Belting’s claim, citing the 1989

Paris show Magiciens de le terre, that “world art” had been replaced by the global practice of

“contemporary art,”284 but also that he, as a scholar centered within its discourse, was fit to make this sweeping declaration.

282 Hans Belting, et al., eds., The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds.

283 Hans Belting and Andrea Buddensieg, “From Art World to Art Worlds,” in The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds, ed. Hans Belting, Andrea Buddensieg, and Peter Wiebel (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2017), 28.

284 See: Belting, “From World Art to Global Art: View on a New Panorama,” in The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds, ed. Hans Belting, Andrea Buddensieg, and Peter Weibel (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2017), 181–2.

107

Claire Farago and others quickly rose up to argue against both the claim and the claimant: “How is the German art historian Belting in a position to declare that a single exhibition staged in the center of European modern art successfully eradicated the effects of centuries of European cultural chauvinism?”285 To make her case Farago evoked the research of Ruth Simbao, a professor of fine arts at Rhodes University, South Africa, who, in writing of the current discourse of “global art”—specifically, her examination of South Africa’s

CAPE Africa Platform, the first ever large-scale contemporary African art exhibition, as

“evidence” for “biennialization” and global expansion—argued that “meaningful global inclusivity and visibility” was but a mirage, and that claims that “new art worlds have been added to the dominant core” were in fact shaped by a “geopolitical perspective that strips away normative visions” and fails to acknowledge the continued “privilege” of the contemporary artworld that continues to exclude the global south.286 Farago vehemently concurred, and espoused the engagement of postcolonial and transcultural approaches to

(necessarily) reinsert the local into historical understandings of discussions of contemporary global art in order to:

[R]eveal the longevity of a universalist art history practiced by white male Europeans of a certain class and stature to rather seek the source of lingering assumptions of geographical determinism and racial or ethnic essentialist in our own current accounts, in order to weed them out, expunge them.287

285 Farago, “Cutting and Sharing the “Global Pie.”

286 Ruth Simbao, “What “global art” and current (re)turns fail to see: A modest counter narrative of “not- another-biennial”,” Image & Text 25 (2015): 261–86, https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC176315. This issue of continued exclusion in the contemporary art world is a topic explored not only by Chin-Tao Wu in “Biennials without Borders?” as referenced in Chapter One’s discussion of “biennialization,” but also observed and digitally visualized with some shocking results with regards to the Whitney Biennial; see: Scott Reinhard, Derek Watkins, Alicia DeSantis, Rumsey Taylor, and Siddharta Mitter, “Mapping the Whitney Biennial,” The New York Times, July 5, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/07/05/arts/design/whitney-biennial- maps.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share.

287 Farago, “Cutting and Sharing the “Global Pie.”

108

Herein Farago argued for the key element of agency in the global contemporary—the

“rights” of its all its actors “excluded from and/or disadvantaged by dominant systems” to

“have a say in announcing when their disadvantage has ended, if indeed it has.”288 But she also called for recognition of the deep implications of World Art History’s examination of the origins of longstanding categories of art, and the identity of art’s makers, to scholars of the global contemporary, and a subsequent (and necessary) rewriting of the history of the past in the present and in line with World Art Historical approaches.

Echoing Farago, but with a specific focus on the study of the visual arts in Canada, is

Concordia University professor Alice Ming Wai Jim, a leading scholar of ethnocultural art history—art historical practice that considers an understanding of ethnocultural diversity within the frame of the national during the transcultural turn. She writes:

Globalization, of the arts and in general, has not rendered indeterminate notions such as national sovereignty, cultural identity, and state power; to account for the complex histories of art by those considered Europe’s others is to interrogate claims as such….acknowledging that the nation, whether as fiction or in material form, remains a significant presence in art history. Surely it could not be said that post-national citizenship or post-national multiculturalism is now de facto (it is not).

Continuing, Jim quotes citizenship education studies professor George Richardson:

[E]ven when regional or national curriculums do make the attempt to tie global identity and citizenship together, the relationship is typically framed as an extension of national self-interest and almost exclusively tied to existing civic structures of the nation-state.289

To this statement Jim asked “[h]ow then might one approach a history of global art?” and immediately responded with her own answer: the way forward, according to Jim, was the more explicit inclusion of the histories of not only so-called non-Western art but also

288 Ibid.

289 Jim, “Dealing with Chiastic Perspectives,” 67.

109 diasporic and Indigenous art for “global art histories”—a “provisional rubric” that “slants the study of globalism in art history” towards a more “attentive politics of engagement” that considers the ways in which cultural identity, described by Arjun Appadurai as a “localized sense of belonging,” and the “contingency” of place, may “shape, resist, or undermine the introduction of world of global art historical approaches in specific national institutional sites.”290 That is to say, to never neglect the local by ignoring the legacies of the art historical institution in the global telling of arts histories.

When, in counter to Elkins and others, Monica Juneja evoked the museum as a site of art historical knowledge-creation—when Juneja claimed that the institution of the museum was so deeply implicated in the project of canonically-sustaining and even reinforcing the nation-state as paradigm: where museums, “buttressing through their displays the idea of unique and incomparable achievements of ancient civilizations, now cast as the nation’s heritage”291—she significantly, and presciently, presented the museum as a site that might, in conjunction with other knowledge-making art historical institutions, also and simultaneously hold the power to rethink art history’s disciplinary frameworks.

This is the examination of the next chapter wherein the practice of World Art History in the North American context is explored via select scholarship that aligns with World Art

Historical theory: new art histories based in part on diasporic, transnational, and transcultural

“models of inquiry…pushing…to reimagine the canon.”292 It is also the project of Part Two –

The Museum wherein two key narrative outputs located within the institution of the museum

290 Ibid.

291 Juneja, “Global Art History and the Burden of Representation,” 280.

292 D’Souza, “Introduction,” viii.

110 are examined for their agency: in the first, a rewriting of art history’s most entrenched narratives constructs, and in the second, a reimagining of its signature narratives of display.

Lastly, in Part Three’s Canadian case study, the links between World Art History discourse and global contemporary art discourse are explicitly connected, revealing that a reconsideration of the nature and location of identity, and self-identity, lies at the heart of any new consideration of a wider frame for the study of art history.

111

Chapter Three: Practicing World Art History

As scholars continued to question the proposed transformation of art history into

World Art History, the circle of debate widened to encompass a second site of art historical knowledge-creation: the application of World Art Historical research principles into scholarship. Here, in research outputs and academic publications that ran in parallel with and in many ways both precipitated and responded to theoretical attempts to reimagine art history’s disciplinary foundations, scholars active in North America put into application key signature moves demanded by the turn to World Art History.

By critically analyzing select scholarship that aligns with World Art Historical theory—studies that range across all world regions and span all of time, and that shift away from the nation-state as the guiding protocol for art historical discovery in order to favour a new paradigm that foregrounds networks of connection and exchange—a number of scholarly practices can be discerned that work to widen the discipline of art history and appreciably respond to the critique of persistent Eurocentrism in the discipline. When these practices are considered together with the discursive platforms proposed in Chapter Two— the various ways World Art History is being debated in the twenty-first century—and when they are measured against Chapter Five’s identification of a number of curatorial practices that engage with a networks of connection and exchange paradigm—how, in the twenty-first century, World Art History is being applied in museums and gallery displays—the sum shapes the key research principles underpinning the discourse of World Art History.

112

World Art History as Scholarly Discourse

A study of the practice of World Art History in the North American context offers an alternative to the conceptual debate outlined in Chapter Two, a debate that in many ways, and to this date, remains unresolved. Despite adhering to a transnational and even a transcultural model, the growing number of practical and empirical studies that trace the

“links and flows...of...people, ideas, products, processes and patterns…[that] operate over, across, through, beyond, above, under or in-between polities and societies”293 neither in part nor as a whole follow a particular narrative formula, rubric, or type. Rather, they share only a resistance to the artificial construct of the nation-state to take as their object of concern units of analyses better able to represent the particular condition of a specific temporal period or geographic frame (or both) in global history. All these studies share in common the three scholarly practices explored below: the extension of space and time, the use of flexible narratives, and the decentring of Europe.

The first scholarly practice characteristic of a turn to World Art History is a widened, global framework achieved through a spatio-temporal extension that collapses borders to view the world as one and connected. This extended framework might take the form of a familiar topic or object of analysis that is broadened, or wherein a new object of analysis is identified and located within a global framespace or worldwide context. Modalities of the local in the form of smaller, more specific, multi-scalar units of analyses framed against a global context—specific places at specific times: world cities, cosmopolitan ports, unique trade routes, intuitive or natural geographic systems of land or water that facilitate

293 Akira Iriye and Pierre-Yves Saunier, quoted in Patel, “Transnational History.”

113 communication across cultures via trade, exchange, or diplomacy often serve as new targets.

Alternatively, a widened framework might simply entail a specific spatio-temporal period within a global system to identify and shape a new network or sphere of influence. To achieve this breadth, multidisciplinary approaches that collapse together such fields as geography and economics, or sociology and cultural studies (among other combinations), and interdisciplinary collaborations wherein teams of specialist researchers coordinate their various areas, are often a requisite of World Art Historical approaches, and bring with them useful and alternative scholarly antecedents as well as new rubrics and models.

A second practice concerns narrative. World Art Historical approaches reject summaries, and work against teleological chronologies and classifications of periods or styles that seek to generalize. Instead, they favour stories that are single in their specificity.

Stories told in a World Art Historical way are sometimes new (consider unexplored research, or new moments in familiar stories that raise an exception), but more often they are simply stories told differently by adopting paradigmatic shifts in thinking on a topic that challenge the accepted master narrative and propose new and alternative storylines that are variable, open, and negotiable. At its heart World Art Historical storytelling is a narrative genre that enables structured flexibility to address the fuzziness of complex scholarship to feed multi- layered interactions between individuals or groups of individuals (rather than simple interactions that are all positive or all negative). While arguably this is something that all good scholarship does, the unique envelope of the narrative story facilitates these trends.

Lastly, World Art Historical approaches respond to the critique of persistent

Eurocentrism by revealing, challenging, and rejecting many of the assumptions silently tethered to the nation-state. By removing the West from the centre, introducing reciprocity

114 and uneven exchanges, proposing new and alternative sources both primary and secondary, and shifting away from homogenization, generalization, and essentialization—monologues of peoples, cultures, and geographies towards rather individualization and nuance in the form of specific case studies, and specific moments in time and space—World Art History challenges Western hegemony with stories that are multi-vocal and multi-perspectival. All three of these scholarly practices are detectable across the seven research trends or themes explored below. Together represent the scholarly practice of World Art History.

The Geography of Art

One first important research area in the scholarly practice of World Art History is a rethinking of the relationship between geography and art. John Onians’ Atlas of World Art

(2004)294 stands as an early attempt to give form to both his theory of a natural history of art and to its wider frame, World Art Studies. This impressive reference text seeks to explain the history of art-making as a worldwide phenomenon across time, geography, and cultures not only by way of the usual narrative, but by systematically mapping data on population centres, major artists, museums and patrons, centres of art production, and trade routes for what has come to be accepted as one of the first attempts at a geography of art.295 While the information presented is not new, its synthesis is. Divided into seven chronological periods

294 John Onians, ed., Atlas of World Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

295 Onians credits Winckelmann as an early proponent of the relation of art to the natural environment in the form of a geography of art, but notes that the approach fell out of fashion in part due to it being associated with Nazi Germany and “partly because the notion that nature might be a constraint on culture offended post-war conceptions of universal freedom.” Onians described his effort: “a first attempt to systematically map the full range of human artistic activity onto the earth’s surface, so illustrating the role of the natural environment in providing both the ecologies that sustained different cultures and the raw materials out of which visually interesting artefacts were wrought.” Onians, Art, Culture and Nature, iv.

115 organized thematically, the text begins in 30,000 BC and on every inhabited continent with subsequent subgroupings discussed in a series of contributing essays written by sixty-eight leading international specialists dubbed “guardians of local traditions”—archaeologists, anthropologists, and art historians—for an interdisciplinary collaboration that enables each specialist to present his or her knowledge in a such a way that it relates to the scholarship of others.296 The attendant maps track the journeys of material resources from extraction to their transformation into artworks and their display across time, geography, and cultures with the goal of viewing the world as one connected space across which humans travelled, collected resources, and made “art”—a term Onians interprets as broadly as possible.

While Onians’ text seeks to collapse borders to focus instead on how and why artworks were “shaped”—a multi-disciplinary approach that takes into account physical geography and climate; the availability of materials, technology, and invention; social, economic, and cultural systems; and also patrons, centres of art production, and trade routes—critics might argue that it falls short of the global aspect of its application across time. Organized into discrete pockets of history, what becomes quickly evident is that as soon as the reader approaches the early modern period maps highlighting trade routes, key centres of art production, materials (and more) increase in such complexity that they cannot

296 Onians explained this interdisciplinary approach: “When art is viewed as a worldwide phenomenon it includes many fields, the knowledge of each controlled by a different group of specialists. There is simply too much disparity in the ways each group deals with its subject for it to be easy to bring them together. Archaeologists are the experts in the earliest arts, anthropologists in the art of modern pre-literate peoples, and art historians in the art of literate peoples….Each group works with such different assumptions that to present them together as such in a single volume would draw as much to their limitations as to their achievements. This is why the Atlas of World Art sets out to offer a new framework, one in which each specialist can present his or her knowledge, but in a way that relates to those of the others…this new framework sets out to avoid categories that depend on assumptions that are cultural…Instead, the categories used are founded as possible in nature…The nature referred to here is one familiar to people of all cultures. It is nature as a set of resources and constraints, principally those embodied in the nature of the earth, of time and man.” Onians, Atlas of World Art, 10.

116 offer the same level of clarity and insight they did in earlier time periods.297 That Onians’ system of analysis cannot apply equally across all time and all places draws attention to certain limitations of his approach. It also presents the opportunity for more targeted studies that employ a signature move characteristic of the turn to World Art History in practice, particularly in scholarship that focuses on the modern world and its beginnings. Namely, studies that employ a narrowed scope to frame a specific spatio-temporal period within a global system as a means of avoiding broad generalizations, and in order to understand nuance in the context of transcultural interactions. One strategy is the shift towards smaller, more specific units of analyses.

Global versus Local

A second strategy used by many scholars is a challenge to the dichotomy between the global and the local culture. One such theorist is Janet Abu-Lughod in Before European

Hegemony (1989),298 an account of a wide and connected Afro-Eurasian system of “world cities” that represented the most sophisticated system of trade the world had ever seen. In her book Abu-Lughod examines the “world economy” of increased economic integration

(international trade) and cultural efflorescence (cultural and artistic achievement, and intellectual productivity) of the Old World of the thirteenth century with players China,

297 This limitation does not necessarily distract from the other valuable information offered, but as time draws closer to a more complex global world, understanding the full context of art production cannot be understood on the same terms. Onians therefore presents a scholarly practice of world art history that while useful and appropriate in certain time periods, does not equally apply to others. A second critique seized by such world art history critics as Elkins and Carrier revolves around the concern for the translatability of the discipline outside of the West—namely, whether art history is global. What of the shape of Onians’ art history? In many respects his attempt begins to feel like unlike the known Western discipline and begs the key question: is what Onians doing art history?

298 Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System AD 1250–1350 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

117

Persia, Egypt, India, and Western Europe—but with no single hegemonic power—and examines why this system faltered by the middle of the fourteenth century in order to understand how, in the sixteenth century, the “modern world system” (as coined by

Immanuel Wallerstein299) was forged with the West as clearly hegemonic. Abu-Lughod argues that several world economies existed in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (Europe was but one of several players, located in the periphery),300 and that there was neither “no inherent historical necessity that shifted the system to favour the West rather than the East, nor...any inherent historical necessity that would have prevented cultures in the eastern region from becoming the progenitors of a modern world system.”301

According to Abu-Lughod, a world-systems approach fails to recognize that there were more similarities than differences between thirteenth-century Old World trading partners; further, it fails to identify that when there were differences, the West lagged behind.

While the prevailing viewpoint has been that the West’s “pulling ahead” in the sixteenth century was the result of unique characteristics of western capitalism, when comparing economic institutions Abu-Lughod found that there were enormous similarities and parallels between Asian, Arab, and Western forms of capitalism including the invention of money and

299 See Wallertsein’s World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).

300 Abu-Lughod’s analysis is similar to that of Fernand Braudel, but in opposition to Wallerstein who asserts that the modern world system began in the sixteenth century. She writes: “The failure to begin the story early enough has resulted, therefore, in a truncated and distorted causal explanation for the rise of the west. I hope to correct this by beginning at an earlier point when the outcome was far from determined. The time between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries marked the transition, and geopolitical factors within the rest of the world system created an opportunity without which Europe’s rise would have been unlikely.” Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony, 20.

301 Ibid., 12.

118 credit, mechanisms for pooling capital and distributing risk, and merchant wealth.302 The

“rise of the West” in the sixteenth century was thus not the result of some internal or innate characteristic of Europe, but rather was made possible due to the opportunity created by the collapse of the previous world system.303 Not only does Abu-Lughod’s work challenge certain Eurocentric assumptions (namely, the assuredness of the West’s hegemony—as new and inevitable304), but it demonstrates that it was neither alleged central processes of globalization, nor preconceived ideas such as nations, regions, or cultures, but rather cities, and, in particular their complex interactions, that prove key in understanding cultural interaction in the thirteenth century. In other words, more than any internal psychological or institutional factor, the role played by modalities of the local in episodes of early cultural encounter—specific places, ports, oceans, trade routes, practices, and the relationships between individuals—and how these modalities subsequently impacted social and economic meaning.

Nancy Um identifies one such specific city and its unique network in The Merchant

Houses of Mocha (2009):305 the port city of Mocha located on the Red Sea coast of Yemen

302 She writes: “The failure to begin the story early enough has resulted, therefore, in a truncated and distorted causal explanation for the rise of the west. I hope to correct this by beginning at an earlier point when the outcome was far from determined. The time between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries marked the transition, and geopolitical factors within the rest of the world system created an opportunity without which Europe’s rise would have been unlikely.” Ibid., 20.

303 The West’s hegemony can be attributed to a vacuum or decline in other areas, like the Middle East—a previous contender for hegemony. Ibid., 12.

304 Like Wallerstein, Abu-Lughod does not take the West’s hegemony for granted. Instead, she works backwards from the hypothesis that there are areas concealed and hidden within that historical narrative; she writes: “in terms of time, the century between A.D. 1250 and 1350 constituted a fulcrum or critical “turning point” in world history, and in terms of space, the Middle East heartland region, linking the eastern Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, constituted a geographic fulcrum on which West and East were then roughly balanced.” Ibid.

305 Nancy Um, The Merchant Houses of Mocha: Trade and Architecture in an Indian Ocean Port (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009).

119 from 1650 to 1750, a period of international renown for its intense Indian Ocean trade activity under Qasimi rule. In contrast to most studies, Um argues against reading Mocha under a regional label, as just another “homogenized or essentialized Arab Muslim city...the unchanging Islamic city with a strong, centralized religious core, a distinct separation between the public and private works, and spatially segregated ethnic quarters;”306 rather,

Um locates Mocha within the rubric of a port city in the same category as Venice or

Bombay. Further, since Mocha was never a European colonial city—European presence in

Mocha was, as Um notes, by way of “privilege,” not political superiority—Mocha ought to be examined as “non-colonial.” The combined rubric positions Um’s study as a unique niche for research that highlights the city for its rich interregional convergences as a coastal “node’ as well as its cosmopolitanism: a “unique story...of a noncolonial port in the age when

European economic and territorial domination was changing the face of trade and authority around the Indian Ocean.”307

While Um focuses on Mocha’s art and architecture, she is not interested in tracking visual connections; rather, by using a network approach with Mocha as a “transregional node”—part of a larger (multiple and overlapping) economic, cultural, and political system to which it belonged and not an “isolated entity defined by the limits of its walls”—Um investigates how trade shaped the city of Mocha from the inside out to create a “visual idiom”: “in its urban form, built environment, and social fabric Mocha must be understood as

306 Ibid., 8.

307 “In the case of Mocha, the visible European trade presence cannot be conflated with local European authority or market primacy, although Europeans did receive certain trade advantages from Mocha’s government.” Ibid., 9.

120 a singular case that responded to specific and social stimuli.”308 In other words, Um argues that the culture of trade shaped the underlying structure of the port city in its orientation, its functionality, and its social hierarchies:

[Trade] merged distant spatial paradigms with local architectural models, contributing to the foreign merchant’s sense of belonging in a faraway city. Essentially, urban structures functioned as spatial tools of transition from one realm to another, allowing those who travelled to make sense of their long-distance journeys and to alleviate the alienation inherently involved in the interactions of cross-cultural trade.309

Um models her text on studies that revolve around the notion that commercial cross-cultural exchange presents most tellingly in art and architecture—in relationships readily visible to the human eye. Also unique is her reliance on alternative historical documentation: a rich narrative of merchant letters and travel accounts generated from the European presence of the

Dutch East India. The result is a new kind of story told through the eyes of Europeans as well as the Arab and Indian merchant community. Also unique in Um’s approach: rather than follow chronology, Um’s text moves from the broad to the specific: from the entire maritime sphere to the smallest unit of study—the city’s inhabitants and buildings.

Using a similar temporal and spatial approach is Stefano Carboni’s Venice and the

Islamic World (2007).310 In this temporary exhibition co-organized by the Institut du Monde

Arabe and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 311 some two hundred works across all media

308 Ibid., 8, 11.

309 Ibid., 12.

310 Stefano Carboni, ed., Venice and the Islamic World, 828–1797 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). The temporal period marks two key events: 828, as the bringing of the relics of St. Mark to Venice from Egypt (Alexandria, then part of the Muslim world) and 1797, the year when the Venetian Republic fell to the French conqueror Napoleon.

311 The exhibition ran from March 27 to July 8, 2007. “Venice and the Islamic World, 828–1797: Exhibition Overview,” Metropolitan Museum of Art, accessed June 27, 2019, https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2007/venice-and-the-islamic-world.

121 narrate one thousand years of “artistic consequence” of interaction with Venice as the centre of Mediterranean trade, and as a commercial, political, and diplomatic hub: during this time a large body of works of art travelled from East to West (and sometimes in the opposite direction) for “diplomatic or commercial exchange or as booty.”312 Dubbed “the hinge,” or the “liquid frontier,”313 for its key geographic location as Christian Europe’s most important interface with the Muslim civilizations of the Near East—a world too often described as “the other” (including the Mamluks of Egypt and Syria, the Ottomans of Turkey, and the Safavids of Iran)—Venice is explored for its careful navigation of its economic dependency on its mercantile relationship with “the East” while at the same time maintaining its position with the other half of her “subsistence”—“the West.”314

Yet contrary to accounts that cross-Mediterranean relationships were “purely antagonistic,” Carboni argues that there were in fact many productive, rewarding relationships across these two seemingly “antithetical worlds.” He writes:

Too much emphasis has been given thus far to Venice’s alignment with the various holy leagues that were established throughout the centuries and on her periods at war with the Grand Turk. As a matter of fact, the times of peace were much longer, capitulations were regularly renewed after the accession of a new ruler, and, even during times of hostility, diplomacy was always hard at work and trade virtually never came to a halt.

312 Carboni, Venice and the Islamic World, 8. One year later, at the “Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration and Convergence” conference, Carboni presented “Mahmud al-Kurdi and His Italian Customer,” an exploration of the reciprocal flow of influence completing the circle from West to East as a complement to this research on Islamic Venice. See: Jaynie Anderson, ed., “Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration and Convergence.” The Proceedings of the 32nd International Congress in the History of Art, 13–18 January 2008 (The University of Melbourne: The Miegunyah Press, 2009).

313 “The city needed to maintain good diplomatic relations especially with the Mamluks and the Ottomans in order to survive and at the same time could not relinquish her role as one of the defenders of Christendom in Europe, which represented the other half of her economic subsistence.” Carboni, Venice and the Islamic World, 15–16.

314 Ibid.

122

Carboni argues that Venice had a different and unique approach to and understanding of the

Islamic world: “It was this almost perfect balance and interaction of religious esprit, chameleonic diplomacy, and an unsentimentally practical mercantile system that tuned

Venice into the most respected trading and political partner in the Near East.”315 Indeed, due to the continuous presence of Venetian diplomats and the prolonged residence of Venetian merchants in the main cities of the Islamic world, Venice developed a “direct, sometimes intimate, knowledge of Muslims’ customs, religion, philosophy, science, technology, and…their arts”316 with many Venetian craftsmen seeking to emulate Islamic styles and motifs, techniques, and media. But Carboni argues that it was neither “Orientalist curiosity” nor fear that prompted Mamluk and Ottoman figures to begin appearing in Venetian paintings: “Venice was the first and in many ways the only European city to understand and appreciate Islamic philosophy and science and to open channels of communication that includes artistic, visual, and technological information.”317

While Um includes alternative perspectives and challenges geo-political boundaries to present a new translocal history, Carboni assumes the role of diplomatic historian to closely follow key relationships, social hierarchies, and cross-cultural entanglements to present a concrete and palpable new reading of a seemingly familiar place and narrative. In fact, much of World Art Historical scholarship involves significant correctives to history

315 Carboni continues: “The city needed to maintain good diplomatic relations especially with the Mamluks and the Ottomans in order to survive and at the same time could not relinquish her role as one of the defenders of Christendom in Europe, which represented the other half of her economic subsistence.” Ibid., 16.

316 Ibid., 18.

317 Ibid.

123 borne by the shift away from any (imagined) political border in favour or wider, more robust spatio-temporal frames that embrace networks over nations.

Trade Networks

Shared between Abu-Lughod and Um is a focus on networks of trade cities. Without exaggeration, as an object of analysis the study of trade networks accounts for the largest volume of World Art Historical practice. Take in example yet another temporary exhibition this time organized and hosted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art318: Amelia Peck’s

Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500–1800 (2013).319 Expanding beyond the scope of the socio-economics of textile trade, Peck tells the story early modern textile trade—silks, cottons, and wools, exotic goods made on one continent for use on another— that travelled between Asia (Japan, China, India), the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and the

Americas in the early modern period. Peck argues that trade textiles “[straddle] not only cultures but the line between artifact and art,”320 serving many purposes beyond meeting such practical needs and functions as dress and bedding. They are thus important not only for their wide economic impact but also for their function as the “primary category of object” that engenders widespread ideas of what is desirable and fashionable and, most importantly,

318 The exhibition ran from September 16, 2013, to January 5, 2014. “Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500–1800: Exhibition Overview,” Metropolitan Museum of Art, accessed June 27, 2019, https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2013/interwoven-globe.

319 Amelia Peck, ed., Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500–1800 (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2013), 3.

320 Asia (Japan, China, and India), the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and the Americas.

124 as status symbols for their owners “advertising the wearer’s sophistication and knowledge of the wider world.”321 Peck argues:

[M]ore than any other type of object, highly sought-after trade textiles, accessible to many in all economic levels, influenced the visual culture of the locations where they were marked as well as produced. Because the scope of the textile trade was so widespread by the mid-seventeenth century, the constant interchange of exotic design motifs, fibers, and dyes between these now interconnected markets brought into being, for the first time, a common visual language of design that was recognizable throughout the world.322

To tell this story Peck explores the Metropolitan’s history of collecting and exhibiting trade textiles323 noting how difficult it can be to fit trade textiles within the traditional cultural and geographical department structure of the museum for not only did objects frequently travel between departments, but often related objects of the same origin found themselves housed in different departments.324 Case in point: Interwoven Globe was curated drawing upon a

321 Peck, Interwoven Globe, 1.

322 Peck continues: “Because the scope of the textile trade was so widespread by the mid-seventeenth century, the constant interchange of exotic design motifs, fibers, and dyes between these now interconnected markets brought into being, for the first time, a common visual language of design that was recognizable throughout the world.” Ibid.

323 Peck notes that while the Metropolitan has mounted a number of “groundbreaking” exhibitions in the field of textiles, Interwoven Globe is only the third in its history to adopt a global perspective; the two previous exhibitions that explored aspects of the textile-trade story were “Painted and Printed Fabrics” (1927) (curated by the Metropolitan’s first textile curator Frances Morris, who intended to show the influence of Indian textile trade textiles on European design); and “The China Trade and Its Influences” (1941) (curated by Joseph Downs, who was interested in the transmission of Asian design to Europe and America). Ibid.

324 Even though most works came into the collection by decision of the curator (with purchases outweighing gifts two to one), Peck notes that she is unable to discern the Metropolitan’s early textile collection policy. She does, however, acknowledge that it was “hard for the curators to fit into the art historical canon typically told in galleries, which usually offer a linear progression of the design aesthetic of a particular world culture” and as a result many were never displayed. Peck comments on textile collecting at the Met in present day: in the 1950s the textile collection decentralized to various curatorial departments (holdings by culture and curatorial stewardship, a fact that dictated how textiles were interpreted and displayed at the museum), and since then storage conditions have varied widely and growth in certain departments has been haphazard at best. In 1989 plans began to centralize textile storage (not collection), and in 1995 the new Antonia Ratti Textile Center was announced. The Metropolitan’s director explained the advantage: “The primary advantage to maintaining varied curatorial responsibility rather than segregating textiles in a separate department—using the medium as the governing principle—is that textiles have been selected and studied, and their significance understood, in the context of knowledge of all the arts of the civilizations from which they came. Thus, for example, Asian garments have been acquired and displayed in the context of other Asian art forms, and European carpets, in the

125 total of nine departments. Collapsing historical narrative with the structural challenges of museum practice, Peck’s volume explores the wider historical dimensions of textiles and trade.

Commercial cross-cultural exchange in a global economy is also the topic of The

Spinning World: A Global History of Cotton Textiles (2009).325 Via the essays of some twenty scholars residing in nine countries across three continents, Giorgio Riello and

Prasannan Parthasarathi explore the history of the global diffusion of cotton culminating in the centrality of cotton textiles in the late eighteenth century through to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century industrialization of Britain, the United States, India, and Japan. While the modern history of cotton textiles is well known, the medieval and early modern historical antecedents and their connections with modern industrialization are less examined.

Answering this gap, Riello and Parthasarathi explore the prehistory of cotton, and note important links with familiar narratives in recent scholarship to offer key revisions in a move away from a Eurocentric narrative and a re-contextualization of cotton’s history within a global framework; namely, new explanations for the rise of Europe over Asia. Riello and

Parthasarathi note that up until 1500 it was the Indian subcontinent that was the locus of cotton production. Only in the late eighteenth century did Europe surpass India, likely due to

context of the finest European furniture and furnishings of the appropriate periods” Ibid., 8. Peck raises two disagreements with this approach: 1) textiles within their own cultural context often fail to “fit comfortably into the narrow precepts” of each department and benefit from being studied with textiles from other lands; and 2) not every department has shown equal interest and care for their collections. In spite of the objections, the Ratti Center continues today, one-stop viewing for the Met’s full collection of textiles organized by digital catalogue: “researchers…[can] search for textiles between departments, by country of origin, culture, time period, materials, techniques, and so on, with the ability to see large images, many in colour, of almost every object.” Ibid., 9.

325 Giorgio Riello and Prasannan Parthasarathi, eds., The Spinning World: A Global History of Cotton Textiles, 1200–1850 (Padua, Italy: Oxford University Press, 2009).

126 the geopolitical conditions in Europe generally and in Britain in particular; in addition, while

Europe has long been credited as the origin of the cotton revolution—what is often referred to as “European industrialization” or the European revolution—the revolution was in fact global.326 For bringing fresh insights to bear on the ongoing debate around the reasons for

“different paths of economic development” with a specific focus on cotton “for its promise in contributing to the debate,” Riello and Parthasarathi offer new knowledge to economic theory.

Riello and Parthasarathi recount a number of ways in which their new scholarship challenges existing narratives. First, their findings provide a new understanding of the eighteenth-century revolution as global in origin: in the period between the beginning of the sixteenth century and the eighteenth century, a number of countries had amassed high levels of skill including China, with technical expertise in the spinning and weaving of not only cotton but also flax and silk; India, with sophisticated knowledge of the handling of cotton including complex designs; Anatolia (modern-day Turkey), which had successfully imitated

Indian products; and West Africa, with sizable cotton textile industries. Second, their findings revise understandings of consumer behaviour: contrary to existing scholarship that portrays the European encounter with Indian cotton as having a “deleterious” effect, scholars in the text argue that import substitutions were found around the world, and that imports of

Indian textiles may have actually “stimulated local production rather than undermining it both in South-East Asia and in West Africa.” Third, their findings lead to a stronger

326 Riello and Parthasarathi outline a number of conditions that led to Europe’s rise. In particular, they cite Britain’s colonization of the Indian subcontinent and North America—access to cheap natural resources and slave labour—coupled with aggressive mercantilist state policies (mercantilism, an economic theory that holds that trade generates wealth and should be encouraged by government). Ibid., 9.

127 understanding of markets and fashionability: the colonies supplied both cheap supplies of raw materials (slaves to cultivate raw cotton in the Americas) and ready markets for manufactured products (markets for finished textiles where fashion became more important than price).327 Also of important note: Riello and Parthasarathi contribute to a global history by putting a number of world regions next to each other to reveal “striking similarities in patterns of change” which reveal a global trend.328

In order to position their argument that the history of cotton was truly global in scale,

Riello and Parthasarathi employ a unique methodology: a global perspective achieved by broadening the chronological focus and widening the geographical framework of cotton’s history. First, they recount the spread of the cotton plant as a raw material from its origins in

India to China, the Middle East, and Africa between 800 and 1000. Next, they address the travelling of cotton’s technology along the same routes the cotton plant itself took in both easterly and westerly directions from India—wherein local production techniques were not simply transmitted, but adapted to new socio-economic and institutional contexts—and the ensuing global spread of not only cotton in its raw material form and attendant technologies, but also the textiles themselves via trade and exchange. Finally, they explore the different uses and meanings that cotton textiles enjoyed across the globe including ceremonial occasions, religious rituals, social expression, and political advantage. The result is a historical narrative which “explicitly rejects” Eurocentrism in its conclusion of cotton as both global in origin and as a globally-traded commodity:

327 The authors summarize their findings: “This book supports the idea that European success in the manufacturing of cotton textiles rested on its ability to capture markets for these fabrics across the Atlantic and eventually back to the Indian Ocean itself.” Ibid., 9–10.

328 Ibid., 11–12.

128

A consideration of mutual influences and the integration of the cases of comparison into a single framework lead logically to the global economy. For the Indian subcontinent had a truly global reach and putting together its areas of influence in the centuries from 1200 and 1800 highlights the nature of the global trading system. It was this global economic order, in which the cotton manufacturers of the Indian subcontinent were dominant, that provided the context and an impetus for cotton consumption and production in many work regions around the world.329

Cotton, and once again the global, is the topic and the scope of Giorgio Riello and

Tirthankara Roy’s How India Clothed the World (2009),330 an interdisciplinary study of the social, economic, and cultural significance of Indian Ocean trade and Indian textiles from the early sixteenth century to the late nineteenth century in the context of global history. As preface to the fifteen papers authored by scholars holding a diversity of research interests that combine for a truly “collaborative history,”331 Riello and Roy position the Indian subcontinent in 1500 (specifically the western regions of Gujarat, Coromandel, and Bengal) as a centre for manufacturing life and the foundation for a wide-ranging trade network wherein by land and by sea—as far as Indonesia and Japan in the East and Saudi Arabia,

Ethiopia, Egypt, and West Africa in the West—Indian merchants exchanged cotton textiles for a variety of commodities ranging from spices and foodstuffs to specie and luxuries. While early historiography has often treated Asian trade as a subplot of the story of European expansion, reinforcing parts of Riello and Parthasarathi’s thesis in The Spinning World,

Riello and Roy emphasize Europe’s emergence as a trade player in the late seventeenth century only. And while earlier examinations of Indian Ocean trade have focused on trade

329 Ibid., 12.

330 Giorgio Riello and Tirthankara Roy, eds., How India Clothed the World: The World of South Asian Textiles, 1500–1850 (Boston: Brill, 2009).

331 Ibid., xxxii. A product of the Global Economic History Network (GEHN) that begins as conferences and ends in publication.

129 companies, in line with recent scholarship that uses global history as its theoretical framework Riello and Roy approach Indian Ocean trade interaction according to a more

“integrated” geography to argue an economy and a society formed by “fluxes” that

“[transcend] the traditional geographic boundaries of the Indian Ocean as a maritime space.”332

Riello and Roy note that from the beginning of the Christian era through to the eighteenth century—“well before...Europeans began to control Asian trade and [direct] it to serve European consumption”—due to its unique climate and geography, namely monsoon winds that set the rhythm of trade and production, the Indian Ocean littoral was an enclosed

(rather than open) space home to a complex intra-Asian trade—“a world with its own distinct historiography” marvelled at by Europeans for its scale and sophistication.333 Indeed, by the late eighteenth century South Asia accounted for approximately one quarter of the world’s textile output and an even larger percentile of the world’s seaborne trade. By exposing the significance of the local in the global Riello and Roy contribute to the study of “accelerated globalization in the social sciences...to reveal the long histories of transcontinental geopolitical, cultural, and economic connextions [sic].”334 With a focus on a more

332 Ibid., 27.

333 “By 1700, Indian Ocean trade was firmly Indo-European in character and the pre-eminent article of trade was cotton textiles, displacing rice and specie that had ruled earlier networks of transaction in the Ocean. Whereas these earlier networks tended to be segmented and primarily focused on Asia, cloth created a truly global network.” Ibid., 6, 7.

334 Ibid., xxxi. In a third study Riello departs from the arguments of his previous two collaborations on the subject of cotton as a global phenomenon continuously connecting different parts of the globe to present as a new type of historian—as an economic historian—interested in the global histories of commodities. By following the production and trade of cotton as a single commodity into locally-specific yet globally-entangled social and cultural spheres—triangulated between West Africa (cotton fabric traded for slave labour), to the American South (slave labour produced raw cotton), to London factories (raw cotton converted to cotton products)—Riello narrates a new story of the globalization of trade. Giorgio Riello, Cotton: The Fabric That Made the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

130

“geographically-integrated account” linking the commercial spheres of East Africa, the Arab

World, India, China, Japan, Indonesia, and continental Australasia for a unified Indian

Ocean, and with consideration of agency, Riello and Roy reveal “a seafaring economy and society…[of unified] character, one quite distinct from that of the interior regions less dependant on the sea.” Further, and reinforcing Riello’s arguments in his previous and recent scholarship, Riello and Roy engage with the “foundational metanarrative for global economic history concerned with material progress” as presented in Adam Smith’s The

Wealth of Nations (1776). Supporting their new thesis they write: “[T]he question of when, where and why did economic divergence between the occident and the orient occur, by proceeding to investigate why a famous transnational industry, cotton textiles, diffused and relocated its centre of production from east to west.”335 Studies like that of Riello,

Parthasarathi, and Roy represent a growing shift in focus in both art historical and historical studies; namely from an exclusive focus on the political and economic effects of exchange— often from a hegemonic perspective with Europe at centre and with each world region treated as one monolith—to softer, more nuanced examinations of artistic and cultural exchange within a global context.

335 Riello and Roy identify three distinct contexts for the “rich narrative of the Indian Ocean” in order to narrow its significance and that of Indian textiles for global history (key subjects of recent analysis around the meaning of trade): 1) the significance of Indian textiles in structuring socio-economic and political relationships with the non-European world—the ways the trade of textiles impacted on cultures and economies across and beyond the Indian Ocean (Relational Spaces); 2) the significance of Indian textiles within the phenomenon that economic historians call “the rise of the west” (Indian Ocean as a Space System)—essays in this text rely on scholarship that has explored how trade impacted upon West European society in the wake of industrialization by using geographical models based on core-periphery systems; and 3) the new discourse on the rise of Europe in relation to the relative decline of Asia from the eighteenth century—the “great divergence” (The Indian Ocean and Divergence). Riello et al., How India Clothed the World, xxxi.

131

Encounters

World Art Historical scholarship is also preoccupied with the theme of encounters.

Michele Greet’s Transatlantic Encounters: Latin American Artists in Paris Between the

Wars (2018)336 examines the “intense interaction” between a cohort of some three hundred

Latin American artists who lived and worked in Paris between 1918 and 1939, and the

“complicated cultural strategies these artists adopted to participate in and, at times, critique and transform the international art scene in Paris.”337 Greet notes that while much has been written on Paris as the centre of the art world between World War I and World War II, very few scholars have explored the story as a global and multicultural account and almost none have examined the participation of Latin American artists in the Parisian art scene.338 In redress, Greet articulates the important role of the “multitude of international voices” that participated in shaping modernism between the wars and “in turn articulated distinct interpretations of European modernism in distant locations as they returned home or moved on to other cities.”339 In order to examine Latin American relationships with Parisian artists

Greet engages with a wide, global network of artists, art schools, and salons and galleries to

336 Michele Greet, Transatlantic Encounters: Latin American Artists in Paris Between the Wars (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2018).

337 Ibid., 8. In example of one complex strategy, Greet opens her study with a discussion of Brazilian artist Vicente do Rego Monteiro’s Quelques visages de Paris, a travel diary penned and illustrated by a fictitious Amazon Indian chief “taking the French imagination with “primitive” societies whose vision or the world is simplistic, immediate, and in need of civilizing” and reversing it in order to “compel his readers to recognize the fallacy of their unidirectional determination of cultural value.” Ibid., 1–4.

338 Ibid., 4. Greet notes that while Latin American artists had been travelling to Paris to study and exhibit since the nineteenth century, the “sheer numbers of artists who arrived after World War I, coupled with the increased allocation of government grants from Latin American nations, distinguish the influx of artists between the wars from previous migrations.” The influx rivals and even surpassed such other groups of foreigners as Russian Jewish artists. Ibid., 5.

339 Namely, cubism, surrealism, constructivism, and also figurative styles associated with the School of Paris. Ibid., 4.

132 not only participate in the rewriting the West’s longstanding claim to modernism “as its own circumscribed invention,”340 but to redirect the historiography of Latin American artists away from a nationalistic focus to one that is transatlantic in its recognition of the realities of

“cultural mixing”:

This project attempts to unravel the complicated issues of influence, emulation, and appropriation in the context of uneven cultural exchange. By determining which sources artists chose to entangle and which aspects of these sources they chose to manipulate, reject, or co-opt, this study will examine just how Latin American artists expanded and transformed modernist dialogues.341

To this end Greet positions her study as resting properly within the recent turn in the humanities towards globalization and multiculturalism; namely, “[s]tudies...that focus on cultural contact, colonialism, transnationalism, globalization, and ethnic diasporas.” 342 In other words, Greet seeks to make visible the links between artists is diaspora and their ensuing artistic production.

As preface to her study Greet offers a close examination of the role of power hierarchies noting that in cases of “uneven power relations” it is the directionality of the

340 Greet argues: “[b]y appropriating and transforming European constructs of the primitive, Latin American artists regained their agency by constructing an “account of the modern/primitive encounter from the ‘other’ side.” Ibid., 7–8.

341 Ibid., 8.

342 Ibid., 5. To position Paris as a node of exchange in the Latin American/Parisian encounter, Greet cites the work of a number of scholars including James Clifford’s imagination of Paris in the 1920s and 1930s as “a series of “travel encounters,” a place of constant “departures, arrivals, transits;”” challenging the notion that the nation-state is merely “a neutral ‘container’ of artistic and cultural production” (quoting Kobena Mercer), Mary Louise Pratt’s description of Paris as a “contact zone” wherein “foreign nationals began to blur the imagined boundaries between Europe and the rest of the world” promoting fears of a loss of distinct national identity and beginning the push for classifications in art along regional, national, and even racial lines—“an acute focus on defining national and regional identities;” and Gerardo Mosquera’s notion of cultural hybridity. Ibid., 5–8. Greet notes that her use of “Latin America” as a geopolitical construct has a long history and is relevant: while there can be no consideration of a Latin American diaspora—Latin Americans came to Paris by choice, as students; further, citizen of certain countries, Cuba and Chile, for example, did not necessarily share a sense of solidarity—rather than tracing national allegiances Greet argues that it was “precisely their time in Paris that allowed for a broader notion of ‘Latin American art’ to take shape.” Ibid., 5–6.

133 hierarchical structure (and not any independent agency) that becomes the lens by which an artist’s output is assessed. Here, influence is often seen as following in one of two directions, neither favourable to “the foreigner”: in a top-down model wherein the foreigner emulates

“the language of dominance,” the ensuing work is often “dismissed as incorrect, derivative, or a substandard copy;” in a bottom-up model, when an artist in the “centre” actively “selects and interprets” from a wide range of sources from distant countries or colonized regions, the work is seen as more “original and creative” and not plagiaristic.343 Yet Greet notes that in terms of tracking influence—a key element in coming to understand Latin American artistic production in Paris between the wars—because of their status as “formerly colonized” Latin

American artists occupied a space “in between”: as the formerly colonized, Latin American artists continued to be linked to Europe in the “cultural hierarchy’ at play in the art market and even in the minds of the artists themselves.344

Cultural Exchange

Another signature move characteristic of the shift towards networks is the interest in notions of reciprocal cultural exchange. In the case of Anna Jackson and Amin Jaffer’s

Encounters: The Meeting of Asia and Europe, 1500–1800 (2004)345—once again explored as

343 For various reasons: as forced assimilation or the reverse, in order to enter the “culture of privilege.” Ibid., 6–7.

344 Greet cites Cuban correspondent and writer Ramon Vasconcelos: “America in general distrusts its artists; everything European exerts an irresistible draw in the native imagination and buyers would rather commission any unknown French or Spanish sculptor before giving the opportunity to earn fame and fortune to a native artist. Yesterday a European colony politically, today we continue to be one intellectually and artistically.” Ibid., 7.

345 Anna Jackson and Amin Jaffer, eds., Encounters: The Meeting of Asia and Europe, 1500–1800 (London, UK: V&A Publications, 2004).

134 both a scholarly publication and a temporary museum exhibition346—it is reciprocal East-

West cultural exchange flowing from the moment the global markets of Asia, the Americas, and Europe were “inextricably linked” and a global economy was formed:347

In May 1498 the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama landed on the west coast of India…. His arrival established the first direct contact between Europe and maritime Asia, ushering in a period of commercial, cultural and technological exchange.348

While Asian ports had previously encountered a small number of European merchants from the Mediterranean basin who had arrived by way of arduous journey absorbing along the way

“something of the successive cultures they encountered, even shedding certain aspects of their European identity,”349 in contrast the Portuguese (and later Dutch and British) of the late fifteenth century arrived in Asia “directly by ship” in a context and physical environment that was “wholly European”: “the difference between their appearance and manner and those of the people they encountered was therefore immediate and marked” and as a result identities were maintained “undiluted.”350

While it is tempting to imagine an ensuing “clash of cultures,” Jackson and Jaffer argue differently: in their text they explore from a “broad perspective the way in which

346 Encounters: The Meeting of Asia and Europe was presented at the Victoria and Albert Museum South Kensington in the UK from September 23 to December 5, 2004. “Trade with Asia 1500–1800: Encounters,” Victoria and Albert Museum accessed June 28, 2019, http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/t/trade-with-asia- encounters/.

347 Interested in spices, as well as a variety of luxury goods including silk, porcelain, precious stones, aromatic woods, and ambergris (used in the manufacture of perfumes), the Portuguese offered silver for trade provided by Columbus’ “discovery” of the New World in 1492: “[t]his international flow of commodities and currency marks the early development of a global economy.” Jackson et al., Encounters: The Meeting of Asia and Europe, 4. New ocean routes were necessary when in 1453 the Turks captured Constantinople and imposed a commercial barrier to the trade of Asian goods which had previously been brought to Europe through the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf to the Levant.

348 Ibid., 2.

349 Ibid., 5.

350 Ibid.

135

Asians and Europeans responded to one another” noting that “both the East and the West considered each other exotic and that this appeal shaped the cultures of both.”351 The resulting narrative is one of complexity and diversity, and fluidity and hybridity wherein the

East adopted elements from the West, and also in the reverse direction, for a unique encounter:352

[T]he notion of a simple dichotomy...is misleading. Maritime Asia was as vast as it was varied, and the response to the European arrival was correspondingly diverse. Such a model [of East versus West] also belies the complexities and subtleties of the subsequent period of encounter and exchange. The European experience in Asia was thus not a uniform one.353

To make their case for the varied nature of cultural encounter, Jackson and Jaffer move beyond the pejorative colonial appropriation reference to “the exotic” to draw parallels between the ways the concept of exoticism functioned in Asia and in Europe during this period: both East and West viewed the other from the outside—as new and as different—to carry genuine appeal, and as a result the goods exchanged brought about “real social, economic and political changes.”354 The authors argue that while both Asia and Europe saw parts of the other in a negative light, the period was not marked by “overriding feelings of cultural prejudice” that distracted both parties from their interests; rather, Asians were interested in western technology, and Europeans showed a marked interest and appreciation of Asian technologies.355 By tracing first, their “discovery” of one another—how in the

351 Ibid., 5–6.

352 Ibid., 5, 9, 11.

353 Ibid., 5.

354 Ibid., 9.

355 Later, relations crumbled for a variety of reasons: by the early nineteenth century “European presence in Asia and a solidifying of hitherto fluid boundaries between different cultures…the European attitude towards

136

European mind the West discovered Asia, and vice versa—and second, their “encounter”— an exploration of the human dimensions or the face-to-face meeting of Asians and Europeans in different contexts (be it diplomacy, religion, personal exchanges, and even physical spaces where encounters occurred)—and lastly, their “exchanges” or the material dimension of their relationship—the mechanisms that developed in Asia for producing Western-style goods specifically for export, and the development of European goods that were desirable in Asian markets—Jackson and Jaffer examine a unique meeting of the East and the West that debunks many previous notions of such contacts.

In addition to exploring the economic effects of trade, many scholars have shifted their focus towards the nuances of cultural and artistic exchange to include the effects on iconography, artistic practice, patronage at home and abroad, and even “visual imagination.”

Cultural exchange is the topic of Natasha Eaton’s Mimesis Across Empires (2013),356 an exploration of the relationship between British and Mughal empires and their attendant visual cultural exchange in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonial India. Yet Eaton is specifically interested in the notion of “mimesis in flux.” Here mimesis—which can take the form of imitation, appropriation, mimicry, simulation, and reciprocity—is represented by a

“series of networks made up of artworks and their relationships with humans,”357 while flux presents in the two-way and bifocal exchange of art between the colonizer and the colonized.

Asians was inevitably coloured by their perceived position of superiority and by more rigid assumptions of ‘East’ and ‘West’.” Ibid., 11.

356 Natasha Eaton, Mimesis Across Empires: Artworks and Networks in India, 1765–1860 (Raleigh: Duke University Press, 2013).

357 Ibid., 3.

137

In other words, “mimesis in flux” stands as the “messiness” of the British-Indian visual encounter and their “shifting contours”358:

When we think about mimesis as being in flux, we can begin to connect its operations in unexpected directions, to explore unchartered and eccentric networks of artworks and their implications in relation to politics, aesthetics, economics, empire building, and empire destruction.359

Eaton argues that within the colony mimesis is increasingly problematic and can never be confined to questions of realism, influence, or Orientalism; rather, she advances mimesis as a “flexible strategy” that can be used to extend beyond the “imitation and appropriation of artistic styles and tropes within the picture frame to include modes of commercial and sociopolitical interactions and questions of personal display.”360 It is an approach that also rejects the conventional art historical approach to Anglo-Indian encounters heavily weighted towards the implicit victory or hegemony of British art361 in favour of the

“imaginative analysis of mimetic possibilities” to show how mimesis can be much more than we expect when considered against “an increasingly problematic symbiosis of identity and likeness in and beyond the colony”:362

358 Eaton argues that eighteenth and nineteenth-century colonial India was a “critical phase of empire building…[when] Britishness and national aesthetics came to be determined and at times undermined by their entanglements with cultural others, the vernacular visual episteme of late Mughal India.” Ibid., 5.

359 Ibid., 3–4.

360 Ibid.

361 A narcissistic identification with Western “superior realism” and conventional understandings of mimesis…the orientalist approach of visual hegemony: namely, questions of realism and influence: “Mimesis in the colony cannot be confined to questions of realism, “influence,” or Orientalism.” Eaton uses the theoretical framework of mimesis successfully employed by such scholars as Michael Taussig, Walter Benjamin, Rene Girard, and Homi K. Bhabha. Ibid., 4–6.

362 Eaton situates her analysis: “I foreground the precarious status of professional British painters forced to negotiate with networks of Mughal images, collectors, and artists. The Mughal Empire...had…one of the most magnificent visual and material cultures at this time, was envied and admired across the globe. Although the British sought to colonize India, they had to recognize the persistent and resilient symbolic authority of the

138

Although the British sought to colonize India, they had to recognize the persistent and resilient symbolic authority of the Mughal emperor...this coexistence of competing imperial practices was fraught with conflict and haunted by ambiguity.363

By pushing beyond the prevailing historiography dominated by the linkage of power and knowledge whereby colonization is based on efficient and effective information gathering,

Eaton highlights a more “volatile and vertiginous take” on mimesis:

By viewing mimesis in flux we can begin to envisage a very different picture of empire, an empire forced to confront cultural alterity in such a way that it becomes far from easy to say who is the imitator and who is the imitated, which artwork is the copy ad which is the original.364

Like many of the scholars before her, Eaton presents an alternative narrative that upsets

Eurocentrism as the structure of knowledge underlying transcultural approaches, a narrative that presents as a multi-angled vision of the global past and stands as a model of an increasingly dialogical way of researching and writing history beyond the nation-state.

Related to the topic of reciprocal cultural exchange is the notion of hybridity in visual culture—the merging of two visual cultures to form a third—and the focus of Gauvin

Bailey’s Art of the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America, 1542–1773 (1999),365 a study of art and architecture outside Europe as evidence of cultural encounter. Bailey notes that while the art styles of modern Catholic Europe—specifically in the disciplines of painting, sculpture, and architecture—display such qualities as simplicity, realism, emotional empathy, and drama typically associated with the West, there was a “rich artistic legacy” in the outer

Mughal emperor…this coexistence of competing imperial practices was fraught with conflict and haunted by ambiguity.” Ibid., 5–8.

363 Ibid., 5.

364 Ibid., 8.

365 Gauvin A. Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America, 1542–1773 (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1999).

139 reaches of the Catholic missionary enterprise in Asia and frontier Latin America “where these styles merged with indigenous traditions of the greatest conceivable variety, creating hybrids that nevertheless maintained ties with European culture” to create the first truly

“global style” in the arts.366 It was the Jesuits—a missionary order called the Society of

Jesus, global humanists trained in rhetoric and practitioners of inculturation367—who, in spreading internationally not only Catholic religion but also Catholic devotional art, brokered

“intimate contact” among a wide spectrum of “different races and religions as well as political, social, economic, and cultural traditions.”368 Bailey recounts three strategies or trademarks held by the Society that can be traced back to Francis Xavier: first, all missions had to be international; second, missionaries listened to what non-Europeans had to say, often discussing but agreeing to disagree; and third, art was used as a mission tool:

366 Ibid., 3–4.

367 Bailey notes that Jesuits followed an approach explicitly from the Spiritual Exercises (1548) written by Ignatius of Loyola, a flexible set of directives designed for a spiritual director to lead a spiritual retreat, the final goal for the participant being to find love for God above all things. A person must freely choose Christ and cannot be coerced. “This attitude gave many Jesuits an exceptional tolerance toward non-European societies that would characterize their missions as more of a dialogue than a harangue”—conversation, not conversion. The Jesuits practiced “inculturation” that acknowledged one imperative: “the only way to approach non- European societies without force of arms is through adapting to their ways…the Jesuits’ openness to the cultural and intellectual aspects of non-European peoples was very unusual and remarkable. In a world of conquistadores, the Jesuits were ahead of their time.” Bailey notes that it was more than just their willingness to adapt and indigenize that won the Jesuits respect in other courts: they had to give them something to adapt in the first place: a high level of culture which separated them from other missions: “The Jesuits came to enlighten the missionized about European culture, not simply to convert them. Fuelled by Renaissance humanism, the Society stressed learning, oratory, and the arts in Europe and overseas alike. Missionaries were thoroughly trained…in the art of disputation, the ability to build arguments and respond to criticism, and brought these talents to bear in debate with representatives of foreign civilizations worldwide.” Bailey addresses how the Jesuits used this skills and applied them to art: art was the visual equivalent to sacred oratory for it had the ability “to delight, to teach, and to move...By harnessing art’s mimetic realism, expressive power, and emotive capabilities…missionaries could move non-Christians to abandon their faiths for Christianity—or at least to respect it…. The Jesuits also stressed an image’s potential for meditation…which exhorted its followers to meditate by forming mental images with the senses.” Images could also surmount language barriers and play an important mnemonic role—to “fix the ideas and events of Christianity in the mind”—to use images to store and retrieve information. Ibid., 7–8.

368 Ibid., 4.

140

Along with instruments of the eucharist, vestments, rosaries, bibles, and prayer books, Francis also brought with him engravings, paintings, and statuettes of the Virgin Mary and Jesus for assistance in preaching and catechizing…. The Jesuits had the extraordinary ability to enter these foreign realms and make themselves not only welcome but even useful to societies that remained firmly Buddhist, Confucianist, or Muslim. At times it seems as if cultural exchange was as important to them as religious indoctrination.369

Bailey argues that the Jesuits, by making accommodation the “cornerstone of their approach to the arts,” pursued what was perhaps the least unified artistic enterprise of the era, yet he is careful to maintain that it was not only the Jesuits who might be credited with the results of this contact but rather, their global partnership with “the Other”: “[t]he story is not about the triumph of Western culture but of cultural encounter. In many cases, the non-

European participants even had the upper hand in shaping mission art.”370 By challenging the prevailing view that art styles of early modern Catholic Europe can only be associated with the West, Bailey explores how “late Renaissance and Baroque art was claimed, altered, and enriched by the people of the four corners of the earth.”371 The result was a blending of

Western art with local, indigenous traditions right into the eighteenth century for a study of cultural encounter that surpasses the specific to argue for a “pervasive impact on world art.”372 In approach Bailey places his study of the interpretation of images produced by cultural encounter in the gap between isolated exchanges between Europe and the peoples of

Asia or Latin America in the early modern period—what the discipline understands as area

369 Ibid., 6.

370 Ibid., 4.

371 Ibid.

372 Bailey summarizes: “With the diverse blend of traditions in hand, the Jesuits penetrated deeper into the non- Christian world than any other order. They initiated a more complete hybridization of the arts in a greater number of cultures than anyone else was able or willing to attempt.” Ibid., 11.

141 studies—and major studies that look at interaction at a global scale. This gap and other such studies of complex global networks—connected and entangled histories beyond simple

East/West dichotomies—represent cross-cultural methodologies that enable hybridized forms of critical thinking and create new social and economic histories key in transcultural approaches.

Barry Flood’s Objects of Translation (2009)373 considers the material culture of South

Asia (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, India, etc.) during the so-called medieval period—between the ninth and thirteenth century—when the geography was populated by Arabs, Persians,

Turkic, and Indic artisans, merchants, political elites, and soldiery. Flood’s primary interest is in challenging the notion that in the pre-modern period “people and things...had their place,” and that the “geographic displacement and the cultural complications” arising from modernity stand as defining characteristics; rather, Flood argues that “people and things have been mixed up for a long time, rarely conforming to the boundaries imposed on them by modern anthropologists and historians.”374 To make his case Flood challenges the prevailing master narrative for South Asia that focuses on “the glories” of the Mughals in South Asian historiography arguing that interest in this period of wide expansion has obscured the existence of a much earlier but no less complex circuit of exchange linking the

Mediterranean, Middle East, and Central and South Asia: the often-ignored as hybrid and

373 Barry Flood, Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval “Hindu-Muslim” Encounter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).

374 Ibid., 1.

142 thus less appealing pre-Mughal period of “dramatic patterns of engagement” between the

Hindu and Muslim polities of South Asia.375

It is within this overlooked history that Flood troubles the term hybrid for its assumption of pure or original parent cultures, and, citing Sheldon Pollock—“there exist no cultural agents who are not always-already transcultured”376—takes aim at the concept of transcultural noting it as a misnomer: it is in fact, the “permanent condition” of all cultural life. Flood uses as example the highly “anachronistic and essentialist” categories of ‘Muslim’ and ‘Hindu’—in hesitation quotes, for Flood considers them “unstable identities”—often reduced to “essences.” Flood proposes rather to emphasize relations, noting that while

Muslim and Hindu straddled different topographies, they nevertheless represent entangled histories.377 His goal is therefore to,

explore and historicize the dialectic between alterity and identity, continuity and change, confrontation and co-option that shaped transcultural encounters and they ways in which these conditioned and were conditioned in their turn by diplomatic, martial, and mercantile exchange...by foregrounding the acts of communication and cooperation that accompanied the movement of premodern subjects and objects, and the transformations that they wrought in their turn.378

Arguing for the need to “move beyond linear borders of the modern nation-state and the static taxonomies of modern scholarship”379 as methodology—history is more dynamic and

375 “Within the master narratives of South Asian historiography, the pre-Mughal period unfolds as a series of iconic moments within the “Muslim” conquest of South Asia, a cultural and historical rupture…[it] assumes a unity of identity and purpose [among] disparate agents”—a teleological view of history that operates through “a collapse of all possible identities into a singular, monolithic identification, producing as singular, static, and undifferentiated what was often multiple, protean, and highly contested.” Ibid., 2–3.

376 Ibid., 5–6.

377 Ibid., 2.

378 Ibid., 4.

379 Ibid., 2.

143 complex, and less vertical than it is often presented—Flood suggests replacing the concept of the transcultural with the master metaphor of translation;380 specifically, to join the study of texts with the study of objects, and to treat both in equal emphasis as historical documents wherein objects are texts that must be translated as intercultural dialogue as “testimony to the construction of meaning across ethnic, linguistic, and religious boundaries.”381

Centre versus Periphery

In Islamic Chinoiserie (2009),382 Yuka Kadoi searches for the origin and explores the

“problem” of Chinese influence—Chinoiserie—in Iranian art in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, a key period of time in which Iran experienced growing contacts with

China under Mongol domination resulting in “very curious mixtures of different artistic styles.”383 Departing from her overall thesis that the Chinese elements appearing in the work of Iranian artists differs significantly from the more well-known “chinoiserie” observed some three hundred and fifty years later, in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century

European art, Kadoi coins the term “Islamic Chinoiserie” as a specific reference to a

380 Flood suggests that translation facilitates communication and is a paradigm for transcultural exchanges; he references the “translation turn” in the social sciences over the past decades: “an explanatory metaphor and a dynamic practice through which the circulation, mediation, reception, and transformation of distinct cultural forms and practices is effected.” He cites the work of one scholar and his consideration of “series of transfers”: “Is it not more useful to think of teapots and other objects as signs?... The study of objects, like discourse, would then focus on a series of translations. And the questions would concern, first, how speakers…encode their messages, with certain goals, within given linguistic and other cultural contexts…and, second, how hearers decode…within different schema….In both encoding and decoding there is an act of translation, finding in one “language” adequate terms to give a reliable account of something in another.” Ibid., 5–9.

381 Flood notes on his methodology: “While acknowledging the value of texts as historical documents, by placing an equal emphasis on material culture I seek to challenge their centrality to the writing of South Asian histories. The material culture of my book’s title is a deliberate expansive term…I aim to highlight the ability of artifacts to provide fresh insights and novel perspectives when treated as potentially complementary (rather than supplementary) sources of historical information.” Flood notes other scholars who have successfully used this approach. Ibid., 10–11.

382 Yuka Kadoi, Islamic Chinoiserie: The Art of Mongol Iran (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009).

383 Ibid., 1.

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“fascination with objects or ‘rarity’ and ‘beauty’...a sinicising model particular to Iranian art” under the Mongols. Kadoi notes that for Europeans, China was never a partner in artistic exchange but remained rather a mythical land of fabulous riches and luxury:

One should bear in mind that chinoiserie in European art is not the result of fruitful exchanges of artistic ideas with China. Genuine ‘Chinese’ elements have never been fused successfully with European artistic concepts, for European artists used their own traditions as a starting point and placed their own art in a position of centrality. Thus they failed to recognize the major merits of Chinese art. Rather, they were interested in transfiguring the image of China to suit their own artistic requirements.384

In distinction, Kadoi argues that Iranians had a clearer idea of the country and its art traditions and, as a result, held “authentic knowledge” of Chinese art; further, that Iranian motives for learning about Chinese art traditions were “sincere and consistent” as they strove to imitate styles and techniques derived from the Chinese into their own repertoires.

However, what is most remarkable is that Iranian artists began to combine indigenous and

Chinese elements: “It is for this reason that chinoiserie in European art ended in a temporary fashion, whereas in Iranian art chinoiserie became a long-lasting and influential tradition.”385

This “fusion” of Sino-Iranian art was more than simply adopted elegance or the result of some desire for exoticism; rather, the synthesis of Eastern and Western elements by way of a

“reworking” of East Asian ideas likely served the very practical need of making foreign

(Chinese) conventions palpable to the tastes and expectations of (Iranian) patrons. Also, and

384 Ibid., 8.

385 Ibid.

145 especially in the case of Iranian textile design, it enabled the new art to be put to cultural and political use.386

In order to explore the “phenomenon” of Chinese elements in Iranian art, Kadoi seeks to “particularize each Chinese element;” specifically, by conducting a “detailed reading” of each Chinese element across a number of pictorial and decorative arts rarely considered alongside one another—carpets, calligraphy, bookbinding, coinage, jewellery, architecture, decoration, and more—Kadoi is able to identify key characteristics, compare Chinese and

Iranian examples, and track down possible Chinese sources. As a counter to earlier scholarship that included statements absent of convincing visual and textual evidence resulting in an “indeterminate picture” of the Chinese contribution to the “artistic explosion” of Mongol-ruled Iran—Kadoi’s interdisciplinary discursive approach carries the distinct advantage of evaluating single objects within a broader context and considering “the interdependence, interconnection and concurrence of Chinese elements in Iranian art as a whole.”387 The result is a re-telling of the story of chinoiserie in Iranian art under the

Mongols: Ilkhanid artists were not merely passive recipients of Chinese influence but progressed to interpreters of Chinese artistic elements.

386 Kadoi begins her study with textiles as possibly these were the first media in the encounter between Iranians and the art of China: “it was during the Mongol period that textiles triggered the integration of Chinese themes into the Iranian world.” Kadoi attributes the integration to several factors: 1) the expansion of trans-Eurasian trade under the Pax Mongolica; 2) the intensification of both political and cultural contacts between China and Iran; and most key 3) the significance of textiles in Mongol material culture of Mongol society, a nomadic people accustomed to travelling with such portable possessions as visual signs of their power and wealth. The Mongol court “restricted the use of the sun, moon, dragon and tiger on the decoration of silk and satin fabrics and that of the dragon and rhinoceros on horse saddles…. [T]his suggests that the Mongols intentionally adopted Chinese conventional motifs associated with imperial power for official clothing in the Yuan court.” Ibid., 18–19, 22–23.

387 Ibid., 2.

146

Circulations

In stark contrast to the frequent focus on dominant, high-profile trade networks is

Leslie Rabine’s The Global Circulation of African Fashion (2002),388 an investigation into

Sotiba printed fabric as a case study of a “subordinate global network” in a “transnationally disseminated culture” that “epitomizes the process by which imitations enter the status of the authentic as artifacts cross borders in space and time.”389 By recounting the complex history of Sotiba’s origins—“Sotiba fabric began not simply as a copy of a copy of Indonesian batik, but as the French copy of the English imitation wax”390—and then by tracking the fabric’s present-day production and exchange network—designed in New York and printed by the

Sotiba factory in Dakar, Senegal, for the purpose of export to the United States, specifically

Los Angeles—Rabine examines the genealogy of how, despite its identity first, as imitation, and second, as imitator, as it passes through the “informal African fashion network” Sotiba becomes an “authentic African fabric.”391 In animation Rabine creates an analogy with the notion of “global suitcases”—the transnational movement of people, culture, objects, images, and identities—and argues Sotiba as a “travelling text” that “goes through a series of

388 Leslie W. Rabine, The Global Circulation of African Fashion (Oxford: Berg, 2002).

389 Ibid., 2, 136.

390 Sotiba originated in Javanese batik brought to Europe by the Dutch in the sixteenth century; later, the textile was sold to the English who, in the 1820s, destined it for the African market. In the 1880s the Dutch began manufacturing their own wax stamped cloth followed by the British who developed their own print designs, equipment, dyes, and techniques for an industrialized version of Indonesian wax stamping to be sold in English- ruled West Africa. Eventually, British manufacturers in factories in Africa made printed imitations of industrialized wax, followed by the French in the 1930s (called le fancy, l’imi-wax, or le légos). Ibid., 139.

391 Rabine explains that the protected monopoly of European textile manufacturers that excluded Senegalese manufactures and contributed to the collapse of the Senegalese economy subsequently permitted imports that bred imitations and frauds: “a fabric originating a colonial exploitation as the ersatz of a counterfeit goes through a process of “authentication” as it travels through different political and cultural regimes.” Ibid., 142–3.

147 transformations [as it criss-crosses] terrains of colonial and post-colonial history” acquiring new social and cultural meanings along the way:392

Sotiba fabric appropriates through imprinting, as a form of writing, every possible image and symbol from every culture, and produces new meaning by combining and recombining them, as well as by circulating them through different social contexts. It is literally a text. By incorporating and recombining design elements in ever new permutations, this text has continuously transformed the meaning of its own status as “imitation” or “authentic.” As it circulates through different social worlds in space and time, each new imitation achieves the status of authentic original which is elsewhere copied.393

To argue Sotiba as a travelling text, Rabine draws upon fieldwork conducted across an informal network of clothing designers, tailors, dyers, and jewelry makers located in three global locations at once dependent on and independent from dominant networks of production and trade: an “active crossroads of exchange” in the Muslim areas in West and

East Africa—in Dakar, Senegal, and Nairobi, Kenya, respectively—and the Black and

African American populations in Los Angeles in the United States.394 Through “particular and telling contrasting historical encounters with colonialism and slavery,” by altering the printed fabric’s designs, colours, and finishes (and, importantly, its very processes) each informal network incorporates a “wide variety of African ethnic styles into its specific codes” transforming the printed fabric into one of three categories: traditional, authentic, or modern—a unique “fashion system.”395 Yet despite these labels—in particular codes that revolve operate on a binary level—Rabine proposes that a more appropriate framework lies

392 Ibid., 136–7.

393 Ibid., 137.

394 Ibid., 6.

395 Ibid., 6–10.

148 in the notions of the “interwoven” or the “intertwined.”396 For Rabine term “authentic” remains slippery, especially when considering travel across cultures, political structures, and economic domains. Further, in the global circulation of Sotiba as an authentic African fabric, ideas around authenticity are constantly being revised: authenticity is not necessarily

“completely indigenous” but can go through a process of “cultural authentication” to come to symbolize (authentic) “ethnic identity.”397

In another example of circulations yet this time taking up the visual as its interface, in

Vermeer’s Hat (2008)398 Timothy Brook investigates five works by Delft painter Johannes

Vermeer (and two further works painted by his contemporaries). But rather than view each work as an illusionistic window into seventeenth century Dutch life, Brook focuses rather on the depiction of single items as “doors” (and occasionally, mirrors) that can be “opened” to reveal (or “reflect”) “hints of the broader historical forces that lurk in their details”399— evidence of a single global entangled world. There is a docked herring boat signalling a unique period of global cooling (and the ensuing plague), a felt hat linked to the Canadian fur trade, and a porcelain dish imported from China; and there is also a long roof identified as belonging to a warehouse of the East India House, home of the Delft Chamber of the Dutch

396 Much of this book is concerned with the way that the three fashion systems, and in fact the very process of their transnational dissemination, refine the tradition/modernity binary and the notion of authenticity beyond and against colonial and neo-colonial meanings (the primitive and static Africa, or that of authentic that carries the stereotype of “unchanging purity”). Ibid., 11.

397 Ibid., 12.

398 Timothy Brook, Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008). Timothy Brook specializes in the study of China. He holds the Republic of China Chair, Department of History, at the University of British Columbia where his research interests include the social and cultural history of the Ming Dynasty and the Japanese occupation of China during World War Two, and extend as far as historical perspectives on world history. “Timothy Brook,” Faculty of Arts, Department of History, University of British Columbia, accessed June 26, 2019, http://www.history.ubc.ca/people/tim-brook.

399 Brook, Vermeer’s Hat, 7.

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East India Company—the centre of a wide “web of international trade connecting Delft to

Asia”400 and a major player in international trade.

While Brook locates his storytelling in Delft in the Netherlands where Vermeer lived, worked, and died, he gives most of his narrative attention to China (“China lurks behind every story in this book”) to contemplates an alternative perspective from Shanghai (Brook is, after all, a sinologist). From this vantage point Brook argues that a change in location yields a story “largely the same regardless of where one begins telling it” for both Delft and

Shanghai were part of a world in which “people were weaving a web of connections and exchanges as never before.”401 Throughout his text Brook argues the seventeenth century as a unique period in time: that if the sixteenth was largely about first contact—encounters and discovery—the seventeenth was one of migration and mobility to yield second contacts—

“sustained engagements,” exchanges, and mutual influences that were wrought through the

‘improvisation’ of negotiation, borrowing, and adjustment.”402 On balance Brook remains less concerned with wide generalizations about worldwide interconnection and more interested in single stories that reflect key aspects of seventeenth century globalization.

Indeed, like Rabine, Brook travels across the world to explore the notion of an object’s origin and trace its complexities. However, in his attentiveness to nuance his work embodies the notion of transculturalism as a process of change rather than being essentialized on a single object. This is key.

400 Ibid., 15–19.

401 Ibid., 6.

402 Ibid., 20–21.

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Networks of Connection and Exchange

Across all these studies the common thread remains a mobile art history that seeks to avoid a fixed, stationary viewpoint from the West in favour of globalized processes best described as networks of connection and exchange. Also shifting is the locus of theoretical and methodological approaches: no longer bound by the limits of art history’s traditional formula for subject-specialist knowledge—namely, one world region narrowed in temporality often focused solely on the object—in their scholarship twenty-first century art historians display remarkable flexibility to adopt and adapt from not only other disciplines, to claim interdisciplinarity in their practice, but also multidisciplinarity in the application of new lines of inquiry that focus on the processes of transculturality in a globalized world.

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PART TWO – THE MUSEUM

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Chapter Four: Writing World Art History for the Public

The problem does not seem to be in the structure and protocols of Western art history as such, their insufficiency or limits for interpretation and understanding of world art. The dilemma, rather, is how to transfer the enormous capital of recently specialized, culturally sensitive scholarship on both Western and non-Western traditions— scholarship destined for specialized audiences, with limited circulation and practical impact—into survey books, courses, introduction and general-purpose art historical narratives that serve to educate art historians, other professionals, and the general public. — Ladislav Kesner “Is a Truly Global Art History Possible?,” 92.

World Art Historical approaches are not limited to scholarly genres, but can also be found in writing aimed towards the broader public—specifically, in writing aimed towards the lay museum audience. Departing from the notion that museums tell stories in the curation and visual arrangement of objects on display, as well as those silenced or omitted403—the project of the next chapter, Chapter Five—then through text, and through text and image, the museum didactic essay, a specialized digital output used increasingly by cultural institutions in North America and across the world to share their collections with a wider, more globalized audience, carries a similar power in the stories it tells to confront some of art history’s most deeply-entrenched assumptions and present a viable challenge to the critique of persistent Eurocentrism in the discipline.

Institutions across the world have long taken notice of the broad reach of the online didactic essay, moving quickly to prioritize the output by assigning significant resources in support and building whole websites to showcase the genre.404 Apart from the staple art

403 Kesner, “Is a Truly Global Art History Possible?,” 92.

404 While this chapter explores just two of the more prominent institutionalizations of the online museum or gallery didactic essay genre—the collections-based thematic essays populating the Metropolitan Museum of New York’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History and the more pedagogically-focused essays forming the backbone of Smarthistory.org—to a greater or lesser degree almost all museums in North America, and many around the world, rely upon the genre for the purposes of object interpretation and contextualization.

153 history textbook, and increasingly used as an alternative by instructors wishing to build a varied collection of assigned readings, the online museum or gallery didactic essay is for many students their first and perhaps their only exposure to art’s history (and, arguably, their most formative405), and in this light the didactic essay stands not only as a first introduction to an object or even a series of objects, but to the discipline of art history as a whole, among countless other fields. For these reasons what these essays say and how they say it— specifically, the kinds of stories they tell including the political grammar they rely upon—is of critical importance to the field of art history.406

How art historians tell stories matters because of the ways in which these stories intersect with wider institutionalizations of Eurocentric thought. At issue is not simply the facts and content of an essay’s story for, barring new discovery, this knowledge-content often remains stable. And it is not (always) about telling different stories. It is about telling stories differently. It is about the questions a story asks—and those it answers—and how the reader comes to think about the objects introduced therein and their place in human history. It is about all that tends to pass unnoticed in the telling of a story, and the assumptions that are positioned with particular certainty such as accounts begun with phrases like “as we all know” or “as it is well-established that.” It is about the narrative constructs, grammatical forms, and discursive uses of language that perpetuate and even reinforce older master

405 Consider James Elkins’ remarks (in a roundtable discussion, responding to a statement made by Friedrich Teja Bach) regarding the key role of these early introductions to the story of art: “I would disagree with your assessment [that textbooks offer primarily a level of information for students]: I would say their structure informs the structure of classes at higher levels, and those in turn inform the choices of postgraduate specialization, and ultimately the reasons why monographic studies are made. From my point of view, textbooks can be formative for the discipline.” Elkins, “The Art Seminar,” 123.

406 See also: Robert J. Belton, Sights of Resistance: Approaches of Canadian Visual Culture (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2001).

154 narratives the discipline has long challenged, and that scholars have rejected in their practice.407 And, when it comes to approaching the world globally by engaging with a World

Art Historical approach, it is about our unquestioning amenability to stories that place the

West at the centre of artistic innovation, and stories that stress the artificial boundaries of the nation-state as ways to not only measure or reinforce the notion of the unidirectional spread of ideas—thus denying connections across space and time—but also to belie the notion that creativity is an act of humanity’s shared past and not the unique territory of anyone nation.

Already a number of scholars have engaged with telling stories differently yielding changes in the discipline’s knowledge, and understanding, of art’s history. When, as explored in Chapter Three, Janet Abu-Lughod repositioned the spatial and temporal frame within which the modern world system was forged globally,408 her finding of the failure of history to start the story early enough spurred a significant reconsideration of the “unquestioning reliance”409 on periodization in Renaissance and Early Modernism studies—a primary focus for research of Claire Farago, who has written extensively on approaching art history as

World Art History.410 Farago notes that by “[de-limiting] the global temporally in some

407 Hemmings, Why Stories Matter, 1–27.

408 The reframed story repositioned the temporal period as set by the master narrative of capitalism under the tale of the rise of the West from the sixteenth century—led by a hegemonic West—to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—when a number of world economies traded across the eastern Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean (notably, with Europe on the periphery).

409 Claire Farago, “Imagining Art History Otherwise,” in Global and World Art in the Practice of the University Museum, edited by Jane Chin Davidson and Sandra Esslinger, 115–30 (London: Routledge, 2017), 116.

410 Farago evokes the term world art history to mean a “witnessing [of] the expansion of the discourse of art history to encompass many kinds of cultural artifacts and activities. The global turn also inevitably means uniting the world’s cultural production, which have been historically sorted into separate disciplinary and subdisciplinary practices of art history, archaeology, and anthropology.” Claire Farago, “The “Global Turn” in Art History: Why, When, and How Does it Matter?” in The Globalization of Renaissance Art: A Critical Review, 299–313 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2017), 301.

155 historically justified fashion”—by failing to “examine the longer history of world trade when

Europe was not at the fulcrum of events”411—art historians have participated in a long-held trap of Eurocentrism: namely, in perpetuating a territorialized model in which “inherited period and style categories imply the mentality of a people or an individual.”412 In other words, a model in which the West is positioned as unique and exceptional.

As part of her exploration of a deterritorialized model, Farago has engaged with what she characterizes as the global turn in an attempt to challenge the “dividing up [of] time and place” according to the “ideologically-loaded” template of periodization in order to experiment with reorganizing the discipline according to “regional networks of interaction” and “regional chronologies” for what she argues is a different art history than that produced under a nation-state model:

Organizing the history of art and material culture into historical spatial networks leads to an entirely different, but extensively documentable history focused on cultural interaction that does not rely on modern categories such as nation-states, continents, period styles, and other monolithic and often anachronistic entities to organize the material. In fact, dividing the world’s cultures by continents is a product of global contact established between Europeans and the rest of the world in the sixteenth century. In other words, it is another initially European idea in need of critical study.413

Under the new story of the modern world system, then, one that stretches earlier, to the thirteenth century (and even the second century when original routes for robust international trade were first established), and now guided by a “responsibly imagined global art

411 Ibid.

412 Farago, “Imagining Art History Otherwise,” 116.

413 Ibid.

156 history,”414 scholars have de-positioned the West from its long-standing hegemonic position for a wholly new perspective.

Indeed, stories reimagined according to and in line with World Art Historical approaches hold the possibility for alternative narratives that effectively respond to the criticism of persistent Eurocentrism in the discipline. In viewing all of the world’s art as infinitely and flexibly connected across both time and space and not, as in ethno-national art history, the domain of any one fixed cultural, geographical, political, or temporal boundary,

World Art History invests in wider, more globally-oriented frameworks to scaffold its art historical scholarship upon networks rather than nations. This paradigmatic shift neither weakens nor alters the discipline’s epistemology, and it does not interrupt or diminish art history’s signature explanatory powers. Rather, via a “unique system of interpretation” propelled by interests, purposes, and goals separate from ethno-national art history—a new line of questioning reflected in the form and content of its argumentation—World Art

History seeks to reorient the location, interpretation, and meaning of art historical knowledge for a scholarship different from that produced by the nation-state paradigm.415 Indeed, when art historians turn to new World Art Historical questions about familiar artworks, or to artifacts not yet placed within the established system, the rhetoric changes and the ensuing art historical discourse shifts—away from familiar master narratives and their ideological

414 Claire Farago, “The “Global Turn” in Art History: Why, When, and How Does it Matter?” in The Globalization of Renaissance Art: A Critical Review, 299–313 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2017), 301.

415 This is a characterization of the various styles of art historical writing explored by David Carrier in his seminal text Principles of Art History Writing, a general theory of the history of artwriting wherein he examines of the argumentation of early writers against present-day professional historians of art asking how and why these texts differ. David Carrier, Principles of Art History Writing (University Park Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1974). 3–10, 239.

157 reinforcements, away from the nation-state as a meaningful and relevant object of concern, and, most significantly, away from the West. This is the power of World Art History.

As a tangible (and evaluable) expression of World Art Historical theory, World Art

Historical writing cast in the narrative form of the didactic essay—stories that connect objects, and connect to all of the world across time—deposes art historical writing that tethers objects to one nation, period, or style.416 Here the introductory art history textbook’s signature meta-narrative—one grand narrative organized around the intellectual conception of the political nation-state wherein the plot for an object or series of objects is simply historical sequencing itself—positions as an avatar for traditional art historical writing and the didactic essay emerges as its rival. When supported through the application of a number of technologies platformed by the digital museum—a series of practical and conceptual strategies that facilitate and, further, enhance communication—World Art Historical writing in the guise of the online museum or gallery didactic essay, an output increasingly used by cultural institutions across North America and beyond to make accessible their collection to audiences both virtual and global, holds the potential to reframe the discipline’s most important questions, and tell art history’s stories differently.

The Didactic Essay Genre

While the online museum or gallery didactic essay presents in a number of flexible types—essays can be single-object focused, multiple objects grouped, thematic, or some combination thereof—a number of characteristics common to genre can be discerned. While

416 While, admittedly, over time art history’s one story of art has expanded to reflect the discipline’s desire to move towards a more inclusive art history (and, with it, the scope and volume of the introductory art history text), the paradigm of its narrative construct and underlying organizational structure has persisted.

158 positioned as a gateway or introduction to one or more objects held in either a physical bricks and mortar collection (such as a museum) or a more select intellectual collection (such as an open-access online space like Smarthistory), the didactic essay consistently remains audience-centred in that it embraces accessible language and uses appropriate vocabulary without jargon. This strategy is mindful and quite deliberate considering the academic background of its authors: while certain public-facing educational texts typically fall into the hands of nameless teams of technical and/or educational writers, the didactic essay remains firmly the territory of subject matter specialists who perform their area of speciality knowledge for a wide lay audience of which scholars will only ever meet virtually. A third characteristic of the didactic essay is that its scholarship is always based on current research that models disciplinary thinking, and works to engage the multi-vocal and seek interdisciplinarity in both topic and authorship: the breadth of deep knowledge alone held by its authors assures as much. Also common to the didactic essay genre is the use of pedagogical strategies intended to capture and retain the attention of the reader. Such literary devices as the narrative hook and/or the injection of rhetoric signal the genre as interesting to read and are common, and often border on edutainment. Lastly, as a narrative the didactic essay avoids the simple release of data in favour rather of subtle persuasion in service to the connection of ideas: information is carefully deployed in either waves of argument or is gradually built up and revealed in order to weave (seemingly) disparate elements of the storyline together all to support the audience in its drawing of conclusions.

While at all times the online didactic essay remains high-level critical academic scholarship written from within the discipline, it is a kind of writing separate from what a scholar might publish for his or her peers. With its ultimate goal to be read—and to be read

159 by the layperson (think ages fifteen to one hundred and five)—the didactic essay is a pedagogically-based narrative with a strong focus on communicating simple to complex ideas using a variety of educational strategies and in anticipation of different types of learners. As such it is real-world based, highly-visual—to enable image-text connections— and often interactive, both cognitively and digitally. At its most basic level, the didactic essay tells a story that is art historically compelling and memorable.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met)417 and the Smarthistory project418—two among several popular online resources for art history—are leading publishers of the online museum or gallery didactic essay genre. The Met’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History hosts an online repository of more than one thousand essays on specific themes in art history written by the Met’s experts including curators, conservators, scientists, and educators, and is based on its extensive permanent collection: works of art from all cultures, and across all time periods. Yet the site boasts more than simply a broad swath of essays. The Heilbrunn

Timeline’s well-developed web interface locates each essay’s original content in space and time—as well as against other original content, where it makes sense—by pairing essays with chronologies organized by world region and visualized through maps and an attendant timeline for a “chronological, geographical, and thematic exploration of global art

417 The Heilbrunn Timeline project was originally launched in 2000 targeted at both students and scholars to art. It self-describes as an “online publication” and is regularly updated and enriched to provide new scholarship and insights on the collection.

418 Smarthistory founding editors Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker recorded their first podcast in 2005 and went on to build a stable of informal videos discussing works on display in the MOMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In 2008 Smarthistory.org was established; since that time the site has been redesigned, its functionality improving as its audience has grown exponentially. In 2011 and for a short time Smarthistory discontinued its main site and shifted efforts to growing a presence on the Khan Academy’s instructional platform of personalized learning. Today Smarthistory maintains both sites, as well as a presence on YouTube and Flickr. Access is free and content is offered without advertising through a Creative Commons license encouraging reuse: the licensor retains copyright while allowing others to copy, distribute, and make some uses of the work.

160 history.”419 In addition, in a keen signal of the museum’s approach to interpreting and communicating the meaning of its diverse collection in a global age, the essays themselves consistently foreground connections between objects—some seven thousand from various cultures spanning close to five thousand years—to deal in a spatio-temporal extension that defies the artificial (and arbitrary) boundaries of the nation-state.

Yet the Heilbrunn Timeline publishes only essays focused on objects held in the

Met’s collection authored by its in-house scholarly experts (or related affiliates) and thus is unavailable to outsiders for the purpose of experimental World Art Historical writing

(although, arguably, it models many of the principles of a World Art Historical approach). In contrast, the Smarthistory project—an open repository of essays interpreting a decentralized virtual collection of the world’s art and cultural heritage not held in any one museum or gallery—actively solicits contributions from independent scholars. Still in its nascent stages of development with a growing collection of essays, videos, and images totalling some fifteen hundred so-called assets published across a range of very popular digital platforms,420

419 The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History,” accessed June 26, 2019, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/metpublications/Heilbrunn_Timeline_of_Art_History.

420 In seeking to extend its impact Smarthistory has looked beyond the increasingly mainstream digital media outlets of print-based reading, writing, and text to anticipate different kinds of learners approaching objects and artworks via alternative learning pathways. Harnessing the power of the web as an accessible and interactive e- learning environment, in addition to its two main educational sites (Smarthistory.org and Smarthistory on Khanacademy.org), Smarthistory offers highly-dynamic visual, aural, and social learning options by uploading many of its videos to YouTube and posting an expanded collection of teaching images on Flickr. With these additional digital learning platforms Smarthistory engages principles of multimedia communication to great effect: the linguistic is supplemented by visual, aural, and even spatial and temporal alternatives, making object interpretation and meaning generation a multivocal, multidimensional, and multimodal experience. Indeed, by creating a number of rhetorical situations by which an audience of readers, viewers, and listeners might connect with an object or work of art (in whatever mode makes sense for their learning), Smarthistory increases the sheer number of opportunities for audience reception of an idea or concept, not to mention increasing audience exposure to objects and artworks generally. Its resulting analytics are impressive. In 2015 smarthistory.org received 13.5 million views, and assets published between January 1, 2015 and March 26, 2016 (224 videos and essays released over a period of fifteen months) were measured by Google to have generated 2,724,330 views. Beth Harris and Steven Zucker, “How Smarthistory Stacks Up (And Why Museums Should Care About YouTube),” Smarthistory (blog), April 8, 2016, https://smarthistoryblog.org/2016/04/08/how-smarthistory-

161

Smarthistory has to date welcomed contributions from more than two hundred scholars and/or scholar-collaborators of various expertise ranging from the paleolithic to the contemporary to interpret an endless catalogue of objects both canonical and new. This active base of scholars and growing collection of objects, combined with the fact that Smarthistory promotes a global content in terms of scope—the editorial team continues to expand content in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Oceania—positions Smarthistory as an ideal venue to practice and test the application of World Art Historical approaches in artwriting.

The Smarthistory Didactic Essay Genre

Like the didactic essay genre generally, essays published by Smarthistory connect any number of ideas ranging from the simple to the complex in a compelling storyline that requires readers to actively engage in order to generate comprehension and meaning. This is not to say that the site’s essays are overly demanding: essays typically focus on a single artwork or object, and run between eight hundred and twelve hundred words of lively writing that targets students at an introductory art history or visual culture level with no prior exposure to the history of art. While Smarthistory provides the same image identification as most staple art historical resources, its essays and videos offer much more than information: they build rich, multidimensional stories around ideas and concepts set in highly-visual and

stacks-up-and-why-museums-should-care-about-youtube. Across key content platforms (including Smarthistory.org, Khan Academy, and YouTube) more than 25 million page-views were recorded in the July 1, 2015 to June 30, 2016 academic year (an average of 12 million visitors a month access the Khan Academy site alone). Beth Harris and Steven Zucker, “Making the Absent Present: The Imperative of Teaching Art History,” Art History Pedagogy & Practice 1, no. 1 (2016): 5. As of April 8, 2016, Smarthistory attracted more than 47,000 YouTube subscribers to its channel, some 7,000 more than the Met and more than every art museum in the US and the UK (save MoMA and Tate). Harris et al., “How Smarthistory Stacks Up.” Proving this trend in on the upswing, Smarthistory updated its YouTube statistics to 60,000 subscribers as of July 2016. Lastly, as of August 1, 2016, the more than 6,000 high-resolution images for non-commercial use offered on the Flickr site had been viewed some 6,775,000 times. Harris at al., “Making the Absent Present.”

162 interactive contexts that model cutting-edge art historical scholarship to deliver a transformational learning experience. While certainly the same can be argued for the Met’s

Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History—namely, that it harnesses this same narrative power in its essay format (and to much the same effect, including many of the didactic essay characteristics explored below)—the Met is restricted to objects in its permanent collection.

Smarthistory has no such restriction: it draws from collections like the Met, as well as every major international art museum (as well as works in situ), to advance its mandate to include works from across the globe. In this light Smarthistory’s virtual collection presents as the most open and flexible—an exploration of the infinite possibilities of objects and art from which World Art History might draw in its narrative expression.

To ensure the effective communication of compelling stories, Smarthistory editors uniformly apply a number of pedagogical strategies that support the core principles of critical reading and comprehension.421 Essays are highly visual, but also extremely thoughtful and discerning in their visuality: more than simply providing an image of the object or artwork in question (as would a typical art history text), essays seek to integrate image into text to encourage readers to read not only words, but also visualize the story they tell. Only images that critically support the narrative goals of the essay are included: choices made around what images to incorporate and where in the essay to incorporate them support in a very strategic way the careful unfolding of key points and arguments. In terms of locating objects in space and time, essays similarly privilege visually-led communication and, further, explicitly connect each object’s spatial and temporal coordinates to the narrative. Contextualizing maps

421 One theory is advanced by Adrienne Gear via her five reading powers: connect, visualize, question, infer, and transfer; see: Adrienne Gear, Reading Power: Teaching Students to Think While They Read (Markham, Ontario: Pembroke Publishers, 2015).

163 and accompanying textual descriptions guide readers through a topic’s geography—so readers always know where they are in the world—and essay narratives work to make clear when an object was created or associated milestone took place by animating the very concept of time: benchmarks, parallelisms, and marking time in reverse do more than report on an object’s date of creation but help readers imagine the flow of time and its relative movement in the world and to the present day. These highly visual strategies reinforce and strengthen the narrative, help readers grasp and retain key ideas, and make tangible spatial and temporal abstractions that are critical to context and overall understanding.

The effectiveness of the Smarthistory essay genre, as well as the visual-privileging strategies that support it, are made possible by the site’s flexible digital media platform. As a digital initiative Smarthistory inherently holds the ability to organize and reorganize its material in any number of ways beyond the traditional silos of period, style, and chronology, as much of the site currently adheres—a predictable if stable system of content ordering borrowed from the traditional art history textbook. Already the site has begun to experiment with alternative organizational strategies, hinting at the immense power of the digital to challenge linear art historical narratives. Experiments with thematic groupings promote anti- hierarchic and anti-canonical “anti-narratives” and offer a glimpse of what is possible when style and/or chronology as an organizing principle is unprivileged. This same digital flexibility, when applied at the level of the essay page, enables Smarthistory editors to not only integrate an unlimited number of images, maps, and illustrations within the text, but to design strong and effective image-text connections that parallel and support the calculated deployment of ideas and information within the essay narrative.

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Yet, perhaps the most obvious advantage of the digital format—the advantage

Smarthistory editors credit among the resource’s greatest strengths422—is that freed from text character limits that cap the object summaries used to tie the narrative of the typical introductory art history text together (texts that expand with each new edition not because the summaries grow in character count or complexity but because objects and artworks grow in number), Smarthistory’s flexible, digital format accommodates essays limited only in length by the attention and stamina of its readers. While the ability to approach objects and artworks comprehensively and with rich visuality—the digital format expands to include unlimited images as well—is a functionality attributable to the digital platform upon which the

Smarthistory essay genre was built, in and of itself this functionality is not unique. What is unique, however, and what sets Smarthistory apart from its online cohort of high-quality resources for art history, is how it fills its digital space to offer a unique art historical educational product.

Each Smarthistory essay is filled with scholarly conversation presented as an idea- rich story narrative that meets the burden, but not the opaqueness, of critical academic scholarship. Rather than driven by a need to maintain the coherence of a master-narrative,

Smarthistory essays are driven by ideas—a broad range of ideas that depart directly from each object or artwork—and, written by practising and specialist art historians, museum and gallery curators, and scholars from such neighbouring fields as archaeology and anthropology, engage with these ideas by applying the latest advances in disciplinary practice. The very best Smarthistory essays model cutting-edge art historical, museum

422 Harris et al., “Making the Absent Present.”

165 education, and field practice, and engage with some of the most compelling research questions and interdisciplinary methodologies representing progressive and even experimental interpretations and hypotheses. This is in stark contrast to multi-edition art history survey texts where in each new iteration a team of educational writers might refresh an object’s presentation with new writing or images, but very rarely do they challenge an object’s core message within the text’s script—the canonical meta-narrative introductory survey textbooks trade in. In a Smarthistory anti-canonical narrative, objects are viewed as subjects unto themselves and as agents of breaking scholarship by subject-matter experts actively linking research and pedagogy. Directing a myriad of ideas—rather than being directed by a master narrative—each object’s interpretation is variable and its message highly negotiable.

In addition to relaying facts and history through its content, in space afforded by the digital each Smarthistory essay uses its time with the reader to explore some of art history’s biggest ideas via the means and methodologies of the discipline. It is this decision, namely, to make room for and align the discipline’s pedagogy with cutting-edge art historical practice that, combined with its focus on education—the considerable thought and effort put into the way in which art history is communicated; specifically the way its big ideas and concepts, specialized vocabulary, and research and methodologies are presented and made accessible to a generalized audience—positions Smarthistory as an ideal outlet for the experimental application of World Art Historical research principles.

Yet for all Smarthistory’s strengths, and as much as it appeals to its audience as a satisfying alternative to the traditional book, in critical ways Smarthistory perpetuates the most problematic hallmarks of the art history education staple it desires to challenge and

166 replace. In its organizational structure—a web architecture that, regardless of an essay’s core message, seizes upon an object’s identity solely on the basis of its culture of origin, style, or period, and then organizes and presents it accordingly—Smarthistory maintains rigid cultural and temporal silos; in so doing the resource erects barriers between and across objects, and silences alternative threads of connection. In a similar act of siloing this time at the level of the object, the Smarthistory essay genre, like the typical textbook object summary, isolates objects from one another, denying intellectual links and quietly reinforcing a rhetoric that objects and artworks live in isolation. And lastly, while the Smarthistory essay genre resists narrative canonicity, in much of its selection of objects for study (although unlike the Met it has no restrictive pool to draw from), the resource fails to challenge the rhetoric of the art historical canon: rather, Smarthistory repeats it, channelling its efforts rather into leading the movement to globalize it.

Three Narrative Experiments

It was within the frame of the didactic essay generally, and the Smarthistory didactic essay specifically, that I researched and published three essays on objects that had remained unclaimed on the Smarthistory collaborator website for more than a year—three easily- recognizable and canonical “what do you say about them” objects from popular scholarship.

Since two of the objects I wrote about—the Apollo 11 Cave Stones and the Running Horned

Woman—are also included in a popular staple art history textbook, Stokstad and Cothren’s

Art History published by Pearson (note: the third object, the Anthropomorphic Stele, is

167 not),423 the opportunity for narrative comparison presents and is explored below as a preface to my critical reflection on writing art history away from the nation-state.

In targeting these objects for essay publication Smarthistory was responding to their inclusion by the American College Board in the 2015 AP Art History curriculum, part of

Smarthistory’s overall and explicit mandate to align with objects that are “most often taught” in introductory art history courses.424 Yet, interestingly, while the College Board categorizes the objects among several from across the world dating to the prehistorical period—as signifiers of the story of art’s very beginnings: under content Area 1 collected as “Global

Prehistory, 30,000–500 B.C.E.”—despite having a similarly-organized chapter (Chapter One, simply entitled “Prehistoric Art”), Pearson opts rather to locate both objects in the chapter dedicated to the arts of the various nations of Africa, the continent from which they originate.

Both objects are thus introduced—one directly and one obliquely—in the first of two chapters addressing Africa as an organizing principle, in Chapter Fourteen’s “Arts of Africa to the Sixteenth Century” under the section heading “The Origins of Art in Africa,” more than four hundred pages from the text’s first chapter presenting the balance of the world’s prehistoric art.425 Following a number of sub-headings presenting three concepts deemed critical for the messaging of the chapter—“Spirituality,” “Power,” and “Identity”—and under the title “Prehistoric Arts” and the subtitle “Namibia and South Africa,” the Apollo 11 Cave

423 Marilyn Stokstad and Michael W. Cothren, Art History, sixth edition (USA: Pearson Education Inc., 2018). The text was originally conceived and created by Stokstad in 1995.

424 John Seed, “Is Smarthistory the Art History Textbook of the Future?” The Huffington Post, May 9, 2012, last updated November 5, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-seed/smarthistory_b_1847324.html.

425 The second chapter on Africa is Chapter 29, “Arts of Africa from the Sixteenth Century to the Present.” Stokstad and Cothren, Art History, 894–919. Prehistoric art also appears in a nationally-organized chapter: Chapter 13, “Art of the Americas before 1300,” beginning on page 386.

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Stones are introduced where, in less than one hundred words, the text discusses the stone’s appellation and offers a concise visual analysis of the imagery presenting on its rock face.

The second object, Running Horned Woman, follows shortly after in the same section but under the subtitle “Algeria” attached to a discussion of the Tassili-n-Ajjer mountain range. But mention of the specific image is only implied as part of a large body of painted work of the same period of history within which the object was assigned; namely, “the transformation of the Sahara from fertile grasslands to the vast desert we know today” where it is referenced as part of “a variety of scenes found on rock walls in Southern Algeria and

Libya [depicting] men and women dancing or performing various ceremonial activities.” The text describes the grouping:

The artists who created these works paid close attention to details of clothing, body decoration, and headdresses; in some examples the figures are depicted wearing masks that cover their faces. While scholars are still unsure of their exact meaning, some have suggested the figures are engaged in rituals intended to ensure adequate rainfall or success in hunting, or to honor their dead.426

In the case of both objects, broad contextualizing discussions link objects together with other, similar painted images on “living rock” across Africa.427

By locating each object within their home continent organized by select nation,

Pearson privileges the kind of periodization Farago accused of long failing the discipline’s understanding of art. Further, by using both objects, two strong examples of prehistoric art, as an introduction to the arts of Africa—to choose to bring together all things “African” under one umbrella rather than all things “prehistoric” as the College Board had done—the

426 Ibid., 417.

427 One example is the linking of “carved and painted images on living rock” in Namibia to those found across a similar landscape in South Africa, specifically the Drakensberg Mountain range which is home to Game Pass Shelter. Ibid., 415–6.

169 text essentialized the continent, its peoples, and its arts even as it aims to position its analysis differently, as the following excerpt shows:

Africa is a continent with over 54 countries and a twenty-first century population estimated at 1.2 billion people, who speak more than 2,000 languages and live on a landmass large enough to encompass the entire United States three times over…. This chapter, therefore, can merely introduce some of the early artistic moments and monuments from across the continent of Africa, as we understand them at the beginning of the twenty-first century.428

The implied reference point of the West is striking: both the comparison to the United States

(anticipating an American reader) and the essential “we” (an authoritative voice no doubt located in the same geography) signal a thoroughly Western-centred perspective which, considering the American publisher, is perhaps not surprising (or to be faulted too heavily).

But the choice to locate two objects from prehistory not within the prehistory chapter—not in the first chapter of the text, at the very beginning of art’s story—presents as a suspect move for by their absence from prehistory as readers receive it in Chapter One there is only

Western Europe: France and Northern Spain, to be exact.429 Implied, then, in the story of the prehistoric is a unique origin for art in Europe. Despite tracing modern humans to Africa,

Africa is removed from the story of art’s beginnings.

428 Ibid., 414.

429 Despite opening with a discussion of the origins of modern humans in Africa spreading across Asia, into Europe, and finally to Australia and the Americas, and following with an explanation of the division of dating categories, signalled by the introductory map entitled “Prehistoric Europe” (and the very first work imaged in the chapter: from Pech-Merle in France), the chapter declares its explicit focus Western Europe. Examples from other parts of the world are, however, included, yet seemingly as reference points: the Rainbow Serpent from Australia is pictured with text noting it as one of the world’s “very oldest images;” in rhetorical framing, a hand axe from Tanzania appears under the title “Tools or Art?”; and the Blombos Cave is discussed as an early workshop where pigments were used to decorate objects and even bodies. Once the authors point readers to later chapters where prehistoric art from other parts of the world are discussed, they properly settle into the prehistoric art of Western Europe and stay there. Ibid., 1–5.

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At the object level, too, the West assumes a hegemonic role in early art. In Chapter

Fourteen, Africa’s prehistoric art is discussed as “images painted on rocks,” “rock art,” and

“painted images,” yet in Chapter One “cave paintings” and “wall paintings” belonging to a

“rich and sophisticated phase” understood as Art in Europe are discussed.430 The zero sum total of this periodization—into chapters organized most often by nation and then, no matter the chapter, an exhausting nesting of section headings and subheadings and titles and subtitles always working to reinforce separations between objects (and perhaps even excluding objects)431—is the uneven treatment of objects and artworks. In the Pearson text, the stories of the Apollo 11 Cave Stones and the Running Horned Woman are presented in a context that perpetuates the categories of ethnography and art that Ruth Phillips argues are still at issue in Western museums. No doubt, for they are rampant in Western texts: Africa has painted images, Europe has paintings.

In my task of challenging these habits of Western art historical writing and applying the principles of a World Art Historical approach to the genre of the online didactic essay, I used the opportunity to write for Smarthistory as an opportunity to intervene in the archetypal art historical narrative and experiment with alternative stories and storytelling

430 In Chapter One under the subtitle “Cave Painting,” Chauvet and Lascaux in France are discussed, and also Altamira in Spain (followed by the next heading, a mirror of the (Western) category preceding it: “Cave Sculpture”). Ibid., 8-13. Chapter Fourteen’s parallel section received not the same high-art introduction but simply nests under “Prehistoric Arts.” Ibid., 415–7.

431 These headings are the discourse of meta-narrative Western art historical writing: rather than serving as the (flexible) departure point for any number of ideas, by cataloguing objects and artworks within this structure they are asked to carry a fixed message, and serve a fixed content-fulfilling purpose while occupying a fixed position: once placed within the meta-narrative, the object and, most significantly, its interpretation, become canonical and likely never to be reconsidered or reinterpreted—the narrative’s very identity demands it. Currently the third object I wrote about for Smarthistory, the Anthropomorphic Stele, does not appear in the Pearson text: considering that AP Art History has earmarked the work in its curriculum, this is surprising. I have two hypotheses: first, that including the work in the prehistory chapter would upset its current narrative tidiness of Art in Europe; second, that in the current chapter organizational structure there is no space wherein a work belonging by geography to the Arabian Peninsula could fit in.

171 strategies.432 In terms of overall approach I endeavoured to view each object, and write about it, with fresh eyes, and I developed my own protocol for writing art history in a World Art

Historical way. At every turn I worked to resist ethno-nationalist art historical writing that privileged chronology, categorization, and teleology—writing that sought to locate objects on a progressive and sequential linear path resulting in the effective isolation of objects—to instead test in application developing World Art Historical research principles that emphasized points of connection and exchange. While on balance I felt satisfied that what I was seeking to do in each essay was accepted—all three essays were published almost exactly as submitted—there was one notable exception: in the essay for the Running Horned

Woman the section title appearing as “Chronology” was submitted by me as “The limits of chronological sequencing”—by shortening the title the editors dulled the argument contained therein.

Each of the three objects I wrote about appeared, to a limited extent, in professional academic scholarship, and it was this research that became the starting point for my task of engaging with writing art history in a World Art Historical way. In the Apollo 11 Cave

Stones essay (see Appendix A.1433), I traced 100,000 years of occupation via a pair of quartzite stones named after a contemporaneous event: NASA’s successful space mission to the moon. Found in a rock shelter in the Huns Mountains of Namibia between 1969 and 1971 by German archaeologist W.E. Wendt, on the cleavage face of what was once a complete

432 I am not the first to suggest nor show by way of application how World Art Historical principles might be applied to all of time; see: Kristen Chiem and Cynthia S. Colburn, “Global Foundations for a World Art History,” Visual Resources 31, no. 3–4 (2015): 177–99.

433 Nathalie N. Hager, “Apollo 11 Cave Stones,” in Smarthistory, November 21, 2015, accessed June 26, 2019, http://smarthistory.org/apollo-11-cave-stones.

172 slab an unidentified animal form resembling a feline in appearance but with human hind legs can be discerned. Using radiocarbon dating, the stones have been dated to the Middle Stone

Age period in southern Africa and stand as the oldest examples of figurative art from the

African continent. In the second essay I worked to locate the local in the global in the Ha’il

Stele (see Appendix A.2434), one of three anthropomorphic stelae found on the Arabian

Peninsula. A simple low-relief sandstone sculpture in trapezoidal shape approximately three feet high, it is notable for its abstracted representation of the human form: on its robed torso a necklace hangs with two cords diagonally crossing the body, and at the waist, a double- bladed dagger hangs from a wide belt that continues around the back. Archeologists believe that the stele was probably associated with religious or burial practices and was likely used as a grave marker in an open-air sanctuary. In the third and final essay I sought to revise the scholarship of the Running Horned Woman (see Appendix A.3435), a rock painting known for its popularly title. Discovered in 1956 by French archaeologist Henri Lhote who, on a sixteen-month expedition to the Sahara Desert to map and study the rock art of the Tassili n’Ajjer, found in an isolated rock shelter a “curious figure” of particular interest he called the

Horned Goddess—so named for the two horns protruding from the head of a woman running.

Lhote suggested and experts agreed on a symbolic, rather than representational, interpretation: perhaps ritual, rite, or ceremony. In order to preserve the “greatest center of prehistoric art in the world,” the Tassili plateau was declared a national park in 1972 and was classified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1982. All three objects proved to be both

434 Nathalie N. Hager, “Anthropomorphic Stele,” in Smarthistory, December 31, 2015, accessed June 26, 2019, http://smarthistory.org/anthropomorphic-stele.

435 Nathalie N. Hager, “Running Horned Woman, Tassili n’Ajjer, Algeria,” in Smarthistory, April 30, 2016, accessed June 26, 2019, http://smarthistory.org/running-horned-woman-tassili-najjer-algeria.

173 complex and interesting, and each presented with their own narrative challenges as explored below.

Engaging with a World Art Historical Approach

Approximately 25,000 years ago, in a rock shelter in the Huns Mountains of Namibia on the southwest coast of Africa, an animal was drawn in charcoal on a hand-sized slab of stone. — Excerpt from the Smarthistory Apollo 11 Cave Stones didactic essay

This stele is tall, measuring approximately three feet high. But it is not just vertical height that makes this free-standing stone sculpture appear human, or anthropomorphic.

While both sides are sculpted, emphasis is on the front, particularly the face, chest, and waist: a trapezoidal head rests directly on squared shoulders with the outline of a face framing two closely-spaced eyes and a flattened nose; on the robed figure’s torso a necklace hangs with two cords diagonally crossing the body with an awl (a small pointed tool) attached; and at the waist, a double-bladed dagger hangs from a wide belt that continues around to the back. The sculpture is simple, even abstract, but clearly represents a human figure. — Excerpt from the Smarthistory Anthropomorphic Stele didactic essay

Between 1933 and 1940, camel corps officer Lieutenant Brenans of the French Foreign Legion completed a series of small sketches and hand--written notes detailing his discovery of dozens of rock art sites deep within the canyons of the Tassili n’Ajjer, a difficult to access plateau in the Algerian section of the Sahara Desert near the borders of Libya and Niger in northern Africa. — Excerpt from the Smarthistory Running Horned Woman didactic essay

All three Smarthistory essays begin with a narrative hook to capture the reader’s attention and to signal the beginning of didactic narrative, rather than summary. The Apollo

11 Cave Stones essay opens with the act of the stones’ very creation, and follows with the story of its abandonment, burial, and eventual excavation; the Anthropomorphic Stele launches with a description, seizing on the object’s unexpected human form as the basis for its overall storyline; and the Running Horned Woman starts by describing early attempts at

174 documenting the Tassili’s rich archive of rock art laying the ground for a story that considers critically what it means to claim discovery. In all cases, joined with or quickly following these narrative openings was a detailed visual analysis—the exercise of close-looking that serves as the backbone of and key learning threshold in the art historical discipline436— supported by a high-quality image of the object in question. It was important to me that these narrative elements not be taken for granted: the inclusion of a reproduction was not enough, for the act of close looking necessitates reinforcement (and modelling) through descriptive narrative that applies in practice the specialized vocabulary of the discipline.

Next, each essay sought to locate objects in space and time and, further, explicitly connect each object’s spatial and temporal coordinates to the narrative. The Apollo 11 Cave

Stones were buried between 25,500 and 25,300 years ago during the Middle Stone Age making them, at the time of their discovery, the oldest dated art known on the African continent and among the earliest evidence of human artistic expression worldwide; the anthropomorphic stele dates to the fourth millennium BCE, a time when the Arabian

Peninsula was more like a savannah than a desert and small groups of hunter-gatherers moved settlements often—seasonally but repeatedly, and probably for centuries—circulating and exchanging objects (like the stele) across wide swathes of territory; and while advanced dating techniques estimate the Running Horned Woman to date to approximately 6,000 to

4,000 BCE during the round head period, this information offers little in the way of the most important question of interpretation: namely, that the female horned figure was found in one of the highest massifs in the Tassili—a region is believed to hold special status due to its

436 Jan J. F. Meyer, Ray Land, and Caroline Baillie, eds., Threshold Concepts and Transformational Learning (Boston: Sense Publishers, 2010).

175 elevation and unique topology—to suggest ritual, rite, or ceremony as its purpose. In all cases, by using benchmarks, parallelisms, and the technique of marking time in reverse each essay was able to do more than report on an object’s dates but help readers imagine the flow of time and its relative movement in the world and to the present day. Further, or geographic specificity essays not only included contextualizing maps, but accompanied these with narrative descriptions as a guide through a topic’s geography so that readers were always made to be aware of where they were in the world. With these pedagogical strategies engaged, the next stage was crafting each essay’s content.

As all objects were recognizable if only as a type—consider the volume and ubiquity of rock art in Africa—in each essay I sought to emphasize individuality by seeking out an object’s most unique aspects from current and progressive research, and by striving to include compelling evidence in support of hypothesized meaning and interpretation. The

Apollo 11 rock shelter overlooks a dry gorge, sitting twenty meters above what was once a river that ran along the valley floor, and was likely an active site of ongoing human settlement thus representing over 100,000 years of human occupation; while the anthropomorphic stelae carries visual similarities with a number of other stelae discovered in the region, by focusing on local culture in their analysis of material history scholars have been able to determine that the Ha’il stele was associated with religious or burial practices and was likely used as a grave marker in an open-air sanctuary; and while the Running

Horned Woman was one of some 15,000 human figure and animal paintings and engravings found on the rock walls of the Tassili’s many gorges and shelters, its isolated location and marked pictorial quality suggests the site, and the subject of the painting, fell outside of the everyday and held symbolic meaning. By using primary resources for my research—sources

176 that are specialized and interdisciplinary and published outside of secondary research from which mainstream educational writing is typically drawn—I was able to inject into each essay complex thought and reason. But this complexity required careful management in order to appeal to a generalized Smarthistory audience. In order to effectively transform an object’s scholarly details into accessible pedagogy, I posed rhetorical questions such as “How can this be?” (regarding shared visual characteristics with regards to the anthropomorphic stele) and

“Can we say that art began in Africa?” (challenging the role of the cave stones in the story of humanity’s origins), and in this way I was able to trace for readers the arc of research that led scholars to current-day understanding as well as shifts and progressions in disciplinary thinking.

To support the trajectory of varied but key ideas across each essay’s storyline, I took full advantage of Smarthistory’s digital platform while simultaneously seeking to bridge its gaps. All essays used visuals in support of the narrative—never as a distraction from it—and worked to join together text and image in one conversation so that readers were never forced to divide their attention. Wherever possible I provided expanded definitions through the site’s hyperlinking functionality, and, in the case of the stele, linked not only to additional resources (as I did for all essays) but to a selection of other essays published on the

Smarthistory site that I judged provided supporting evidence to the essay’s argument regarding objects and ideas travelling (I was especially pleased to see this proposal accepted by the editors for it marked the first time on the Smarthistory site that objects were linked in this way). While some of these strategies are similarly used by other authors contributing essays on the Smarthistory site, together with the approaches outlined below and

177 concentrated in one essay, they facilitated a redirection the history of art objects towards wider, more exploratory questions that characterize World Art Historical scholarship.

Geographic and Temporal Networks as Context

Considering the geographic vacuum many students struggle with today,437 contextualizing maps were key; yet, where it made sense and reinforced each essay’s purpose, focus was oriented on networks rather than nations, and on natural geography rather than borders: the Apollo cave stones were found not in a random cave but in what was once a spacious and protected rock shelter located approximately twenty meters above a dried riverbed, making the shelter’s location a deliberate site for ongoing human occupation over

100,000 years; the stele was located in the Arabian Peninsula (encompassing Saudi Arabia, among other countries and regions), an important geographic distinction considering the argument for trade and crossroads to follow; and the Running Horned Woman was found in

Algeria, in the Tassili, but most importantly, on the Aouanrhet massif, a naturally-defined region more meaningful than any man-made political or cultural construct.

Just as it became important to locate an object within its geographic network, it became important to locate it within a world historical chronological network. In addition to describing an object’s related geography so that it might align with and support the specific narrative arguments of each essay, it was important to approach time not as a strict measure

437 A professor at Memorial University in New Brunswick summarized: “[b]asic geography allows us to locate where we are in the world. It gives us a sense of time, and space, and scope....” But her pop quiz demonstrated that many university students were unable to locate whole continents or significant bodies of water on a world map. Joe O’Connor, “Lost Without a Map: Despite a Globalized Society, University Students Can't Locate the Atlantic Ocean,” The National Post, January 15, 2013, http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/lost-without- a-map-despite-a-globalized-society-university-students-cant-locate-the-atlantic-ocean.

178 of chronology, but, rather, in a comparative or relational way. Objects might date to a certain period or millennium, but this is often quickly forgotten or rarely remembered for the long- term. Instead, relative time, based on the present and contextualized against such significant evolutionary milestones as the evolution of Homo sapiens (Apollo 11 Cave Stones) or such key religio-historical events as the rise of Islam in one world region (Anthropomorphic Stele) was impressed.

Connecting Objects, and Groups of Objects

Having established the relative visual, geographical, and temporal dimensions of each object, in order to address a key critique of the Smarthistory site and in fact many parallel sites where the didactic essay is used—namely, the practice of siloing objects and separated them from one another—focus was shifted from practical considerations to the conceptual challenge of emphasizing, when possible, the connection between objects on the

Smarthistory site and beyond. In the Anthropomorphic Stele essay I added a postscript entitled “The global phenomenon of the stele,” and hyperlinked internally to other essays on the Smarthistory site discussing objects that were hypothesized to have similar purposes as the stelae found on the Arabian peninsula—an attempt to show linkages between objects across world regions while carefully managing each object’s unique scholarship. In the

Running Horned Woman essay the rock painting was discussed not only as an object unto itself, but as part of a larger, comprehensive collection of more than 15,000 human figure and animal paintings found on the rock walls of the Tassili with cumulative significance. In addition to making direct and overt connections between objects, secondary or indirect

179 connections were also explored as a way of bringing attention to the kinds of evidence they provide of a linked world in prehistory, and of the rich stories they fuel.

The Apollo 11 Cave Stones essay—in a decision facilitated by the inclusion of and even emphasis on a later discovery and its corrective effect on the historical record— illustrates this notion: in my essay I noted that at the time of their discovery the stones claimed status as “the oldest dated art known on the African continent and among the earliest evidence of human artistic expression worldwide” but had been displaced by the discovery of the 100,000-year-old paint workshop in the Blombos Cave. This move—to link these sites in a shared geography and temporality in the essay’s narrative—not only signals the limited use and even fickleness of relying upon fixed chronological dating in the location and focus of an object’s significance, but works to contextualize the cave stones themselves as only one discovery among others and an accordingly shifting significance. This point was emphasized in the concluding section, “The global origins of art,” where the essay offered an alternative hypothesis: in its argument for an understanding of rock art as a global phenomena, the

Apollo cave stones were positioned as but one actor in the world’s narrative on rock art’s beginnings—in no way a discovery, or even a series of discoveries, isolated to the continent of Africa.

Self-Reflection: Artwriting the World Art Historical Way

These decisions to shift and widen the frame through which objects are interpreted— spatially and temporally, but also metaphorically and symbolically—were deliberately made to reveal the many ways in which objects could be interpreted and relate to one another, and to prompt readers to think beyond the works in question. Such practical and conceptual

180 strategies are common in professional scholarship and even necessary to accurately present the complexity and interconnectedness of material culture yet are rarely used in pedagogical applications. It is a shortcoming and a missed opportunity.

While ethno-national art history has typically focused on the specific tasks of narrowing an object’s date of creation and applying chronological sequencing in order to generate interpretation and meaning in service of constructing cultural or national identity— which, in fact, comprises the majority of published research on the stones—the Apollo 11

Cave Stones essay is focused towards the compelling story of the cave’s 100,000 years of human occupation. Seizing the site where the cave stones were brought to and used and subsequently abandoned for later discovery as equal in importance to the stones themselves, the essay shifted interest away from concerns of dating or chronology towards the broader storyline of how early humanity sought to interpret the world around them and the role of the cave, and the stones, in this process. In this way the stones served not as isolated objects, but as part of a larger and wider narrative—one with implications of general yet worldwide interest. A slightly complex, more nuanced story to tell requiring the very disciplined release of select evidence from such fields as geography, anthropology, environmental sciences, religious studies, as well as archaeology and art history, the result was an interdisciplinary story interesting for its humanity rather than its facts alone.

In writing the Anthropomorphic Stele essay it was important to highlight the delicate negotiation between commensurability and non-translation. While the stele was discussed in the context of other, similar-use objects found in different regions of the peninsula (some of which shared common features), it was their differences rather that were highlighted. This strategy would likely contrast the approach of those seeking to integrate the stele in the

181 canonical meta-narrative of the staple art history text where, citing the need for pedagogical simplicity in service to narrative coherence, the stele, and all the stelae referenced in the essay, might find themselves organized not only chronologically and by period, but grouped in their similarities in order to emphasize their likeness or type. Yet this smoothing out and even silencing of difference does a severe disservice to both the object and its audience: there are ways to successfully integrate the findings of professional scholarship into a text geared towards a generalized audience and make a clear point about locating the local in the global, an important element of writing to World Art Historical research principles.

For its many confrontations and sometimes difficult subject matter, the Running

Horned Woman essay was the most challenging to write but necessarily so for it sought to delicately reckon many lingering beliefs about art, and also art in Africa (not the least the anointing of objects with dramatic and disconnected Classical names—a similar (but less urgent) point could be made with regards to the Apollo cave stones). While it fell outside of a direct discussion of the rock painting itself, a discussion of French archaeologist Henri

Breuil’s racial theory of the “White Lady” was a necessary inclusion for it demonstrated how deeply Eurocentric ideas and assumptions influence scholarship, likely to this day. By directly addressing the notion that for many generations foreign influence on ancient art in

Africa was suspected, the essay sought to revise the scholarship of rock art in Africa via one object’s unique story. Yet the point of these interventions was to not only correct the record, but to demonstrate the fallibility of research that depends upon unchecked beliefs and assumptions.

The online didactic essay is but one museological discourse capable of reinforcing master narratives of art history established upon the intellectual formation of the nation-state,

182 and simultaneously working to challenge and dismantle them. The second is the physical exhibition of a permanent collection of objects—the narrative of display wherein museums tell stories through the curation and visual arrangement of objects on display, as well as those silenced or omitted.438 This is the topic of exploration in the next chapter, laying the ground for the Canadian case study examined in Part Three.

438 Lynda Kelly, “The Role of Narrative in Museum Exhibitions,” The Australian Museum Blog, June 8, 2010, accessed March 28, 2019, https://australianmuseum.net.au/blog-archive/museullaneous/the-role-of-narrative-in- museum-exhibitions/.

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Chapter Five: Displaying World Art History

I have always sensed that much of what is done in the history of art classroom is a kind of disciplining of thinking about art. The discipline requires that the students learn the defining habits not only of the discipline’s distinctive procedures for the study of art but also its model of narrating a story of art. This disciplining is more urgent the larger the art historical constituency or its potential influence. Consistency and even uniformity of message safeguard the passing on of cultural capital for the next generation or across social constituencies. The museums perform a similar function, but architecturally and curatorially, telling their publics again and again the same story through selection, layout, and text panel. The same story is the politically right (not the politically correct!) story. — Griselda Pollock, “Whither Art History?,” 16.

As evidenced in Chapter Three, some of the most perceptive challenges to the values and assumptions of ethno-national art history have come out of research outputs and scholarly publications located within the museum.439 Indeed, via these and countless other exhibitions taking place across various global contemporary art worlds,440 a number of art galleries and museums have worked tirelessly in their narrative displays to shift away from national art histories and area studies towards an exploration of the spaces in between geographic and political borders to demonstrate the institution of the museum as a site unique in its ability to apply into practice the spatio-temporal extension that is the hallmark of a

World Art Historical approach.

439 The three temporary exhibitions of the last decade and a half discussed include: The Meeting of Asia and Europe (2004) exhibited at London’s The Victoria and Albert Museum; Venice and the Islamic World (2007), a transnational collaboration between Paris’ Institut du Monde Arabe and New York’s the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s and Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade (2013).

440 Two very recent shows merit specific mention. The first is Secrets of the Sea: A Tang Shipwreck and Early Trade in Asia organized by the Asia Society and Museum in New York (2017). “Secrets of the Sea: A Tang Shipwreck and Early Trade in Asia,” Asia Society, accessed June 26, 2019, https://asiasociety.org/new- york/exhibitions/secrets-sea-tang-shipwreck-and-early-trade-asia. The second is Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange across Medieval Saharan Africa organized by the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University in Los Angeles (2019). “Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange across Medieval Saharan Africa,” Block Museum of Art, accessed June 26, 2019, https://www.blockmuseum.northwestern.edu/exhibitions/2019/caravans-of-gold,-fragments-in-time-art,- culture,-and-exchange-across-medieval-saharan-africa.html.

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Yet the turn towards wider frameworks as a means of both deviating from and presenting a challenge to the typical and expected art historical narrative is not unique to the display of the latest and most progressive scholarship powering temporary exhibitions across

North America and beyond. Increasingly museums and galleries are embracing key temporary exhibition protocols proven effective in telling new stories—as well as old stories in new ways—and are beginning to apply them to the reimagination of their signature permanent exhibition galleries in order to deploy their collections in service to not only a transnational perspective, but to a transcultural one as well.

Most recently in Canada, for instance, there is the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto,

Canada: the 2016 reinstallation of the Thomson Collection of Canadian Art441 organized by

Andrew Hunter, (the now former) curator of Canadian art,442 saw the physical gallery space open up for a complete redesign in order to “help tell the broader story of art in Canada with attention to dialogues between first nations and settlers, the rural and urban, as well as

Toronto and Quebec.”443 Internationally there are two museum projects worth noting. The

441 Named after “visionary” collector and philanthropist Ken Thomson, the new galleries were the first reinstallation of the Thomson Collection since 2008 when it first debuted: 16,000 square feet tracing the evolution of painting in Canada including major works by such Canadian favourites as Cornelius Krieghoff, the Group of Seven and their contemporaries, and select post-war artists, as well as rare historic Indigenous artworks. “Exciting changes are happening in the Thomson Collection of Canadian Art,” AGOINSIDER. Art Gallery of Ontario, January 10, 2016, http://artmatters.ca/wp/2016/01/new-canadian/.

442 Hunter resigned following the very successful launch of Every. Now. Then. (2017), a temporary exhibition co-curated by Anique Jordan, an African-Canadian independent curator: “a powerfully inclusive, unblinkingly critical take on contemporary Canadian nationhood...[that] refused master narratives in favour of hidden histories—driven whether by race, gender, or economic disparity—and unflinchingly demands that we, as Canadians, face the reality of our country, past and present, unpleasant though it may be.” Murray Whyte, “AGO facing big choices as top curator Andrew Hunter quits,” The Star, September 4, 2017, https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/visualarts/2017/09/07/ago-facing-big-choice-as-top-curator-andrew- hunter-quits-whyte.html.

443 “Exciting changes are happening.” AGOINSIDER. The Thomson Collection reinstallation precipitated an institution-wide reconsideration of the presentation of the AGO’s full collection taking the shape of the Look: Forward project beginning in 2017 and ongoing—an initiative lauded by AGO administration but heavily critiqued by Andrew Hunter for failing to “engage with Canada, Canadian art or the diversity of this

185 first is “Objects in Transfer,” a unique project that reveals a network of relationships between widely differing cultural contexts that are not necessarily associated with Islamic art today.

Organized as a “transcultural exhibition trail” through the Museum für Islamische Kunst in

Berlin, Germany, the exhibition aims at fulfilling the double function of museum scholars: to as researchers engage with the transcultural history of museum objects; and as museum professionals, to explore new ways of conveying art and (trans)cultural histories to a broader public.444 The second initiative, located in Marseilles, France, is the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations (MuCEM in French: Musée des civilizations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée): inaugurated in June of 2013, it is devoted to exploring the history and cross-fertilization of the Mediterranean basin from the Neolithic period through to the present for a permanent collection mandated to cross political, geographic, and cultural borders, and collapse material history across long-standing museum and gallery categories.445

In all these cases—at the AGO, the dismantling of the cultural and linguistic divides that have long-separated two (and likely more) versions of Canada; in Berlin, the questioning of modern assumptions about cultural boundaries and the whole notion of a separate Islamic

community.” Hunter, “Why I quit the Art Gallery of Ontario.” Not so according to the organizers, AGO’s curators: “We will challenge the status quo by aspiring to reflect varied voices that broaden our understanding of the world. Each curator is paying special attention to artists who have been under-represented and deserve recognition.” “The AGO is reimagining its look,” AGOINSIDER, Art Gallery of Ontario, February 14, 2017, http://artmatters.ca/wp/2017/02/the-ago-is-reimagining-its-look/.

444 Stephan Weber, “Preface,” Objects in Transfer: A Transcultural Exhibition Trail through the Museum für Islamische Kunst in Berlin, edited by Vera Beyer, Isabelle Dolezalek, and Sophia Vassilopoulou, 3–7 (Berlin: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Museum für Islamische Kunst, 2016), 6–7, https://www.kuk.tu- berlin.de/fileadmin/fg309/bilder/Aktuelles/Objects_in_Transfer.pdf. The exhibition was developed with the Collaborative Research Center “Episteme in Motion” at the Freie University Berlin.

445 Its collections are a collapse of the former Ethnographic Museum at Trocadero Palace in Paris (1878–1936) and the two museums that succeeded it (beginning in 1936: The Museum of Man and the National Museum of Popular Arts and Traditions (MNATP)). “A Brief History of the Collections,” Musée des civilizations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée (MuCEM), accessed June 27, 2019, http://www.mucem.org/en/collections/histoire-des-collections.

186 art; and at the MuCEM, the bringing together of several cultural players via the various processes of circulation and exchange that unified the Mediterranean as one but also as unique—dialogues across cultures with careful attention to the local within the global have been privileged, and political borders and cultural boundaries have been collapsed, in order to tell new previously-silent and alternative narratives thought unimaginable prior to the transcultural turn.

Two further examples located within the North American context—and, for their specific focus on reconstructing their respective master exhibition narratives, the subjects of this chapter’s analysis—include the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s reorganization of its former Islamic art galleries as the Art of Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later

South Asia, and the National Gallery of Canada’s new Canadian and Indigenous Galleries: two permanent exhibition gallery (re)installations that disregard the nation-state as organizing principle in favour of approaching objects from around the globe and across time transculturally. By investigating these cutting-edge twenty-first century museological “stories of art”—reimagined permanent exhibition galleries that engage with World Art Historical networks of connection and exchange—a number of patterns of curatorial practice emerge that, when considered together with the discursive platforms proposed in Chapter Two, the various ways World Art History is being debated in the twenty-first century, and when considered in conjunction with the three scholarly practices that put into application key moves signature of the spatio-temporal extension demanded by the turn to World Art History analyzed in Chapter Three, shape the key research principles underpinning the discourse of

World Art History. Embedded within these new and alternative narratives is the implicit power of the museum as a public-facing institution of art historical knowledge to first, as

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Juneja had accused, be fully implicated in the perpetuation of the notion of the very legitimacy and relevance of the nation-state in art-history-making, and second, in acting as a transcultural agent powerful in the identification of this Eurocentric bias and serving in its repair.

World Art History as Museological Discourse

To begin to re-shape their permanent exhibition galleries for the twenty-first century, museums have successfully translated three curatorial protocols long standard in the presentation of temporary and special exhibitions. First, in their strategic borrowing of key works from any number of collections both within the museum and gallery network as well as on its fringes, museums have reached across typical boundaries of what has long been assigned the status of fine art—from any number of previously-separated collections—to incorporate in their displays objects belonging to a previous generation’s notion of ethnography in order to create the capacity for directions more flexible and adaptable than those dictated by their collecting history alone. Second, via the deployment of cross- disciplinary teams of curators and other museum professionals both internal and external to the institution whose expertise and collaborative networks allow for a broadening of the previous tastes and interests of a single curator, museums have enabled the production of exhibitions that address a variety of topics through multiple voices in conversation, and that employ a number of methodologies and approaches. And third, in harnessing these new objects and this new multi-disciplinary expertise the museum has positioned itself as the teller of stories at once more nuanced and complex than the one staple narrative canonized by museums across the world, yet increasingly targeted towards its core audience and unique locale for stories capable of connecting with its visitors in personal ways.

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In addition to these protocols, a number of curatorial practices specific to the application of World Art Historical approaches can be identified following three threads.

First, in permanent exhibition galleries of the twenty-first century museums seek to present alternatives to the single and long-accepted master narrative by rethinking the notions of completeness, inclusivity, and integration as a curatorial strategy: narratives extend both temporally and spatially the storyline (and often storylines, told from various perspectives and in multiple voices) to begin earlier, reach wider, and weave in increased intellectual complexity requiring visitors to engage actively to formulate meaning. The actual number of objects selected for narrative-telling are increased and the nature of these objects—what opportunities for segue, breaches, challenges, and ruptures they offer by way of their inclusion—are carefully considered in order to provide the exhibition with both breadth and depth. No longer limited to objects held in their collection, museums are able to focus on representing previously-overlooked genres, media, and even groups or cultures to cater a narrative specific to their audiences in order to tell a story apart from the generic or staple formula canonized in museums across North America. New narratives, while following chronology generally, also often break with time, reverse time, or, in a demotion of the importance of ordered time, juxtapose objects across time in surprising ways in order to offer visitors both a look ahead and a reflection back on how the narrative of their museum was shaped, and what might have been missed.

Second, permanent exhibitions conceived for the twenty-first century—no longer the vision of a singular curator or based on a single collection—are foundationed on interdisciplinarity and multidisciplinarity. Boundaries between subject-matter expertise and even collections long-held separate are collapsed (often bringing with them collapsed walls

189 for a physically more open and fluid viewing space) in order to reveal connections across objects and artists previously unseen, unrecognized, and undervalued, driving not only the mix of content visible to museum audiences but also, as shall be discussed, prompting the infrastructural reorganization of internal departments (but not always attendant information management systems). By all accounts the result is new (and renewed) storylines borne out of innovative scholarship all the result of curatorial teams working together, and not apart. A third and final curatorial practice specific to the application of World Art Historical research principles and key in permanent exhibitions emerging out of museum practice in recent years is the turn away from sequential narratives that focus on progress and influence—often told in isolation—to stories of art that focus on how cultures have grown and changed through common linkages, interactions, and connections in a system of reciprocity and two-way exchange. Stories are less generalized, more specific, and often visually stacked in order to offer visitors multiple pathways, and at all times seek to incite an emotional response in the audience. As the new narrative, storytelling enables stronger connections between visitors and the collection on display by bringing from its literary origins the notions of voice, point of view, and perspective, and making a transparent disclosure of these devices.

Islamic Art in a Globalized World: New York’s The Metropolitan Museum of Art

In 2011, after being closed for more than eight years in order to undergo an extensive renovation, New York’s the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s formerly-titled “Islamic art” permanent exhibition galleries re-opened to the general public under what Carol Blier in

“Reframing Islamic Art for the 21st Century,” a close reading of the revamped exhibition space, described as a new “rubric” capable of articulating the whole of the arts of the Islamic

190 world.446 The new exhibition space was more than simply an expansion of the existing physical display area, although with an additional six thousand square feet for a total of nineteen thousand—the “largest” permanent exhibition of Islamic art in the Western

World447—it was that too. The newly re-installed and geographically re-titled “Galleries for the Art of Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia” signalled how the

Met had reimagined a twenty-first century exhibition devoted to the arts of Islam:

The new name bears special significance for its deconstruction of a Western European category (Islamic art), by articulating both diversity and complexity in accommodating Arab lands by ethnic identity, Turkey and Iran as political entities today that represent historically the much larger Ottoman Empire and Safavid Empire, Central Asia as a regional destination, and Later South Asia as a temporal reference to a geographic region.448

The “diversity and complexity” the Met sought to express was achieved in the number and arrangement of the works on display—over 1,200 sacred and secular objects of all media exhibited across a suite of fifteen interconnected rooms surrounding a central courtyard—and was executed in their strategic curation: an installation that sought to reveal the “mutual influence of artistic practices…[and] the exchange of motifs” in the cultural traditions of

Islam via objects dating from the seventh century through to the twenty-first originating as far as Spain and Morocco in the West, and Central Asia and India in the East.449 The result was a “greatly enlarged and freshly conceived” gallery highlighting “both the diversity and

446 Carol Blier, “Reframing Islamic Art for the 21st Century,” Horizons in Humanities and Social Sciences: An International Refereed Journal 2, no. 2 (2017), 1, doi: 10.19089/hhss.v2i2.53.

447 Rebecca Lindsey, “Displaying Islamic Art at The Metropolitan: A Retrospective Look,” Now at The Met (blog), February 2, 2012, https://www.metmuseum.org/blogs/now-at-the-met/features/2012/displaying-islamic- art-at-the-metropolitan.

448 Blier, “Reframing Islamic Art for the 21st Century,” 1.

449 The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Islamic Art,” accessed November 26, 2018, https://www.metmseum.org/about-the-met/curatorial-departments/islamic-art.

191 interconnectedness of the numerous cultures represented, with multiple entryways [to] allow visitors to approach the galleries—and the art displayed within—from different perspectives.”450 The Met’s CEO, Thomas P. Campbell, conveyed how the institution’s new

Islamic galleries were implicated in its commitment to and “encyclopedic”451 mandate:

In its role as a global museum, the Met strives to present the best examples of art from all cultures and all periods of history. From May 2003, the Museum worked on the reinstallation of its galleries for the art of the Islamic world, aware of the meaning and power of these collections in our modern world. Since these galleries reopened in their new configuration just over a year ago, we have been truly gratified by the exceptional interest that our visitors—both local and international—have taken in this newly conceived presentation of Islamic art.452

Indeed, in the fourteen months following its grand re-opening, the new Islamic art galleries welcomed an average of 2,500 people per day—approximately fourteen percent of the Metropolitan’s overall attendance during the same period—for a record one million visitors.453 Critics and the press alike praised the new exhibition. Nasser Rabbat, Aga Khan

Professor in the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in

Cambridge, ranked the Met’s installation as the “top exhibition of Islamic art” in the United

450 Ibid.

451 While Campbell was the first to use the term, in a press release for the Islamic gallery’s re-opening, it was quickly seized by journalists including Jerry Saltz; see: “Art of the Arab Lands: Metropolitan Museum’s New Islamic Art Mecca,” artnet Magazine, n.d., http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/saltz/metropolitan- museum-islamic-art-11-4-11.asp.

452 “Metropolitan Museum’s New Galleries for Islamic Art Department Draw One Million Visitors (press release),” Metropolitan Museum of Art, January 22, 2013, https://www.metmuseum.org/press/news/2013/new- galleries-for-islamic-art-department-draw-one-million-visitors.

453 The “milestone moment” was celebrated with a gifting of the exhibition catalogue to the one millionth visitor in a ceremony taking place in the Patti Cadby Birch Court, a space “inspired” by Moroccan late medieval design and built by artisans from Fez. Flowers were scattered in the fountain in the Court and musicians played Arabic music. Ibid.

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States and “one of the top five worldwide.”454 Holland Cotter of The New York Times reviewed the show calling it “A Cosmopolitan Trove of Exotic Beauty,” and declared it

“intelligent...fabulous…visually resplendent” and an “immense cultural vista—necessary, liberating, intoxicatingly pleasurable.”455 Yet beyond these aesthetic celebrations of the display and the art contained therein, the reimagined gallery was recognized for its careful framing of “the real story” of the art of the Islamic world:

Rather than presenting Islamic art as the product of a religiously driven monoculture encompassing centuries and continents, the Met is now—far more realistically— approaching it as a varied, changing, largely secular phenomenon, regionally rooted but absorptively cosmopolitan, affected by the intricacies and confusions of history, including the history that the art itself helped to create.456

What The Times and other publications picked up on—likely led to, to be more exact, by the Met’s own press which narrowed for the public what the institution was seeking to achieve457—was the shift away from monolithic thinking towards a more “elastic” understanding and a meaningful challenge to the “static” master narrative long perpetuated in both history and in art:

[O]ver and over again...we’re reminded how fluid a concept Islamic art can be, and often is. If we could ask for only one lesson learned from the decade since the Sept.

454 Nasser Rabbat, “The New Islamic Art Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Artforum 50, no. 8 (2012): 75–78, https://www.artforum.com/print/201201/the-new-islamic-art-galleries-at-the-metropolitan- museum-of-art-29813.

455 Holland Cotter, “A Cosmopolitan Trove of Exotic Beauty,” The New York Times, October 27, 2011, https://nyti.ms/uqaOjr.

456 Ibid.

457 Many press articles linked the new gallery’s re-opening to the (nearly) ten-year anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks: “The Museum says its goal is to dramatically widen Americans’ perspective on Islamic culture. The opening of the new galleries comes 10 years after 9/11 defined many Americans’ impressions of Muslim culture and history.” Nikola Krastev, “New York’s Met Opens New Islamic Art Wing,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, November 12, 2011, https://www.rferl.org/a/new_yorks_met_museum_opens_new_islamic_art_wing/24384833.html.

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11 attacks, surely freedom from essentialist thinking would be the necessary one. That’s the direction the Met’s new galleries take us….458

By focusing on the “geographic breadth and varied history of Islamic culture”459—the exhibition was designed to trace Islamic civilization over a period of thirteen centuries to

“show how much it and its contributions are part of the world’s shared cultural heritage”460— the institution hoped to not only widen and extend the scope of the collection on display but facilitate “a major effort to increase Americans’ understanding of Islamic culture.”461 Sheila

Canby, curator for the Metropolitan’s Department of Islamic Art, articulated the key strategy the Met deployed to achieve this lofty goal:

There is great potential for changing people’s opinions and the reason is that we provide a lot of information that is historical, so people have an opportunity to come to a neutral space where there is no political view….We are trying simply to give context to the objects that we have on view.462

The exhibition’s new historical-contextual focus was informed by more than a century of progressive scholarship in the field of Islamic art history. Yet, perhaps most significantly, it was informed by a “much broader phenomenon”463 of the past fifteen years in both new and established museums and galleries described by Blier as “places as far distant from one another as Sharaj in the United Arab Emirates, Toronto in Canada, Honolulu in

458 Cotter, “A Cosmopolitan Trove of Exotic Beauty.”

459 The Economist, “Centuries of Glory: Islamic galleries at the Met,” October 29, 2011, https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2011/10/29/centuries-of-glory.

460 Krastev, “New York’s Met Opens New Islamic Art Wing.”

461 Ibid.

462 Sheila Canby, quoted in Nikola Krastev, “New York’s Met Opens New Islamic Art Wing.”

463 Blier, “Reframing Islamic Art for the 21st Century,” 2.

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Hawaii, and Doha in Qatar”:464 a deliberate turn towards not only a physical reframing of the

Islamic art on display but, at a “pivotal moment in world history” (to quote the Met),465 a complex “conceptual reframing” of the presentation of Islamic civilization for a globalized world.466 Across expanded collections and renovated exhibition spaces, special and temporary exhibition programs, ambitious digitization initiatives, expansive landscape and architectural projects, and even live performances as part of a public programming effort to make real and accessible “the cultural aspects of a globally diverse Islamic heritage and living traditions,” museums and galleries in every corner of the world have embraced the project of stimulating in their various publics—often multi-national audiences—a complex and sophisticated understanding of the arts and cultural heritage of a wide and diverse

Islamic world via the vehicle of an “exceedingly positive narrative...that runs on a parallel track but remains distinctly unconnected to the narrative regarding Islam in Western news media, which remains so often entirely negative.”467

The Met’s 2011 “reframing” marked only its second permanent exhibition dedicated to the display of Islamic art: the first, original permanent installation dated to more than thirty-five years earlier, to 1975, and it was this version that remained on view until 2003 when the galleries were closed for renovation. The differences between the original 1975

464 Ibid.

465 The Metropolitan Museum of Art Director Thomas P. Campbell, quoted in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Metropolitan Museum’s New Galleries for Islamic Art Department Draw One Million Visitors.”

466 This is the central argument of Carol Blier in her seminal article wherein she examines the “phenomena” by way of an analysis of the overall trend across the world, and the Met specifically (in the particular context of New York City), to reframe the Islamic world for the twenty-first century; see: “Reframing Islamic Art for the 21st Century,” 1–2.

467 Ibid., 3.

195 installation and the renovated 2011 exhibition space—what the Met describes as a slow evolution away from an installation that was once “largely visual” to an exhibition that now abides by “scholarly organization by style, material, and civilization”468—are striking, and serve as strong evidence of the “purposefulness” with which the Met set about to reconfigure the display of one of the most important collections of Islamic art in North America. It also signals the institution’s firm dedication to its role and responsibility in serving to rewrite the narrative of Islamic art history.

In the late nineteenth century Islamic art was viewed through the lens of the exotic.

Like many museums of the day, at the Metropolitan objects acquired were principally by gift or via bequest from a variety of lay individuals who had traveled abroad and collected pieces according to their personal tastes and interests. In accordance with the wishes of many donors, “significant individual assemblages”—private collections that included works from across the world of which only some could be identified as “Islamic”—were often presented in their entirety, as one group, or else integrated into the Met’s own acquisitions and exhibited together with other “like” objects according to material for a display with “little emphasis” on time, style, or place of origin.469 During this time, because there was neither any one gallery space nor any specialized curatorial infrastructure devoted to Islamic art, all

468 Lindsey, “Displaying Islamic Art at the Metropolitan.”

469 The Met notes the receipt of a number of such bequests including the Moore Collection in 1891, a reference to Edward C. Moore (1827–91), head designer at Tiffany and Company from 1868 until his death: the range and media of the objects acquired was varied (it included Greek and Etruscan vases, metalwork, glass, ceramics, and textiles) and each object was collected for its aesthetic qualities with no specific regard for dates or places of origin. A second bequest noted was from William B. Osgood Field (1823–1900), a New York businessman and philanthropist who collected a number of objects while living in Rome: Turkish, Chinese, and European ceramics, as well as Italian and Indian artifacts. A third significant bequest came from Heber Reginald Bishop (1840–1902), a wealthy importer/exporter: carved and hard stones, many from Central Asia and India. These are but three bequests in the early years of collection-building at the Met: hundred of objects came to the institution via donation over the years, building the vast repository it holds today. For a complete reporting see Lindsey, “Displaying Islamic Art at the Metropolitan.”

196 of these works were collected under the auspices of the industrial or “decorative” arts making it difficult to ascertain exactly how many “Islamic world” objects were in the Met’s holdings, or on display, at any one time.470 However, what is known is that on balance decorative objects earned less prestige than the “higher” arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture, and correspondingly garnered less of the Met’s physical exhibition space or professional attention.471

This situation changed somewhat with the 1907 establishment of a Department of

Decorative Arts, a new organizational model that included both Far and Near Eastern applied art headed by its own curator.472 The new department worked to “legitimize” the objects in the collection and on display, and also bring to the Met a certain professional expertise borne out by a new practice. For the first time in Met history, specialized temporary exhibitions were initiated from which many Islamic-era objects on display were acquired for the permanent collection.473 Alongside the collection grew the bricks-and-mortar Metropolitan, and by the early 1920s seven major galleries were devoted to the display of Islamic art— albeit with non-Islamic objects exhibited alongside Islamic works—yet “with little

470 Rebecca Lindsey’s retrospective article details the evolution of Islamic art displays at the Met generally, and with some specificity noting which galleries opened and/or closed in any specific year. But because Islamic art was displayed together with first, all decorative art, and second, with all Near Eastern Art, the challenge remains to discern exactly how many objects for how much display area were exhibited at any one time. See: Lindsey, “Displaying Islamic Art at the Metropolitan.”

471 Ibid.

472 Thus, the Met’s first curator of Islamic art was in fact the institution’s first curator of Decorative Arts, Dr. Wilhelm Valentiner. He sought to build the Near Eastern collection “systematically.” Up until that point the Met had had only three curators: of paintings, sculptures, and casts. Ibid.

473 The Met cites the first such exhibition as taking place in 1910: it included a collection of Oriental rugs belonging to the Met as well as rugs on loan from twelve American and European individual and institutional lenders. There was even an accompanying catalogue. The Met credits this and further temporary shows as “expanding both professional and popular understanding of Islamic art.” Ibid.

197 explanation of temporal, stylistic, or geographical relationships.”474 Increased specialization was also a result of the growing collection with displays refined to the point that in 1923 a separate sub-department for Near Eastern Art was established which included Indian art dated after 1000 BC and Near Eastern art dated after the death of Alexander the Great in 323

BC.475 While this revised curatorial structure would lay the groundwork for the recognition of Islamic art as its own field, despite “ancient” and “Islamic” art displayed separately, with no ““Islamic” cutoff” the whole of the Near East remained as one.476

In 1932, after a decade of physical exhibition space growth and collections expansion—seven more gallery spaces were added displaying objects from the Near East

(both Indian and Islamic), important collections of “Oriental” carpets were acquired by the

Met,477 and countless special exhibitions were mounted on Islamic topics—a curatorial department separate from Decorative Arts was established bearing the familiar title of “Near

Eastern Art.”478 That same year the new department undertook the institution’s only Islamic- era archaeological work in Nishapur, Iran. With surprising informality a coin toss determined which half of the excavated materials would belong to the Met and which half would remain in Tehran, and it is this sizable acquisition that remains today the heart of the Met’s Islamic holdings479—a collection of some 15,000 objects. However, after a long run of permanent

474 Lindsey, “Displaying Islamic Art at the Metropolitan.”

475 The sub-department was established by a new associate curator of decorative arts, Dr. Maurice Dimand. Ibid.

476 The Met describes how Mughal and Hindu Indian art was displayed adjacently, as well as pre- and post- Islamic Persian works. This conflation would continue for almost another fifty years. Ibid.

477 The Met cites the James Ballard donation of carpets: an acquisition facilitated by Joseph Breck, Dimand’s predecessor and Valentiner’s successor. Ibid.

478 This department was chaired by Dimand. Ibid.

479 The Met had agreed with the Iranian government on an equal divide from the expedition. Ibid.

198 exhibitions in the late forties to the late fifties—fourteen large and small galleries carried signage and attendant press that identified the objects on display as “Islamic”—most of the

Islamic art collection went into storage in 1958 while gallery spaces were inspected for structural integrity. From 1965 to 1972, only one temporary “Islamic” gallery space remained on view: a chronologically-arranged room containing mostly small objects and one key work synonymous with the Met itself—the fourteenth-century Isfahan tile mihrab.480

Despite this exhibition lull, the Met remained active, amassing through a combination of donations and purchases a collection of Islamic art that was by all measures “significant.”481

It also moved to establish, in 1963, as a “separate entity,” a Department of Islamic Art.482 But it would be another ten years before the Met would open its first, dedicated “Islamic art” exhibition gallery.

After years of planning (but following countless scheduling delays), in 1975 the first permanent exhibition galleries devoted solely to the presentation of Islamic art opened at the

Met under the curatorship of Dr. Richard Ettinghausen.483 Spread over a major suite of ten rooms in Wing K, the inaugural “Islamic art” galleries represented “the largest permanent

480 This work was acquired in 1939 from the Madrasa Imami. Ibid.

481 The Met cites the purchase of the “Emperor’s carpet,” reportedly a gift from Peter the Great to Leopold I; the 1946 Kress donation of the Anhalt medallion carpet, prominently displayed thereafter from the Met’s Great Hall balcony; the acquisition of the Shah Jahan album in 1955; the 1970 donation of seventy-eight illustrations for the Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp; and the Kevorkian Foundation donation of the then-called Nur-Al Din Room (now called the Damascus Room). Ibid.

482 “Fifty Years of Collecting Islamic Art: Exhibition Overview,” Metropolitan Museum of Art, accessed November 26, 2018, https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2013/collecting-islamic-art.

483 Ettinghausen had served as consultative chairman of the (new) Department of Islamic Art from 1969 through to 1979. Lindsey, “Displaying Islamic Art at the Metropolitan.” Ettinghausen and a number of other specialists published an accompanying exhibition publication that provided “cultural context” for the objects on view; see: C. Bier, R. Ettinghausen, M. Hart, M. Jenkins, C. Kane, M. Keene, and M.L. Świętochowski, Notes on Islamic Art in its Historical Setting (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1975).

199 exhibition...ever shown in the Western hemisphere”484 and over its lifetime was accessed not only by scores of visitors but was used as a “teaching tool” in the education of future art historians.485 While perhaps notable for its innovations in terms of the technicalities of display,486 the installation privileged older ideas of materiality. It also maintained a strict chronology:

[O]rganized along the lines of the pre-World War II displays in the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum in Berlin, where Ettinghausen had trained. The galleries displayed art from the Seljuk and Mongol eras, followed by rooms arranged by country and region. Separate from these were the Nur al-Din Room and the Nishapur gallery, which provided the viewer with a sense of Islamic architecture, both interior and exterior. These installations lasted into the twenty-first century with only minor changes and provided a fitting culmination for the first century of Islamic art displays at the Metropolitan.487

When, after more than a quarter of a century on display, the 1975 installation closed for renovation in 2003, the world was a dramatically different place. During the eight years leading up to the 2011 re-opening—while the Islamic art galleries awaited the completion of renovations to the Greek and Roman galleries located immediately below (lest active construction vibrations cause damage to objects on display),488 and while the still-growing collection underwent extensive treatment by conservation experts—the Department of

484 Lindsey, “Displaying Islamic Art at the Metropolitan.”

485 Navina Najat Haidar, “The New Galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia,” Masterpieces from the Department of Islamic Art (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2011), 12.

486 Carol Bier, then a graduate student assigned to work on the new gallery, cites both the lighting and the modularity of the hexagon-shaped display cases, but specifically the latter, which picked up on patterning in classical Islamic art and so was considered “culturally relevant.” Lindsey, “Displaying Islamic Art at the Metropolitan.”

487 Ibid.

488 Rabbat, “The New Islamic Art Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” 75–78.

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Islamic Art undertook the complex project of reimagining a “new identity” for the story of the whole of Islamic civilization for the twenty-first century.

The new galleries represent a “shift in emphasis” from one of “underlying unity and greater linearity...to rooting the art in the distinctive geographic, cultural, and linguistic realms of the Islamic world.”489 This shift—from cultural unity to regional diversity—lies at the core of what the Met sought to achieve in its reinstallation, a goal that was achieved through both formal scholarly collaboration across Met experts and colleagues, academics, designers, and artists, as well as informal contributions, and took shape via a number of gallery design iterations evolving towards the galleries as they are on view today. In addition, and equally significant, was how this wide academic community brought together their new scholarship with a variety of audience-facing experts to conceptually confront a number of key issues identified by a consensus of Islamic art historians, including:

[T]he shortcomings of the term Islamic art, especially within a museum context; the wide interest in the presentation of intercultural connections; the powerful resonance of the idea of western Islamic art; the public interest in conservation work; the degree of public unfamiliarity with the history and ruling dynasties of the Islamic world; and the prevailing misconceptions about the role of figural imagery in the arts of the Islamic World.490

Yet the result sums to more than advances in scholarship or in the new physical gallery space now occupying much of the same floorplan as the original installation, but presents equally in tangible form across a series of “secondary” benefits: the “re-discovery” of objects long held in the collection but which remained underused or never displayed, the project of digitally recording the collection for widespread global access, and the advancement of

489 Haidar, “The New Galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia,” 12.

490 Ibid., 13.

201 conservation efforts facilitating both of these progresses.491 Indeed, in the process of developing the new galleries much new knowledge-content was gained from the careful study (and re-study) of the collection. Together these are the outcomes measurable by the shift towards a more intercultural interpretation of Islamic art via its contextualization within broad cultural-historical parameters grounded in a wider, yet also a more specific, temporal- geographic frame.

The new Arts of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia and Later South Asia galleries are organized geographically, by region—an emphasis highlighted by the titles of each new space and the attendant map of the Islamic world located at one of the two entrances. Yet regional location is not the only guiding principle. Like in the first, original installation, a loose chronology offers a “long view” of the “historical development of regional styles.”492 Together a clear sense of space and time is established, an approach the

Met evokes throughout its various exhibition installations (not to mention its virtual presence online via the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History). Moving counter clockwise the visitor can encounter the art of the Umayyads and Abbasids in the Arab world and Iran in the seventh to thirteenth centuries, proceed through to the smaller, specialized Iranian Nishapur and Sabz

Pushan Gallery holding objects collected through Met-sponsored expeditions, and continue, chronologically to Iran and Central Asia in the ninth to thirteenth centuries, Egypt and Syria

491 The Met cites a number of these progresses in particular: the 1707 Damascus Room (a gallery space that is featured in both the original 1975 installation and the new 2003 renovated galleries) received a “new configuration” as a result of new analysis; new knowledge was gained regarding the structure and colour palette of the Emperor’s Carpet from Iran, as well as the achievement of its stabilization for longer term display. A number of additional restoration projects devoted to manuscripts and paintings were also made possible by the renovation. Navina Najat Haidar, “The New Galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia,” Masterpieces from the Department of Islamic Art (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2011), 14.

492 Blier, “Reframing Islamic Art for the 21st Century,” 6.

202 in the tenth to sixteenth centuries, and then choose whether to investigate the Hagop

Kevorkian Fund Special Exhibitions Gallery, proceed along the “timeline” to view Iran and

Central Asia in the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries and further ahead in time (a number of galleries culminating in the art of Mughal South Asia from the fourteenth to the twentieth century), or detour, to the European Vision of North Africa gallery set outside of the new

“Islamic art” gallery footprint.493

Here the interconnectedness of the gallery spaces comes into play. From the two gallery entrances a number of vistas through to the scope and layout of the full exhibition space is afforded, a visual cue as to not only what lies ahead, but what paths are possible.

These alternative routes are key, for the Met anticipates both the nascent visitor and the expert scholar: no two visitors are expected to assume the same viewing route. By visually- stacking its galleries—a mirror of its strategy in terms of content: a stable of textual and visual communications with the visitor ranging from lively-written text labels and wall panels, to maps, diagrams, and other visuals, and then more complex access points of information through interactive in-gallery digital media and other web-based virtual experiences—the Met is able to offer an open (rather than closed) visitor experience and a range of possibilities for dynamic encounters with the objects on view.

The challenges the Met faced in reimagining its Islamic Art galleries during the transcultural turn are not unique to the field of Islamic art or to the Met, but are ones faced by institutions around North America and the world. As examined in the discussion below, a similar rethinking of the categories of geography, chronology, culture, and the nation-state in

493 Haidar, “The New Galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia,” 17.

203 order to tell more complex stories of intercultural exchange has also unfolded in the

Canadian context.

Telling the Story of Art in Canada

In 2014, in Ottawa, Canada’s capital city, The Ottawa Citizen494 published a series of sobering articles that examined the slow yet steady decline in visitorship to the National

Gallery of Canada in Ottawa in the wake of a one-time “boost” in 1988 when more than

930,000 people visited the institution’s new home on Sussex Drive, and in the decade following when some 600,000 to 700,000 visitors walked through its doors annually.495 Not since 2002 had the National Gallery hit the half-million mark, and in 2014 the institution was expected, for the second year in a row, to report a low of some 300,000 visitors. Yet while attendance figures dwindled in Ottawa, museum and gallery visitorship increased, and set records, elsewhere in Canada and worldwide where more people than ever before were visiting the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Montreal, the

Louvre in Paris, the Prado in Madrid, the Uffizi in Florence, and the British Museum in

494 All articles were authored by Peter Simpson, the (then) arts editor-at-large who wrote regularly about visual arts, music, books, film, and other arts and entertainment news taking place in the nation’s capital. The first article in the series presented the issue and the institution’s initial responses: “Where have all the people gone? The National Gallery deals with a daunting problem,” The Ottawa Citizen, December 12, 2014, last updated December 16, 2014, https://ottawacitizen.com/entertainment/local-arts/where-have-all-the-people-gone-the- national-gallery-deals-with-a-daunting-problem. The second addressed the decline of the travelling blockbuster show specifically: “Blockbuster era may be over for art galleries,” The Ottawa Citizen, December 16, 2014, https://ottawacitizen.com/entertainment/local-arts/blockbuster-era-may-be-over-for-art-galleries. The third and last looked closely at the Ottawa public’s appetite for contemporary art: “Cautious about contemporary art: It’s a tough sell at the National Gallery,” The Ottawa Citizen, December 16, 2014, https://ottawacitizen.com/entertainment/local-arts/cautious-about-contemporary-art-its-a-tough-sell-at-the- national-gallery.

495 Indeed, the 1990s marked the National Gallery’s best years for attendance: just over 600,000 people visited in the fiscal year 1995–96 while 772,385 visited in 1996–97; between 1997 and 2003 no fewer than 520,000 people visited annually. Simpson, “Where have all the people gone?”

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London. Diagnosing varied reasons and complex factors for the “slide” in visitorship,496 the institution set to work correcting the downwards trend by (re)setting their sights on the institution’s mandate asking, in the words of National Gallery Director and CEO Marc

Mayer, “what is core to us?”497

That that same year, in 2014, Mayer welcomed Katerina Atanassova to the National

Gallery as the new Senior Curator of Canadian Art, hired to lead and implement his “vision” to “better represent the complete narrative of the art of Canada and to engage visitors in new ways.”498 Over the next three years Atanassova and her team set about the task of reimagining the presentation of art in Canada, and, after nine months of construction, launched, on June 15, 2017—to coincide with Canada 150, the sesquicentennial celebration of Confederation—a reimagined gallery space under a new frame: the Canadian and

Indigenous Galleries. “We started with a directive from Marc to make the collection more relevant to 21st-century audiences,”499 described Atanassova of the ambitious $7.4 million

496 Among the reasons cited: overly-aggressive budget cuts that saw the elimination of popular children’s programming, and key outreach staff; gaps in communication and marketing seen largely responsible for failing to reach locals and bring them through the door; and overly-jargoned and didactic wall-panel text alienating the visitors who had. Ibid. The rising costs (and declining financial return) of the summer blockbuster was also cited as a key reason. Simpson, “Blockbuster era may be over for art galleries.”

497 Simpson, “Where have all the people gone?”

498 Atanassova described the Canadian gallery renovation project as one of her “main responsibilities” upon her arrival at the National Gallery. Katherine Stauble, “The Magnificent Art of this Land: The New Canadian and Indigenous Galleries,” The National Gallery of Canada: Magazine, February 16, 2017, https://www.gallery.ca/magazine/in-the-spotlight/the-magnificent-art-of-this-land-the-new-canadian-and- indigenous-galleries. The full curatorial team responsible for the rehung galleries included Associate Curator of Indigenous Art, Christine Lalonde; Canadian Photography Institute Associate Curator of Photographs, Andrea Kunard; Associate Curator of Early Canadian Art, Rene Villeneuve; Associate Curator of Canadian Art, Adam Welch; and Curatorial Assistant of Canadian Art, Danuta Sierhuis, and Curatorial Assistant in Indigenous Art, Heather Campbell. “The new Canadian and Indigenous Galleries open June 15 at the National Gallery of Canada (press release),” National Gallery of Canada, June 7, 2017, https://www.gallery.ca/for- professionals/media/press-releases/the-new-canadian-and-indigenous-galleries-open-june-15th-at.

499 Stauble, “The Magnificent Art of this Land.”

205 dollar project to transform the complete 4,200 square meter footprint of the permanent exhibition galleries devoted to art in Canada.500

Given the nation’s history of the colonization of Indigenous Peoples and the marginalization of their historical artistic and visual cultural heritage, long and difficult has been the challenge for the National Gallery to reconcile its mandate to foster Canadian art and, with it, the notion of national identity. “Together, and never again apart,”501 declared

Mayer of the decision to shape the complete narrative of the art in Canada by integrating into one display works held in the National Gallery’s collections of Canadian art and Indigenous art—a move Associate Curator of Indigenous Art, Christine Lalonde, reaffirmed as “for the long-term.”502 While for several decades the institution had (consciously) collected the work of contemporary First Nations artists for display in the Contemporary art galleries,503 only once before, in 2003, with the opening of the new galleries of Canadian and Aboriginal art— an installation that sought to investigate the “connections between Euro-Canadian and

500 These including rooms A100 to A114, the Garden Court, the Rideau Chapel, and the Michael and Sonja Koerner Family Atrium using funds taken entirely from the National Gallery’s reserves—by all accounts a risky endeavour considering reduced attendance numbers and following years of frozen federal government appropriations. Murray White, “The National Gallery’s moment of truth,” The Star, June 5, 2017, https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/visualarts/2017/06/05/the-national-gallerys-moment-of-truth.html.

501 White, “The National Gallery’s moment of truth.”

502 Stauble, “The Magnificent Art of this Land.”

503 The late 1980s marked the beginning of the National Gallery’s foray into the exhibition of work by Aboriginal artists with the acquisition of The North American Iceberg (1985), a large-scale multimedia work by Carl Beam, an Anishinaabe artist, in 1986: it was the first work of contemporary art by an Indigenous artist ever collected by the institution. Yet scholars have noted that the institution’s “choices” in collecting the work of contemporary Indigenous artists have often focused on works where the “media and style of execution fit more easily into their existing collections.” Anne Whitelaw, quoted in Naohiro Nakamura, “The Representation of First Nations Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario,” International Journal of Canadian Studies 45–6 (2012): 417, doi: 10.7202/1009913ar.

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Aboriginal peoples after contact”504 that took the name Art of this Land—had the institution sought to display historical Canadian art together with Aboriginal cultural objects.505 Yet the

2003 installation was met with equal parts celebration and reproach. Both the shortcomings and the many opportunities of the 2003 gallery rehanging were examined by Anne Whitehall in her seminal analysis “Placing Aboriginal Art and the National Gallery of Canada”

(2006).506 Applauding the institution’s leadership for wading into “unchartered waters” by seeking to exhibit objects from the historical Canadian and Indigenous art collections side- by-side, Whitelaw notes that the National Gallery was also criticised for the ways in which the new galleries fell short of the goal of integrating “the production of Aboriginal and non-

Aboriginal cultures” resulting in a display of objects that “coexisted” in space yet did not, on balance, engage in “productive dialogue.”507

504 Anne Whitelaw, “Placing Aboriginal Art at the National Gallery of Canada,” Canadian Journal of Visual Communication 31 (2006): 200, doi: 10.22230/cjc.2006v31n1a1775.

505 Yet historic Aboriginal and Indigenous arts had been shown at the National Gallery previously via a number of temporary exhibitions: as will be cited Exhibition of Canadian West Coast Art, Native and Modern (1927); A Century of Fine Crafts (1957) and Canadian Fine Crafts (1963)—two displays of Aboriginal arts; Arts of French Canada, 1613–1870 (1947) and Three Hundred Years of Canadian Art (1967)—two chronological surveys of Indigenous arts; and finally Masterpieces of Indian and Eskimo Art from Canada (1969 and 1970)— an earnest first attempt at inclusion by broadening the definition of “Canadian art.” Ruth B. Phillips, “Modes of Inclusion: Indigenous Art at the National Gallery of Canada and the Art Gallery of Ontario,” in Museum Pieces: Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums, 252–76 (Montreal and Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011), 253–4.

506 Whitelaw, “Placing Aboriginal Art at the National Gallery of Canada,” 200. Ruth Phillips also examines Art of this Land as part of her study of modes of inclusion in Museum Pieces (2011), yet, rather than evaluate the installation as an exercise in integration and dialogue, via a detailed analysis of the curatorial elements of the exhibition Phillips celebrates the National Gallery’s strides over time in achieving Indigenous art inclusion. Phillips concludes that across the various iterations of the installation (rotated approximately every three years for four distinct displays), the institution successful presented four different kinds of inclusive relationships (where only the first achieved the connection Whitelaw argues as key to the presentation of art in Canada): 1) specific episodes of intercultural and artistic exchange; 2) documentary display, or side by side; 3) groupings according to formal affinities; and 4) display by conjunction, or objects selected according to similar same time and place. Phillips, “Modes of Inclusion,” 259–68.

507 Whitelaw, “Placing Aboriginal Art at the National Gallery of Canada,” 211. Despite her criticism, Whitelaw offers several examples of the successful integration of Aboriginal objects. For example, a room devoted to the later work of the Group of Seven saw Algonquin and Anishinaabe objects placed inside the MacCallum-

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This parallel (yet largely unintegrated) display represented more than simply a missed opportunity to better exhibit objects from different cultures together. By not initiating meaningful cross-cultural dialogue the newly-installed galleries failed to rewrite the dominant narrative of Canadian art historical progress—a constructed narrative tracing

Canada’s transition from colony to independent nation signalled by the development of a so- called distinctly Canadian art most frequently identified with the landscape tradition of the

Group of Seven. It also failed to trouble the (popular) conception of Canadian art as established by the Euro-Canadian tradition and long-legitimized by the institution. As

Whitelaw articulated:

The National Gallery of Canada’s decision to venture into the display of historical Aboriginal objects acknowledges the place of First Nations within the Canadian state’s imagined nation...however, this rhetoric of inclusion has not been accompanied by a reconsideration of the terms within which “Canadian” art history has been constituted.508

Specifically, the National Gallery was criticised by some for perpetuating the legacy of the

“salvage paradigm”:509 modes of viewing and evaluating Aboriginal cultural production according to imagined notions of authenticity with no possibility (and no desirability) for connections to the present day.510 By including Aboriginal objects in the display yet relegating Aboriginal cultural expression to the “sidelines,” Art of this Land was accused of

Jackman cottage—a placement confirmed as “entirely appropriate” by Ruth Phillips as “many of such objects were created by these communities for the tourist trade and would very likely have been regular features of Muskoka cottage interiors.” Whitelaw’s strongest praise, however, was for the Paul Kane room as a powerful instance of “rupture.” Ibid., 201, 206–7.

508 Ibid., 198.

509 As discussed by James Clifford in “Of Other Peoples: Beyond the “Salvage” Paradigm” (1987).

510 As a frame for her consideration of the National Gallery of Canada’s new Canadian and Aboriginal galleries, Whitelaw critiques a number of museum and gallery exhibitions for continuing to rely upon “antiquated conceptions of the authenticity of pre-contact indigenous cultures.” Whitelaw, “Placing Aboriginal Art at the National Gallery of Canada,” 202.

208 considering how the inclusion of previously-marginalized Aboriginal objects might support and expand the existing Euro-Canadian narrative, but not how it might reconsider it:

[Objects] were selected with particular attention to the geographical proximity of Aboriginal and Euro-Canadian cultural producers...and coinciding temporal parameters. In addition, the Aboriginal works were selected for the interesting visual comparisons they afforded with the existing Euro-Canadian paintings and sculptures on display, both formally and in terms of subject matter. The basis for the selection of Aboriginal works thus appears to be closely linked to how well they would fit in with the already existing narrative of Canadian art presented by the National Gallery. The territorial expansion and colonization that are the unspoken frameworks for the organization of the display further position the Aboriginal objects as subjects of the overarching discourse of Canadian art, a position that does little to facilitate a reconsideration of the terms within which their value is assessed.511

The expansive approach of the 2003 gallery space—one that did little to interrupt the established narrative of Canada’s national art history perpetuated in large part by the institution’s authority to tell that story—was the starting point from which the National

Gallery of Canada, in 2017, mobilized the reimagining of a permanent exhibition gallery devoted to the art produced in Canada.512 To tell the story of “[t]wo Canadas, often separate, never equal, displayed, at last, as one,”513 the institution moved to unite all its collections holding Canadian content: it brought together recent acquisitions514 with objects from its

511 Ibid., 209, 201–2.

512 Mayer addresses an important shift in nomenclature in his introduction to the accompanying catalogue (identically titled) Art in Canada (2017): “How Canadian is Canadian art? Is there such a thing, beyond the Canadian passport of the artists? Strong evidence suggests that, generally speaking, we are an outpost—albeit an eccentric and increasingly prestigious one—of a larger international culture with its roots in Europe. Would it make more sense to talk about art in Canada rather than presume such a thing as “Canadian Art?” My preliminary answer is suggested by the title of this essay, but it is a provocative question that would require us to first understand what is meant by the adjective “Canadian.” Marc Mayer, “Art in Canada,” Art in Canada (Ottawa: The National Gallery of Canada, 2017), 29.

513 White, “The National Gallery’s moment of truth.”

514 Among these acquisitions was a mid nineteenth-century Ceremonial Coat by an unknown Naskapi artist (c.1840), William Raphael's painting Bonsecours Market, Montreal (1880), and Emily Carr's sketchbook from her 1907 trip to Alaska. The National Gallery of Canada, “The new Canadian and Indigenous Galleries.”

209 permanent collections of Canadian art, Indigenous art—now comprising the collecting areas of Aboriginal art and Inuit art515—and also select images from its collection of Canadian photographs. To round out gaps in its permanent collection and augment the depth of its display, as it had done in 2003, the institution borrowed extensively from both private and public collections around the world. Long-term loans of historical Indigenous sculptures and objects by Inuit, Métis, and First Nations artists were negotiated by the institution to shape an exhibition of close to eight hundred objects—almost double the number from the previous installation.516

515 It is important to note that the National Gallery’s Indigenous collection as represented in the 2017 From Time Immemorial exhibition was conceived under a wider frame than the Aboriginal of the 2003 Art of this Land exhibition. In 2003, the new galleries displayed historical Canadian art together the work of the Aboriginal Peoples of Canada—First Nations and Métis only—to the exclusion of Canada’s Inuit: up until 2017 (when the Canadian and Aboriginal galleries reopened as the Canadian and Indigenous galleries), the Inuit art collection was titled and located in an independent gallery space, managed as a separate curatorial department. Likely the move to integrate Inuit art (as a curatorial department, collecting area, and gallery viewing space) together with Aboriginal art under one title, Indigenous art—to now capture not only the Aboriginal Peoples of Canada, but Indigenous Peoples around the globe including Canada’s Inuit—was most welcome: when the National Gallery moved to its new building on Sussex Drive in 1988 the Inuit art collection received its first dedicated exhibition space, on the institution’s lower level; yet the placement of Inuit art in the basement— including the connotation of a display located in the furthest reaches of the National Gallery’s public space, in a series of windowless rooms placing Inuit art, literally, in the dark—incited much dissatisfaction and critique.

516 Because in 2003 the National Gallery did not hold in its collection historical objects by Aboriginal producers, the institution borrowed from various collections around the world including the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Hull (its former name, located across the Ottawa River from the National Gallery of Canada in the province of Quebec), the Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton, the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, and the British Museum in London. Whitelaw, “Placing Aboriginal Art at the National Gallery of Canada,” 199–200. In 2017 the National Gallery borrowed again, this time a total of ninety-five historical Indigenous artworks from such institutions as the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto, the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, the Canadian Museum of History in Hull, the Musée des Ursulines de Québec in Quebec City, the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg Cultural Center in Maniwaki, and, in Ottawa, from Library and Archives Canada and the Canadian War Museum. The National Gallery of Canada, “The new Canadian and Indigenous Galleries.” It is important to note that in 2003 the institution’s reliance on loans meant a continuously-rotating Indigenous display against a more stable and controllable Euro-Canadian display and for this reason in her parallel analysis of the show, Ruth Phillips cedes a certain amount of grace to the institution for its efforts, but limitations, in creating effective connections on an ongoing basis. Phillips, “Modes of Inclusion,” 260–1.

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Decolonizing the North American Museum

Underwriting the National Gallery of Canada’s 2017 unveiling of the new Canadian and Indigenous galleries was a changed museum landscape—the culmination of a long project to decolonize the North American museum begun in the late twentieth century yet largely considered “unfinished.” Despite progress in bringing to the fore the many nuances of the politics of identity and the problems of public representation, sweeping claims that artistic practice and art historical narratives have shed their colonial histories to now

“recognize” and “include” have been criticised as hegemonic overstatements for, by failing to satisfactorily negotiate the terms of this recognition and inclusion against issues of

Indigenous sovereignty—and in a biting reminder of the ongoing processes of contestation and reconciliation—these institutions of art historical knowledge have “failed to disturb ongoing colonial power relations.”517

These and other critical issues have been explored by a number of scholars who have, as part of a larger global initiative to challenge the institutionalization of colonial memory, examined the key turning points, and the policies and players implicated in the long trajectory of the history of exhibiting Indigenous arts in museums and galleries.518 Key among these is Canadian art historian and curator Ruth Phillips, who was written extensively on the history of display of Indigenous art in Canada tracing important events contributing to

517 Kathleen Ash-Milby and Ruth Phillips discuss a reimagining of Indigenous-centred self-representation, self- determination and definition, and autonomy in their article “Inclusivity or Sovereignty? Native American Arts in the Gallery and the Museum since 1992,” Art Journal 76, no. 2 (2017): 12, doi: 10.1080/00043249.2017.1367190.

518 Consider the 2017 issue of On Curating (December 2017) edited by Ronald Kolb and Dorothee Richter devoted entirely to the study of the decolonization of art institutions worldwide: http://www.on- curating.org/files/oc/dateiverwaltung/issue-34/PDF_to_Download/Oncurating_Decolonizing_Issue35.pdf.

211 and significant precedents for the “more permanent and differently conceptualized integration of Indigenous arts” currently under practice.519

Phillips notes that prior to 1969, the key assumption driving the display of historical

Indigenous arts was the systematic deployment of Aboriginal arts as both a temporal and developmental prequel to the story of Canadian art—namely, to make an early appearance and then, like popular lament of the (so-called) disappearance of traditional arts, vanish, but not before presenting Indigenous arts as less evolved than settler tradition and serving principally to inspire a future and distinct tradition of Canadian art. After 1969, in the wake of academic debates surrounding art and artifact display paradigms—contentious debates surrounding the merits of an aesthetic approach privileging the contemplative visual experience of an art object versus an ethnological approach grounded by the display of an artifact (and sometimes, as in Phillips’ consideration of The Spirit Sings, a hybrid of the two paradigms520)—a number of major art centres in the West began to experiment with a variety of exhibition strategies (many of which Phillips notes were led by the European art world521) mounting highly influential temporary exhibitions that served an important role as “key

519 Phillips, “Modes of Inclusion,” 259. In her article Phillips traces modes of inclusion at the National Gallery of Canada: via two temporary exhibitions that served as “auguries” yielding significant changes in permanent exhibition practices—the Indians of Canada Pavilion at Expo 67 and the attendant Masterpieces of Indian and Eskimo Art from Canada shown in Paris and Ottawa in 1969 and 1970—Phillips lays the ground for the 2003 Art of this Land reinstallation as the institution’s most robust attempt at inclusivity.

520 See: The Spirit Sings: Artistic Traditions of Canadas First Peoples, a temporary exhibition staged by the Glenbow Museum with Phillips serving as guest curator for the Northern Woodlands section. While the show has been examined for the controversies surrounding its planning and launch—as a “critical event”—Phillips’ analysis, a return to the exhibition itself, is just that: an analysis of the successes and failures of an exhibition of more than six hundred and fifty examples of Aboriginal art from museums across the world. Her conclusion: it was and remains “a transitional, intentionally hybrid, and in many ways innovative project, rather than a conventional ethnographic installation.” Ruth B. Phillips, “Moment of Truth: The Spirit Sings as Critical Event and the Exhibition Inside It,” in Museum Pieces: Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums, 252–76 (Montreal and Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011).

521 Phillips cites the Gimpel Fils Gallery in London, England, in 1953 as an early example of the presentation of contemporary Inuit sculpture in a fine arts mode. Phillips, “Modes of Inclusion,” 254.

212 stimulus for the reflexive critique of the exhibitionary practices of Western museums”:

“Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern (Museum of

Modern Art, New York, 1984); Magiciens de la Terre (Centre Pompidou, Paris, 1989); and

Into the Heart of Africa (Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, 1989). Despite some thoughtful planning and consideration on the part of curators and their respective institutions, the need for constant management of the biases of the Western appreciation of Primitive art became clear: in order “to be represented as art…the aesthetic objects of non-Western peoples had to be transposed into the Western system of classification of fine and applied art”522 risking eternal assignment to the “ethnographic present”—an imagined time and place where authenticity is both constructed and frozen, and removed from the contemporary present.523

Here and often the lack of Indigenous voice raised the question of who could tell the story of

Indigenous arts in Canada, and in accordance with what terms.

Shaped by an evolving political and social consciousness in turn spurred by

“museum-based contestations” led by Aboriginal peoples and amplified by the national media524—many of these contestations the direct result of North American exhibitionary experimentation and risk (and even elements of failure: once again consider The Spirit Sings, this time in its guise as political event including its aftermath and legacy as “a site of post-

522 Ruth B. Phillips and Christopher B. Steiner, “Art, Authenticity, and the Baggage of Cultural Encounter,” in Unpacking Culture: Art and Commodity in Colonial and Postcolonial Worlds, edited by Ruth B. Phillips and Christopher B. Steiner, 3–19, 355–56 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 7.

523 A tendency discussed in Writing Culture (1986), a highly influential post-modern critique of anthropology edited by James Clifford and George Marcus.

524 Ruth B. Phillips, “A Preface—by Way of an Introduction,” in Museum Pieces: Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums, 3–22 (Montreal and Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011), 4.

213 colonial critique”525)—federal cultural policy in Canada has significantly shifted over the last five decades to seek to unite a country internally divided by “language, ethnicity, and regionalism.”526 One outcome of a process of policy-formation scaffolded on locating and categorizing identity: the emergence of the notion of multiculturalism, expanded and redefined over time and translated into law in 1988,527 and inextricably linked to the formation of one overarching and unified national identity: “Canadian.” It is a policy that has largely failed to overcome the nation’s (narrow) view of its origin story: that of a settler nation rooted in “two founding “races” or “nations,” the French and the British”528 with

(almost) complete erasure of Canada’s First Peoples.

Ironically, it is the popular, unexamined, and “borrowed…rhetorical power of the identification between non-Aboriginal and Aboriginal peoples” that has helped “establish a general body of identifications that express the country’s national identity”—a phenomenon explored by Leanne Pupchek in “True North: Inuit Art and the Canadian Imagination.”529

525 Addressed once again by Ruth Phillips where she references the international boycott of the exhibition as precipitating “a divisive national confrontation over power in museums.” Ruth B. Phillips, “A Preface—by Way of an Introduction,” in Museum Pieces: Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums, 3–22 (Montreal and Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011), 6, 12.

526 Leanne Stuart Pupchek, “True North: Inuit Art and the Canadian Imagination,” American Review of Canadian Studies 31 (1–2): 192, doi: 10.1080/02722010109481590.

527 The trajectory of negotiation—first, recognition of the disadvantages and marginalizations of Aboriginal Peoples of Canada and the proposed solution, repeal of the Indian Act (and the dismantling of Indian Affairs) met with increasing and effective activism on the part of Aboriginal leaders and their Red Paper response— culminated in Trudeau’s model of multiculturalism. Ruth B. Phillips, “A Preface—by Way of an Introduction,” in Museum Pieces: Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums, 3–22 (Montreal and Ithaca: McGill- Queen’s University Press, 2011), 6-7. A second outcome of policy-formation designed to “support its guarantees” manifested in funding for museums, galleries, and other cultural institutions. Ibid., 8.

528 This is a quote from Lester B. Pearson’s 1963 Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism. It divided Canada along ethnic lines without consideration for Canada’s legitimate founding nations. Ruth B. Phillips, “A Preface—by Way of an Introduction,” in Museum Pieces: Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums, 3–22 (Montreal and Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011), 6.

529 Pupchek, “True North,” 191.

214

Since the early twentieth century, and even before—since the emergence of the modern nation-state linking politics with culture—artistic producers worldwide have been put into the service of the development of their country’s nationalism.530 But following

Confederation, and especially after 1949 and increasingly through the post-war period,

Canada has moved to actively recognize and even federalize the arts as “the expression of national culture.”531 One case in point is the 1951 Royal Commission on National

Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences of which one outcome, the National Gallery of Canada’s initiation and appropriation of the biennial exhibition series as an index of

Canadian national identity (which will be examined in Part Three) explored the fusion of arts and culture with Canadian nationalism.

It is important to note that to New World French and English searching for a “unique identity resource”532 capable of standing as a “visual symbol”533 of the nation and effectively expressing its national community, not all of Canada’s Indigenous Peoples met the necessary criteria. Because Canada’s Potlatch Law banned artistic production, and because Canadian identity “had to celebrate place rather than a common uninterrupted genetic line of descent,”534 “the North” emerged as a unique “place” capable of expressing foundational

530 Leoussi, “The ethno-cultural roots of national art,” 143–159.

531 Pupchek, “True North,” 191.

532 Pupchek evokes the work of Benedict Anderson to explain the ways in which a colonizing Canada could “imagine” its division from Europe to rather identify with the indigenous inhabitants of the New World and “appropriate elements of their culture.” Ibid., 193.

533 A characterization phrased by Athena Leoussi in her reference to Anthony Smith’s discussion on cultural nationalism. Leoussi, “The ethno-cultural roots of national art,” 144.

534 Pupchek, “True North,” 198.

215 themes of isolation, purity, and authenticity, and its inhabitants, the Inuit people embodying the land’s “spirit,” were rhetorically assigned carrier of quintessential national identity.535

Pupchek outlines two assumptions that led to the striking “graphic power” of Inuit imagery becoming discursively synonymous with the North as a symbol of Canadianness— as “a synecdoche, symbolic part-for-the-whole, of Canadian identity”536: first, that art itself was able to express national characteristics—to express “nation” and national essence—and second, that authenticity of identity was located in the unique (read: pure, essential, and innocent). She argues:

Inuit art has come to encode the connection between Canadians and the Northland, culminating in the period after the Second World War when international assumptions linking art with nationalism and linking an authentic “Folk” with a place converged with Canadian self-consciousness to catapult the art of the Inuit people into the image- making mechanisms of Canada’s cultural producers.537

Indeed, Canada saw both a national art and its “Folk” in Inuit culture (at great peril to the

Inuit538). It would link the two—notably, via the vehicle of the museum: the ground-breaking

1927 Exhibition of Canadian West Coast Art: Native and Modern mounted jointly by the

535 As Pupchek notes, these same themes had been attached to the Group of Seven earlier in the century (regardless that their landscapes most often depicted Southern Ontario), earning them the accolade of “national movement.” Pupchek, “True North,” 194, 199.

536 Ibid., 191.

537 Ibid. The national phenomenon of the search for an authentic “Folk” is explored by Ian McKay in his Quest of the Folk (1994): an appropriation of the popular search first focused on French Canada at the end of the nineteenth century but shifted to English Canada at the beginning of the twentieth century (specifically rural Nova Scotia’s self-promotion as authentically living an idealized past), and appropriated by Pupchek in her arguments for the Inuit in the North as the quintessential example. Ibid., 197–9

538 Pupchek notes that it was only when a southern market was created for Inuit carvers—and, alongside it, a sophisticated production and distribution system that would build the brand—that the Inuit would re-emerge on some (economic) terms of their own. Ibid., 199–204. For a more critical reading of Houston’s role see Kristin K. Potter, “James Houston, Armchair Tourism, and the Marketing of Inuit Art,” in Native American Art in the Twentieth Century: Makers, Meanings, Histories, edited by W. Jackson Rushing, 39–56 (New York: Routledge, 1999).

216

National Gallery of Canada and the National Museum of Man by ethnologist Marius Barbeau as a “validation” of “native art as a distinctively Canadian art form”—and make “the connection between national consciousness and Inuit culture” official at the International and

Universal Exposition in Montreal (Expo 67). From there the Canadianness of Inuit art shifted internationally where, strategically positioned as fine art, it quickly became a “favourite choice” for gifts for foreign dignitaries.539

Yet what has been gained in national identity has come at a loss in the agency and sovereignty of Canada’s Indigenous Peoples to this day only partially reconciled by way of

Indigenous recognition and inclusion within the museological narratives of Canadian art history. Writing about the vast literature on Inuit art in Canada but the dearth of Inuit authors directing this scholarship, in “Curating Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit” Heather Igloliorte makes the case for an emic (rather than the current etic) perspective in the study of the Inuit, and, one could argue, Indigenous arts generally:

[D]espite the rich literature, often written by those who have worked closely with Inuit artists over the last seven decades of the modern and contemporary arts industry (since 1948), the existing scholarship still represents a deep imbalance between who is being written about and who is writing…the lack of Inuit scholars has meant that Inuit perspectives and knowledge have been conspicuously absent from much of the research and writing on Inuit art as well.540

Igloliorte argues that in writing about and presenting Inuit art from the perspective of the observer—by Qallunaat (non-Inuit) scholars, curators, critics, and museum staff—the

539 Pupchek, “True North,” 194, 204.

540 Heather Igloliorte, “Curating Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit: Inuit Knowledge in the Qallunaat Art Museum,” Art Journal 76, no. 2 (2017): 101, doi: 10.1080/00043249.2017.1367196. Igloliorte notes that despite some Inuk artists having held curatorial positions within Canada, she is the only Inuk in Canada with a Ph.D. in art history and one of only several to have ever taught an Inuit art class at the university level: “there is yet to be a single full-time Inuit museum employee at any of our major national or provincial institutions, and few have ever been employed in the many Inuit and Indigenous private art galleries or in auction houses, as freelance authors, research assistants, critics or film or exhibition reviewers.”

217 relevance to the arts of what has been translated simply as “Inuit traditional knowledge” (but in fact represents a “complex matrix of Inuit environment knowledge, societal values, cosmology, worldviews, and language,” or IQ for Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit541) has been overlooked with prescient consequences for Inuit modern life and living knowledge. She explains that “for the Inuit, the way to respect our ancestors is to maintain our living traditional knowledge and to be resourceful and creative, as they had to be.”542

The situation is markedly different for Indigenous arts in Canada where Indigenous curators have been employed for decades in roles directly associated with the presentation and interpretation of Indigenous arts specifically, if not art in Canada more generally.

Leading here is curator, artist, and author Gerald McMaster, a Plains Cree member of the

Siksika Nation lauded for his landmark arts project and exhibition INDIGENA:

Contemporary Native Perspectives,543 and his reimagining of the Art Gallery of Ontario’s

Canadian art galleries—in a watershed role, as its first Indigenous curator. Launched to critical success in 1992 and closing “five hundred years to the day after Christopher

Columbus’ landfall in the Americas,” INDIGENA “questioned the process by which

European colonists came to dominate the continents original inhabitants” based on three

541 The six tenets of IQ were formally embedded into the governance structures of Inuit regions and communities when Nunavut separated from the Northwest Territories in 1999: pilimmasarniq is the acquisition of knowledge, or the way in which Inuit artists train and develop; angiqatgiinniq is the importance of consensus-building and collective decision-making; pinasuqatigiinniq is the principle of working together for the common good; pijitsirarniq is the concept of serving (crucial in how success is measured to the Inuit); qanurtuuqatigiinniq is being resourceful and inventive to solve problems; and avatimik kamatsianiq is the concept of environmental stewardship. Ibid., 103–5.

542 Ibid., 103.

543 Co-curated by Lee-Ann Martin, INDIGENA was a major travelling exhibition that opened at the Canadian Museum of Civilization: of all media, the show was accompanied by a publication of essays and portfolios that included nineteen contemporary Native Canadian visual artists. See: Gerald McMaster and Lee-Ann Martin, eds., INDIGENA: Contemporary Native Perspectives (Hull, Quebec: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 1992).

218 principles prompted by issues of “access and interpretation” in recent history implicating the site of the museum: “Native voice, Native representation, and Native community.”544

McMaster wrote of the exhibition’s impetus:

The Spirit Sings exhibition sparked a fair amount of controversy in Canada. It raised a lot of questions that museums had to deal with and a lot of questions that Native people had to address…. What kind of role should native people play in the presentation of their own past, their own history?

In answer, McMaster framed his own query with the exhibition itself the response:

[W]hy have art museums excluded aboriginal art from Canada and the United States?.... The question is answered, in varying degrees of articulation, by artists, art historians, critics, and curators. Infrequently has the Native perspective been accepted or acknowledged.545

The case of McMaster is notable: an Aboriginal curator responsible for mounting some of the most progressive exhibitions of Aboriginal art in Canada, yet also a curator of

Canadian art who, as part of his work and interest in addressing the politics and discourse of the representation of First Nations art, led the reimagination of one of the most influential permanent exhibitions galleries of Canadian art in North America.546 Following these and many other precedents are a number of Aboriginal curators holding key positions in institutions Canada-wide and beyond supported by allies who, likely with at least some cost

544 Gerald McMaster, “INDIGENA: A Native Curators Perspective,” Art Journal 51, no. 3 (1992): 66.

545 Ibid.

546 McMaster’s career is remarkable. He has close to thirty years working as an artist, curator, and researcher both in Canada and internationally, and is considered a leader in forging understandings of transnational Indigenous visual culture and curatorial practices. Within Canada, McMaster is closely associated with the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Hull, Quebec, where for close to twenty years he served as Curator of Contemporary Indian Art before transitioning to the role of Curator-in-Charge for First Peoples Hall project; from there he moved to the Smithsonian before landing at the AGO. Currently McMaster holds the rank of professor at the Ontario College of Art and Design University. “Dr. Gerald McMaster,” Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Ontario College of Art and Design University, accessed December 10, 2019, https://www2.ocadu.ca/bio/dr-gerald-mcmaster.

219 to their own careers (the case of Andrew Hunter comes to mind),547 have taken up the position of resisting speaking for a community best positioned to present their own story of art in Canada. At the Art Gallery of Ontario, when the Canadian Art Department transformed into the Department of Indigenous and Canadian Art in 2017, the institution redeployed two of its curators into new roles. To replace an outgoing Andrew Hunter, Georgiana Uhlyarik was named the Fredrik S. Eaton Curator of Canadian Art (formerly she was the Associate

Curator of Canadian Art) and Wanda Nanibush was named Curator of Indigenous Art

(formerly she was the Assistant Curator of Canadian and Indigenous Art).548 The parallel transformation at the National Gallery of Canada—namely, its change in approach to its former Canadian art galleries and its attendant curatorial staff, already examined—lays the ground for the discussion below of how infrastructural reorganizations can create an atmosphere for meaningful change with gallery spaces. Later, in Chapter Seven’s consideration of the Canadian Biennial, these same infrastructural systems will be examined for how they might work against institution-wide goals and require at least some dismantling.

Integration and Dialogue: The National Gallery of Canada’s New Canadian and Indigenous Galleries

In 2017, in the former Canadian and Aboriginal galleries at the National Gallery of

Canada, the new exhibition installation marketed under the title Canadian and Indigenous

547 Hunter resigned from the AGO in 2017 citing his disappointment that the AGO was “wavering in its commitment to make space for new voices—voices traditionally excluded from senior roles at public cultural institutions in Canada.” Andrew Hunter, “Why I quit the Art Gallery of Ontario,” The Star, October 3, 2017, https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/visualarts/2017/10/03/andrew-hunter-why-i-quit-the-art-gallery-of- ontario.html.

548 “A new vision for Canadian art at the AGO,” AGOINSIDER, Art Gallery of Ontario, October 2, 2017, http://artmatters.ca/wp/2017/10/uhlyarik-nanibush/.

220

Art: From Time Immemorial to 1967 signalled a concerted effort at the integrative dialogue central to the institution’s challenge to the dominant narrative of Canadian art history, and to its reframing of the very notion of Canadian art. The National Gallery had already, in 2003, abandoned a narrative that began with early nineteenth-century ecclesiastical art and various decorative art forms from New France to locate, in the introductory gallery, pre-contact objects from a diversity of Indigenous cultures,549 but, in moving to exclusively present

“indigenous production” as a means of highlighting the first-time inclusion of Aboriginal artists, the institution was criticised for feeding the (false) belief that the only Indigenous objects legitimately authentic were pre-contact, and, more stingingly, that by beginning the display this way, the exhibition isolated objects both temporally and epistemologically from the overall coherent narrative of Canadian artistic progress and development. In 2017 the

National Gallery embraced a new narrative, and a new tone. According to Peter Simpson:

Almost immediately upon entering the galleries are seen a ceremonial cloak and headpiece, displayed between the religion and material wealth of European culture— a statue of the Virgin Mary, and large, ornate pieces of silver ware.550

By explicitly showcasing the integration of Indigenous and non-Indigenous artistic production the institution declared its intention to never again “tell the Canadian story without the Indigenous story.”551 Indeed, throughout the new galleries, and reinforced by the

National Gallery’s press and even in the words of Mayer himself—“a stronger and deeper

549 These cultures include Thule, Beothuk, Coast Salish, and Souris. Whitelaw, “Placing Aboriginal Art at the National Gallery of Canada” 200.

550 Peter Simpson, “National Gallery of Canada: New galleries offer a new perspective on art made in Canada,” artsfile, National Gallery of Canada, June 8, 2017, https://artsfile.ca/national-gallery-of-canada/.

551 White, “The National Gallery’s moment of truth.”

221 narrative [about] two separate stories that...converge without assimilating”552—the institution worked to rewrite Canadian art history according to World Art Historical notions of integration and dialogue, yet also uniqueness and divergence:

Central to the transformation is a new approach to telling the history of Indigenous visual art. Outstanding historical objects by Indigenous artists, such as stone and ivory carvings, woven materials, regalia, beadwork and quillwork, as well as paintings, sculptures, and prints, will be installed throughout the galleries. At times the works will be in dialogue with those by settler Canadians, while at others, they will reflect a distinct Indigenous path.553

Further, by breaking with strict chronology to display ancient “immemorial” Indigenous objects alongside more contemporary ones—the oldest object: a Coast Salish stone bowl borrowed from the Museum of Vancouver dating back some 5000 years; and a more recent object: a pair of boots made from moose hooves by Florence McConini in the 1970s554—the institution quickly countered the notion of “the vanished” with that of a continuous (and continuing) Indigenous art history. Of the decision to preface the exhibition with concurrent temporalities, Mayer explained: “What we’re making clear is these are thriving cultures that are very much alive.”555

The introductory gallery did more than announce the exhibition’s commitment to the integrative cross-cultural (and intercultural) dialogue central to the institution’s challenge to the long-accepted narrative of Canadian art historical progress. Via the strategic—and permanent—installation of a key work by a contemporary First Nations artist, the first room

552 Simpson, “New galleries offer a new perspective on art made in Canada.”

553 Stauble, “The Magnificent Art of this Land.”

554 Kate Taylor, “How to make history,” The Globe and Mail, July 7, 2017, last updated November 12, 2017, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/art-and-architecture/national-gallery-of-canada-exhibit-showcases-an- unbroken-indigenous-arthistory/article35602063/.

555 White, “The National Gallery’s moment of truth.”

222 of the new galleries signalled a correction to and reparation of the previous gallery’s exploration of the connections between Euro-Canadians and Aboriginal peoples after contact.

While one might have expected to find Luke Parnell’s A Brief History of Northwest Coast

Design—a large-scale sculpture produced in 2007 and consisting of a series of vertical wood panels “painted with the highly recognizable black and red animal graphics of the Haida and

Tsimshian”556 displayed alongside recent acquisitions in the 2014 biennial exhibition Shine a

Light (explored in Chapter Seven)—further down the hall, in the contemporary art galleries, its location at the beginning of the new Canadian and Indigenous galleries instead prepared the visitor for the kinds of stories that followed.

The three panels at the centre of Parnell’s eleven-panel work—whitewashed, to erase all traces of the imagery that once appeared upon them—immediately draw the eye and altogether frame and introduce a new narrative. According to Peter Simpson, each panel represents “a stage in the history of First Nations people in Canada since contact with

Europeans.”557 In its visualization—from the contemporary present—of the shifting nature of

Euro-Canadian and Indigenous interaction in the past and over time, the inclusion of

556 Taylor, “How to make history.”

557 Simpson goes on to describe how the panels go from “pristine and vibrant to faded to whited out and back to vibrancy” with last panel, made out of plywood (the first ones are cedar), representing “rebuilding and layers.” Peter Simpson, “The National Gallery shows off some of its recent purchases,” The Ottawa Citizen, October 17, 2014, https://ottawacitizen.com/entertainment/local-arts/the-national-gallery-shows-off-some-of-its-recent- purchases. When A Brief History of Northwest Coast Design was shown in the 2014 Canadian Biennial it was displayed alongside a second work by Parnell, Phantom Limbs (2010), also acquired: in an allusion to the Haida repatriation project (in which museums returned Haida human remains to their communities), “on the floor in front of the panels...[f]orty-eight small wooden figures—each hand-carved and each unique—[lay] in transparent boxes on the floor, in evocative homage to the ancestors who came home again.” Parnell’s work generally draws on historic Indigenous art, as well as Indigenous and western art histories, in order to trace the “changing path of traditional knowledge and customary practices” across time “from flourishing, to interruption, to repression and, finally, renewal and resurgence through today’s artists.” “Luke Parnell: A Brief History of Northwest Coast Design,” National Gallery of Canada, accessed March 20, 2019, https://www.gallery.ca/collection/artwork/a-brief-history-of-northwest-coast-design.

223

Parnell’s work signals the exhibition’s displacement of the previous narrative of progress in favour of narratives of encounter. Here various legacies are shaped into three key moments or chapters: the time preceding European arrival, represented within the galleries by the ancient artworks of the founding nations and first peoples; the nineteenth century, represented by ceremonial regalia associated with the Potlatch and the Sun Dance; and the

1950s and 1960s when Inuit art and the Woodland School became part of mainstream

Canadian art.558 Across all three chapters, themes and perspectives specific to various

Indigenous cultures were emphasized: “cosmology and worldviews, cultural continuity, diplomacy and sovereignty, domestic design and trade, innovation and adaptation, group and individual identity and gender relations.”559 Positioned in the introductory gallery, then,

Parnell’s work served not only as a (second) type of temporal challenge to the “expected” beginning of the story of art in Canada,560 but, by privileging Indigenous “voices” in the various trajectories of encounter—an experience conceived in reciprocity (and a stark contrast to much of established Canadian art history’s exclusive focus on the Euro-Canadian perspective)—Parnell’s telling of the Indigenous story contributes to the development of new multi-directional and multi-vocal art histories. It also declares the exhibition’s subversion of the power dynamics of the traditional master narrative.

558 Stauble, “The Magnificent Art of this Land.” Ruth Phillips notes that 1949 marks the “advent of a contemporary and commoditized production of Eskimo (Inuit) stone carvings,” putting some pressure on the National Gallery to envision their inclusion in its displays. Phillips, “Modes of Inclusion,” 254.

559 Ibid.

560 A selection of early Indigenous objects also located in the introductory gallery worked to similar effect, namely restarting the Canadian art historical narrative with the Indigenous story (although those, to avoid criticism of salvaging only authentic pre-contact objects, were displayed alongside more contemporary works to stress that Indigenous cultures are alive and flourishing today.

224

The balance of the galleries continued and expanded these exhibition protocols.

Historical Canadian and Indigenous works were consistently displayed together, in integration, with the narrative alternating between—and often including—both Indigenous and settler stories, and temporal juxtapositions were used throughout to signal both the contemporaneity and diversity of art in Canada. While like the 2003 installation the new galleries (largely) followed chronology to display objects close to or at the same time, a number of galleries were organized thematically or worked against ordered time in order to make a particular point or tell a certain story.561 Here, “[i]n an effort to set the record straight,” a number of previously-marginalized groups were highlighted, most notably artists who were women, as Katherine Stauble observes:

[A]n entire room has been largely dedicated to women artists of Montreal’s Beaver Hall Group—notably Prudence Heward, Anne Savage and Sarah Robertson—while also featuring a monographic presentation on Emily Carr. Nearby, a display of footwear on loan from the Bata Shoe Museum highlights the skilled beadwork of Indigenous women artists, including Dogrib artist Margaret Football, Joan Elise Tsetso of the Fort Simpson Band, and Joyce Growing Thunder Fogarty of the Assiniboine Sioux.562

And lastly, in keeping with the institution’s intention to (finally) exhibit all of its collections of Canadian art together—from historical to contemporary Canadian art, Indigenous art, and images from its collection of Canadian photographs—interspersed across all rooms was a curation of photographs that offered not only an overview of the medium in Canada—“the many different forms that photography took during these periods”563—but that also

561 For example, thematic galleries included “The Dignity of Labour,” “Inhabited Landscapes,” and “The 19th- Century Portrait Tradition.” Stauble, “The Magnificent Art of this Land.”

562 Katherine Stauble, “Ten Things to Know About the New Canadian and Indigenous Galleries,” The National Gallery of Canada: Magazine, June 14, 2017, https://www.gallery.ca/magazine/exhibitions/ngc/ten-things-to- know-about-the-new-canadian-and-indigenous-galleries.

563 Stauble, “The Magnificent Art of this Land.”

225 complemented the paintings, sculptures, and Indigenous objects on view: from nineteenth- century portraits, to images of the landscape, urban scenes, and even abstraction, photography was showcased as both a medium and a form of artistic expression.

In order to imagine an exhibition space capable of all these narrative challenges, the

National Gallery’s in-house design team engaged international museum and gallery design specialist, Paris-based Adrien Gardère,564 to reconfigure the previous suite of sixteen rooms to focus on the visitor experience. Breaking up the former “succession of closed and enclosed galleries,”565 Gardère worked to develop spacious galleries with expansive views, and, via passageways and viewing routes, coupled these with a number of smaller side galleries in order to create a more “fluid” experience that Gardère claims capable of presenting “a real encounter and a real dialogue between Indigenous and Western collections.”566 According to

Mayer:

Visitors to the Gallery will see that we believe we can tell the asymmetrical stories of both the land’s Indigenous and transplanted cultures simultaneously in the same rooms. Despite their stark asymmetries, to understand Canada one needs to know its many cultures, especially its oldest ones, their differences and their influence on one another, and where we are now.567

In one gallery, telling of the literal and figurative stripping of Indigenous rights and lands at the hands of Euro-Canadian settlers for profit and gain, is George Reid’s Logging, an

1888 oil painting depicting a sombre scene of landscape devastation displayed alongside a

564 Gardère has designed gallery spaces for the Musée du Louvre-Lens in northern France, the Royal Academy of Arts in London, and Toronto’s Aga Khan Museum. Ibid.

565 Ibid.

566 Ibid.

567 Marc Mayer, “From the Director,” The National Gallery of Canada, accessed January 17, 2018, https://www.gallery.ca/from-the-director.

226 number of ceremonial objects from a potlatch, a traditional gift-giving ceremony banned by the federal government in 1885 as its continuance was considered by Prime Minister John A.

MacDonald as a hindrance to the “civilization” and assimilation of Indigenous Peoples.568 In another gallery, Canadian and Indigenous notions of “time” and “place” are collapsed together in the display of a collection of paintings by late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century Canadian artists shaped by their travels in Europe—works by such academicians as

Paul Peel but also those influenced by Impressionism like Clarence Gagnon and William

Brymner, among others. In front of these works, hanging ceiling-to-floor, Salon-style, sits an enormous birchbark canoe dating to the early twentieth-century (a loan from the Canadian

Canoe Museum in Peterborough),569 and on the opposite wall a series of muted landscapes by members of the Group of Seven: the canoe, a large-scaled functional object belonging properly to the very “wilderness” depicted by the Group—minus its first inhabitants, of course—serves as a “reminder of the contributions of Indigenous peoples to European exploration of this vast land.”570 And in the final rooms, just as they would have appeared

“[w]alking down the street in Montreal gallery window...a Borduas in one gallery window,

568 Stauble, “Ten Things to Know About the New Canadian and Indigenous Galleries.” The ban was lifted in 1951 only.

569 These works are located in the Ash K. Prakash Gallery, named for an independent art historian and advisor, based in Toronto, with a varied and distinguished career spanning over four decades and culminating in his appointment as a Privy Council Officer of Canada. Prakash is also a director of the National Gallery of Canada Foundation.

570 Stauble, “Ten Things to Know About the New Canadian and Indigenous Galleries.” The juxtapositions continued, many of them integrated with gallery architecture. In the central atrium, a visitor favourite featuring a glass-bottomed pool open to skylights above: various early twentieth-century sculptures by European artists Alfred Laliberté and Louis-Philippe Hébert dialogue with Anishinaabe artist Michael Belmore’s 2015 installation Lost Bridal Veil, a new acquisition. Jean Paul Riopelle’s Parvane (1954) hangs just a few feet from a carved caribou head by Olive Mamak Innakataski, and in another room work by various settler abstract expressionist artists are displayed alongside examples of Indigenous sculpture.

227 and a sculpture by Johnny Inukpuk in the next,”571 abstract paintings were displayed alongside contemporaneous Inuit sculptures and works on paper—works of art that, like its collection of Canadian photographs, the National Gallery had, up until only recently, displayed separately from all other Canadian collections.

In planning the new Canadian and Indigenous galleries the National Gallery consulted widely with a number of key stakeholder groups to “provide expertise and guidance on interpretation, display protocols and community engagement,”572 and struck two

Indigenous advisory committees composed of curators, academics, knowledge-keepers, and other recognized authorities in order to guide the exhibition’s selection of content and navigate the politics of representation. From Time Immemorial was but one element (and very much the culmination) of the institution’s public-facing efforts to engage with the importance of Indigenous art to the story of art in Canada:

Alongside several other Indigenous-focused initiatives—including the formation of an Indigenous Advisory Committee, the establishment of an Indigenous Quinquennial exhibition, and the hiring of a Curator of Historical Indigenous Art—the new galleries seamlessly integrate Canadian and Indigenous art within the larger storyline of art history in Canada.573

571 The National Gallery of Canada, “The new Canadian and Indigenous Galleries.”

572 Ibid.

573 “National Gallery of Canada bids farewell to Director and CEO Marc Mayer (press release),” National Gallery of Canada, January 15, 2019, https://www.gallery.ca/for-professionals/media/press-releases/national- gallery-of-canada-bids-farewell-to-director-and-ceo. The second Indigenous Quinquennial will be held on November 8, 2019, to April 5, 2020, and will feature eighty-five artists from twenty countries and forty-three tribal affiliations, including thirty artists from sixteen First Nations to offer “an overview of contemporary work…[that] will focus on performance (as well as including beadwork, painting and video) and will trace the links between contemporary practice and ancient forms and among global Indigenous networks.” Globe Staff, “What’s next for 2019 in the world of arts,” The Globe and Mail, December 30, 2018, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/article-whats-next-for-2019-in-the-world-of-arts/. The first (and inaugural) Indigenous Quinquennial was held in 2013. Alexandra Kahsenni:io Nahwegahbow was announced as the new Associate Curator of Historical Indigenous Art on June 21, 2018, on National Indigenous Peoples Day. She is Anishinaabe and Kanien'kehá:ka, and a member of Whitefish River First Nation with maternal roots in Kahnawake Mohawk Territory. “Historical Indigenous Art at the National Gallery of Canada,” National

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While at once lauding the accomplishments of the new Indigenous and Canadian galleries, the institution was quick to pre-empt the notion that From Time Immemorial was its first foray into integration and juxtaposition—a point stressed by Greg Hill, Audain senior curator of Indigenous art:

I wouldn’t want it to be characterized that way. But to highlight it, especially right now, at this time of celebration that’s not just about celebration, but reflection, and with reconciliation on a lot of people’s tongues, is what we need to be doing.574

Indeed, across departments the curatorial staff had for some time been working to this effect, if not quite to making the approach its permanent state of being.575 For the 2003 Art of this

Land project Hill, who worked on the exhibition as a curatorial assistant from the

Department of Canadian art, designed a display of rare First Nations objects—moccasins and bead bags—alongside paintings by the Group of Seven in order to place a challenge on the empty landscapes portrayed and to prompt the viewer ask the question: “what about the people that lived there?”576 While according to the institution “the change represented by the new spaces is something more fundamental in the nature of the gallery itself, in its full recognition and presentation of the role that indigenous culture has played in the history of

Canada,”577 in making meaning and creating significance in a co-opted display, and to then

Gallery of Canada, accessed March 27, 2019, https://www.gallery.ca/whats-on/calendar/historical-indigenous- art-at-the-national-gallery-of-canada.

574 White, “The National Gallery’s moment of truth.”

575 Phillips notes this in her analysis of the 2003 exhibition; namely, that during the 1980s and early 1990s actively lobbying for the inclusion of contemporary Aboriginal arts into the National Gallery of Canada paved the way for the inclusion of historical Aboriginal arts in the Canadian exhibition galleries. Phillips, “Modes of Inclusion,” 260.

576 Ibid.

577 Simpson, “New galleries offer a new perspective on art made in Canada.”

229 use it for altering the established narrative of Canadian art, was a process that proved slow, and challenging, according to Hill:

Art of This Land was the first time we brought Indigenous works into the historical galleries, and it was a real struggle for some of the curators to reconcile that these almost violently different aesthetics could reside together.578

Despite the renovations that kept the Canadian and Indigenous galleries closed until

June 2017, the National Gallery of Canada reported a “solid year of attendance” during the

2017–18 fiscal cycle: more than 385,000 visitors walked through its doors, a traffic the institution credited to the new exhibition. Also at play in this (hopeful) recovery of visitorship was a certain critical mass in the shape of concurrent exhibitions in adjacent galleries,579 and a number of opening and related ongoing activities:

The year 2017 was an important one for Canada—and for cultural institutions in the National Capital Region—as visitors around the world travelled to mark the 150th anniversary of Confederation. While here, they were treated to a radically new story of Canadian art, culture and history, along with a more inclusive and frank assessment of our relationship to nature, to the past, and to each other, providing a portrait of a mature society aware of its accomplishments as well as its failures, and one that is poised for a bright future.580

In many ways the National Gallery’s evolution of its signature galleries—first, the Canadian art gallery installation original to the 1988 Sussex Drive location; next, the 2003 rehanging as the Canadian and Aboriginal Galleries; and, lastly, the new 2017 Canadian and Indigenous

578 White, “The National Gallery’s moment of truth.”

579 From Time Immemorial to 1967 was one of three concurrent exhibitions (running from June 15 to September 4, 2017—effectively forming the National Gallery’s summer blockbuster) that together shaped the institution’s marking of Canada’s sesquicentennial by showcasing a wider interpretation of the meaning of “art in Canada” by featuring “the largest collection of Canadian and Indigenous art ever presented” across all media under the umbrella title Our Masterpieces, Our Stories: in the Contemporary art galleries the institution mounted Canadian and Indigenous Art: 1968 to Present and in the Canadian Photography Institute galleries Photography in Canada, 1960–2000 was shown. The National Gallery of Canada, “The new Canadian and Indigenous Galleries.”

580 The National Gallery of Canada, “Message from the Director and CEO,” National Gallery of Canada Annual Report 2017–18, 6, https://www.gallery.ca/sites/default/files/upload/ra_design_17_18_en15-final.pdf.

230 galleries—represented slow change on the part of the institution. It also signaled the gradual reconsideration of the notion of Canadian art to rather “art in Canada,” a shift was not only one of nomenclatures, but also of substance involving some loss of control over the dominant narrative of Canadian art history. As Mayer articulated, “[w]e are adapting the story of

Canadian art to suit the needs of our own time.”581

Indeed, the highly-anticipated launch of new Canadian and Indigenous galleries marked the institution’s most public-facing attempt, via the gesture of a redesigned curatorial display coinciding with a signature milestone in the young nation’s history, to more fully integrate the work of Indigenous artists across time into the story of Canadian art. Yet more than simply visitor engagement was at play. During the transcultural turn—a critical juncture in the twenty-first century art historical debate when the meaning and relevance of the nation-state to discipline of art history was never more in question—the reimagined galleries also represented an opportunity for Canada’s leading art institution and holder in trust of the national collection to reflect on its legacy of exhibiting and collecting (and collecting and exhibiting) “Canadian” artists. It is this story of located and securing for the national collection the very best “Canadian” art, and the shifting conceptions of Canadianness that came attached to an increasingly untenable ethno-nationalist art history in the Canadian context, that will be examined in Part Three’s Chapters Six and Seven.

581 Mayer, “From the Director.”

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The Museum as Transcultural Agent

It was in the early 1970s, in the context of interdependent transnationalism, that the notion of a non-state “actor” operating actively and autonomously across national borders was proposed and the now-famous term “transnational actor conceived.582 Interest was renewed in the 1990s with the meaning and implication of a transnational actor mined and extended across disciplines and fields. Implying the declining influence of the “state” in their significant “economic, political, and ideational influence,”583 transnational actors have been defined as able to:

[O]perate on a cross-border basis, pursue the same sets of goals everywhere, and address a global audience. This does not mean that their national affiliates, subsidiaries, or chapters have no autonomy: but they possess a clear overall image and exist as international, often legal entities, whether as a church, corporation, or federation.584

The university, in its exchange of not only faculty and students but, in the digital age, also curriculum, has earned status. And for its circulation of objects and artworks across borders via both short-and long-term loans and travelling exhibitions, so too has the museum.585

If the museum as an institution of learning “acts” in the process of material and intellectual exchange across borders thus earning it the status of “transnational actor,” what

582 The phrase is defined as “entities interacting across national boundaries with at least one nonstate agent present.” Markus Thiel and Jeffrey Maslanic, “Transnational Actors,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia, March 2010, accessed June 26, 2019, doi: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.013.105. See political scientists Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye’s 1971 article “Transnational Relations and World Politics” as published in 1971, in a special issue of International Organization. Jönsson, “Capturing the Transnational,” 23.

583 Patricia M. Goff, “The Museum as Transnational Actor,” Arts & International Affairs 2 (2017), doi: 10.18278/aia.2.1.7.

584 Daphné Josselin and William Wallace, “Non-State Actors in World Politics: A Framework,” in Non-State Actors in World Politics, ed. Daphné Josselin and William Wallace (New York: Palgrave Press, 2001): 3.

585 The satellite branch of the museum is described as a special category; see: Goff, “The Museum as Transnational Actor.”

232 state might the museum claim for its brokering of the art history embodied with the narratives that envelope and bind these objects and these stories—specifically an art history no longer rooted in notions of nation, nationhood, and nationality? For its reach not only across national borders via the circulation and exchange of its collection, but for the very transcultural narratives it seeks to create in its temporary and special exhibitions—many of them also travelling—the museum emerges as a “transcultural agent”: a role suggested by its ability to lead the development and advancement of a World Art Historical networks of connection and exchange paradigm, and assured by its authority to apply corrections to narratives it for so long perpetuated. Both are key in the project of presenting a viable challenge to the persistence of Eurocentrism in the discipline of art history.

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PART THREE – WORLD ART HISTORY AND THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF CANADA’S BIENNIAL EXHIBITIONS

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Chapter Six: Exhibiting and Collecting a National and International Canada

The art and the artists the National Gallery of Canada chose to privilege in 2017 in its redesigned Canadian and Indigenous galleries, and, in fact, had very proactively moved to secure under several private and public long-term loan agreements, represented not only a collapse of the categories of collection that had long been held separate from the interests and focuses of the art museum for a new narrative of art in Canada, but marked a steep correction to the acquisition and exhibition priorities of the previous seventy years. This sharp and strategic departure from the institution’s permanent Canadian holdings to seek out a display

“more relevant to 21st-century audiences”586 brings to the fore the National Gallery’s changing conception of Canadianness and its very role in brokering shifting notions of national identity.

This is the focus of this chapter, and also the next: an examination of two series of biennial exhibitions of contemporary Canadian art organized and hosted by the National

Gallery (1953–1968 and 2010–2017) in which the institution exhibited and collected (and then collected and exhibited) shifting notions of Canadian national identity. Via a critical analysis of the detailed criteria for “Canadianness” the institution applied in its conception of

Canadian artistic identity across a period of some seventy years—by closely examining key identity markers in the profiles of artists selected to represent the country and the institution as it navigated its national, international, and global mandates: be it by way of the captured data of birth or lives and works locations, or one word (or more) expressing nationality in the

National Gallery’s collections management database, or a wholly different category of marker—together these chapters examine the enduring notions nation, nationality, and

586 Stauble, “The Magnificent Art of this Land.”

235 nationhood lying at the heart ethno-cultural art history’s relentless adherence to the nation- state paradigm, and consider the ways in which the lens of World Art History might serve to challenge and unravel the meaning and relevance of national identity, and all identities rooted in land, culture, or constructed notions of nationhood.

Across key periods of the institution’s growth and amidst the wider growth of Canada as a nation—as the National Gallery sought to navigate a constantly evolving set of complex social, political, and cultural contexts, and locate and secure its place in an increasingly global artworld—it was through the biennial exhibition series that the institution confronted its conception of what it meant to be a contemporary Canadian artist and its negotiation of this Canadianness. In its consideration of artists for representation in the national collection—beginning with the first exhibition in 1953 and through the second series, to the last exhibition held in 2017—the National Gallery worked to align the profile of the biennial artist with that of the contemporary Canadian artist and, in so doing, linked artistic identity with national identity. Finding Canadian national identity to be variable, elastic, and highly- porous, to meet its changing exhibition and collection objectives the National Gallery strategically “shifted” its primary marker of Canadian identity to negotiate the Canadianness of the artists it considered for exhibition, and possible acquisition, to, in time, across seven decades of collection and display, shift the biennial exhibition series from a national biennial to an international “biennale.”

In the first series, by carefully selecting artists according to home province and then, by tracing the roots of the new nation’s art historical heritage to Western Europe—by

(selectively) extending its geographic consideration to Canadian artists living and working in

(certain) countries abroad—the institution shifted its primary marker of identity from a

236 nationalism grounded in “place” for a “national” Canada, towards an “international” Canada made possible by marking artists according to Canadian political identity and treating

Canadian national identity as “transportable.” In total, across eight exhibitions spanning some fifteen years, the National Gallery selected three hundred and six unique artists to exhibit seven hundred and thirty-nine works with one hundred and twenty acquired for the national collection. Yet despite this wide breadth of artists and works, the profile of the biennial artist maintained a number of consistent markers of identity: artists were predominantly white and male; between twenty and thirty-five percent of artists were born outside of Canada; almost exclusively the nationalities held were Canadian or dual with

Canada; and, while in the first exhibition one hundred percent of artists hailed from within

Canada’s borders, with each subsequent show artists ranged further and further afield to live, train, and work as artists in locations across the world putting into question the very notion of a “national” artistic identity based on a country’s political borders. Across all exhibitions, and despite its adherence to “place” and an identity located predominantly within its national borders, and in the face its relentless search for the next “national tradition,” at not time did the National Gallery, in its conception of “Canada,” imagine the inclusion of any Indigenous representation be it Aboriginal, First Nations, or Métis.

The second series was less spatially restricted, and incredibly open to (a corrective) indigeneity, yet on National Gallery terms. Resurrected at a time in history when national borders have never been so permeable and mattered so little, the new biennial, responding to an artistic identity now guided by each artist’s self-identification within an expanded artworld, once again saw its marker for Canadianness shift to imagine a “global” Canada.

Across all four exhibitions artists selected were born and claimed citizenship (and dual

237 citizenships) not only in Canada but in cities around the world, and held nationalities (often dual nationalities) not only from Canada but from several nations, many of these lying at the centre of the global contemporary art worlds. In terms of cultural identity, too, the National

Gallery increasingly located and marked artists who were identified or who self-identified as something more than or in addition to (or as a sub-category of) “Canadian” to set on display a diversity of identities more relevant in the twenty-first century than the privilege previously accorded to national identity alone. Here, for the first time in biennial history and mirroring the new Canadian and Indigenous galleries, staking a significant claim in representation were artists of First Nations and Aboriginal descent and, significantly, fair representation from the

North: the Inuit of Canada. Yet, notably, the institution achieved this task not by following the categorizations of identity it had so loyally adhered to in the first series, but by rebutting fixed notions of identity with alternative sources of Canadianness located outside of the nation-state, within World Art Historical networks of connection and exchange. It was here that the series’ greatest tensions between indigeneity at home and the global contemporary beyond national borders were laid bare.

With regards to gender representation the National Gallery’s selections in the second biennial also reflected a changed time: while in the first series when included many female artists came attached to their artist husbands, in the resurrected series the representation of artists who were female increased dramatically to stake never less than a quarter and up to almost half of the field of artists, and all carried international reputations. Lastly, in terms of artist eligibility, the National Gallery breached its own protocols to give way to objectives loftier than simply national recognition: to be included in an exhibition, works had to have been acquired within the last two years and be recent, yet as the series progressed the latter

238 rule was relaxed to bring into the collection and the public eye Canadian artists deemed critical to advancing the National Gallery’s collections mandate—part of the institution’s management of corrections inherent in the riskier business of acquiring contemporary art and a reckoning curators aptly described as “historical hindsight.”587 It was an important shift that marked the exhibition’s transition from Canadian biennial to global “biennale.” These complex negotiations position the National Gallery of Canada as a discursive institution powerful in shaping conceptions of national identity, and the biennial exhibition series an index of shifting notions of Canadianness.

The Biennial Exhibitions of Canadian Art, 1953–1968

When the National Gallery of Canada resolved, at mid-century, and during a critical juncture in the nation’s ideological formation, to revive a pre-war exhibition series originally initiated to satisfy “the desire of the Trustees to keep in closer touch with the developments of Canadian Art than was possible in any other way,”588 the institution did more than organize, host, and acquire from an exhibition of Canada’s most recent and best work. While the new series, collectively known as the Biennial Exhibitions of Canadian Art, was conceived as a national buying show in answer to the recommendations of the Massey-

Lévesque Commission—namely, to foster Canadian arts and culture as part of a nationalist surge that had overcome the country post-war—it was the effort on the part of the National

587 Josée Drouin-Brisebois, “Looking through the Fence and Building a Bridge: Reflections on Collecting Contemporary Canadian Art,” in It Is What It Is: Recent Acquisitions of New Canadian Art (Ottawa: The National Gallery of Canada, 2010), 11.

588 The National Gallery of Canada, “Foreword,” Annual Exhibition of Canadian Painting 1953 (The National Gallery of Canada: Ottawa, 1953), citing the [Eighth] Annual Exhibition of Canadian Art (1933) exhibition catalogue.

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Gallery to develop a “fair, representative and egalitarian mechanism to choose works of art for the national collection”589 that pushed the institution to confront its conception of

Canadian artistic identity and its very role in brokering this Canadianness to express shifting notions of national identity. Eric Brown, Director of the National Gallery during the pre-war series,590 articulated the ideology that had long guided the institution in its mandate as a national museum: “[i]t is a truism that nothing expresses the customs, manners and ideals of a country more clearly than does its art…[s]o art becomes an index of nationality.”591 By extension it would seem that the National Gallery could similarly participate in the indexing of nationality if it managed to locate and secure for the national collection the nation’s strongest representation of Canadian artists.

In the first two exhibitions the National Gallery sought to capture Canadian artists located almost exclusively within its geographical borders: first, by selecting artists by home province—artists living and working in British Columbia, the Prairies, Quebec, Ontario, and, occasionally, the Maritimes, were targeted; and second, in a bid to locate from its grassroots the next great Canadian school of painting, by privileging artists active in local, regional, and national art societies located in cities identified as established centres of artistic production— principally Vancouver, Montreal, and Toronto. Yet as the series aged, and as the pool of new and available Canadian artists living and working in Canada exhausted, in order to secure

589 Limbos-Bomberg, “The Ideal and the Pragmatic,” 37. This master’s thesis explored the numerous shifts in the format of the exhibition series as a chronicle of the changing direction of the institution and its attempts to meet its own and the country’s perception of its national and international roles and professional responsibilities.

590 Brown was “newly arrived” from Britain, from where a belief that art could reflect national culture originated. See: Pupchek, “True North,” 194.

591 The National Gallery of Canada, Special Exhibition of Canadian Art, 1926 (The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa: 1926).

240 artists of national and even international importance the institution began to slowly abandon its strict adherence to physical geography to consider a more flexible Canada, one in which

Canadian identity was attached less to place and more to the very mobile marker of nationality.

Across the remaining exhibitions held (almost) every two years,592 and experimenting with a variety of artist-selection models that, with the notable exception of the anomalous

1961 show, increasingly turned away from the national art scene to embrace international- facing artistic practice in all its forms, in the hopes of fostering a Canadian tradition at home and its own international reputation abroad the National Gallery sought out for exhibition and possible acquisition Canadian artists of international stature working in the most progressive, avant-garde styles. Here the legacy of Canada’s formation—political and ideological, yet also cultural—was laid bare for it was from across the ocean and predominantly from within countries that shared the inherited legacy of the Canada’s academic art historical traditions— namely, Western Europe with particular focus on France as the nexus of twentieth-century modern art—that the National Gallery, staunchly resisting encroachment from its southern neighbour, the United States, searched for and located its best Canadian artists.

By tethering national identity to the physical land and, over time, stretching it more flexibly to include the whole of Canada as a political nation—that is to say, by declaring as its highest-value Canadians a select cohort of the nation’s artists, first, those at home of growing national reputation living and working predominantly in Central and Western

Canada, and, second, those select internationally-connected and/or Canadian expatriates who

592 The final exhibition of the series was intended to launch in 1967 but was delayed to 1968.

241 had achieved international recognition, many of them located in Paris—the institution assiduously promoted the myth of the Canadian artist as a construct that not only existed, but as one that might prove meaningful and relevant.

Yet simultaneous with this construction of Canadianness the National Gallery also unwittingly brokered its deconstruction. By shifting away from the markers of Canadianness that located artistic identity within the nation-state—ethno-nationalist taxonomies as captured in the National Gallery’s collections management database and cited in its exhibition catalogues: birth and lives and works locations, and nationality—to introduce and then privilege a rival paradigm of identity-formation shaped by each artist’s formal and informal networks of connection and exchange laying outside, in between, and through Canada’s national borders and political reaches, the institution advanced a notion of identity that pointed away from the singular monolith imagined through the biennial as a group identity exhibition towards the plurality of identity underpinning a World Art Historical approach.

By actively negotiating the Canadianness of the artists that would be considered for the national collection the National Gallery exhibited and collected a constructed notion of

Canadian national identity that was, at mid-century, based on the fixed borders of the geographic nation-state, driven by a system of regional, provincial, and national art museums, galleries, and artist associations, and located in the institutional mainstream. As nationalist fervor waned, and as notions of Canadian national identity shifted away from place as key marker, a new construction of identity emerged enabled by the institution’s recognition that it was artists connected to one another—and to avant-garde collectives, styles, and movements irrespective of geographic borders or political affiliation—that stood as the most significant, important, and, for the National Gallery of Canada, the most sought

242 after. In order to capture these artists, after mid century Canadian national identity shifted to now be based on the flexible political marker of nationality, driven by the National Gallery and its desire to position the institution on an international stage, and located in the avant- garde mainstream.

These negotiations of identity—all made possible by a turn away from fixed nations towards more flexible networks—position the National Gallery of Canada as a discursive institution powerful in shaping notions of national identity, and the biennial exhibition series as an acute index of the shifting nature of national identity. It also suggests the museum generally, and the National Gallery of Canada specifically, as a transcultural agent capable of building but also dismantling the very taxonomies that organize the art and the artists that power notions of Canadianness to present more complex and nuanced understandings of identity.

A Mid-Century Call to Develop National Arts and Culture

Chaired by the Honourable Vincent Massey, the Royal Commission on National

Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences (1949–51) was established by Privy Council

Order on April 8, 1949. The task of the Massey-Lévesque Commission, as it came to be known, was to assess the state of arts, culture, and education in Canada, and to “examine and make recommendations” on how Canada might strengthen its national cultural resources.593

Representing the first major step by the Canadian government to nurture, preserve, and promote Canadian culture, the Commission recommended the establishment of new federal

593 The Government of Canada, “The Order-in-Council,” Report: Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences, 1949–51 (Ottawa: King’s Printer, 1951), xi.

243 institutions, such as the Canada Council for the Arts, and advocated for federal aid to grow those in existence (including funding that would lead to the establishment of the National

Library of Canada, now the Library and Archives). For the National Gallery of Canada, which had argued for an urgent boost in resources, the Commission recommended funding to extend many of its current services, such as education, publications and reproductions, and travelling exhibitions, and significant increases for acquisitions, staffing, and housing. Yet, notably, the National Gallery was interested in more than material change but sought an elevation of status fitting to its role as Canada’s national art gallery:

The value of such institutions as the National Gallery to a country, and specifically to a rapidly growing country as Canada, is apt to be forgotten or underestimated, since much of that value cannot be put in terms of dollars and cents. By providing material for the study of man in his cultural and artistic activities, it supplements studies of the political and economic aspects of human affairs. By bringing a country into closer cultural relations with others...it raises national prestige.594

To make its case the institution argued for full operating autonomy. While in current practice the National Gallery was required to operate through the Deputy Minister, the

Trustees now lobbied for direct access to the Treasury Board. They were successful:

That in the future the National Gallery have a status similar to that now accorded to the Public Archives, and that the Director of the Gallery...have direct access to the Minister of the department through which the Gallery reports to Parliament.595

The National Gallery’s new and elevated status, legislated in the 1951 act,596 allowed it to enter into contracts, make by-laws, and, key in this analysis of the biennial exhibition series as an index of Canadianness at mid-century and following, directly access funds and make

594 The National Gallery of Canada, Submission to the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences (Ottawa: 1949), 2–3.

595 Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters, and Sciences 1949–51, Report (Ottawa: 1951).

596 The Government of Canada, An Act Respecting the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa: 1951).

244 selections for the acquisition of works of art for the national collection. In return the institution was expected to assume its rightful place at the centre of Canada’s art and cultural identity.

Indeed, the Commission was asked to do more than offer recommendations on funding and resources but to propose a direction by which the country might foster its national reputation at home and abroad. Herein lay the impetus for the Royal Commission, outlined in the terms of reference of the Order-in-Council which read, in part:

That it is desirable that the Canadian people should know as much as possible about their country, its history and traditions; and about their national life and common achievements;

That it is in the national interest to give encouragement to institutions which express national feeling, promote common understanding and add to the variety and richness of Canadian life, rural as well as urban.597

The notions of a “national life” and “national feeling” were seized by the Commission, and in their Report they addressed the assumptions that drove their recommendations:

[T]here are important things in the life of a nation which cannot be weighed or measured…. Canada became a national entity because of certain habits of mind and convictions which its people shared and would not surrender…. It is the intangibles which give a nation not only its essential character but its vitality as well....598

That Canada represented a “national entity” with one shared “essential character” uniting its citizens became the Commission’s creed:

[T]he innumerable institutions, movements and individuals interested in the arts, letters and sciences throughout our country are now forming the national tradition of the future. Through all the complexities and diversities of race, religion, language and geography, the forces which have made Canada a nation and which alone can keep her one are being shaped. These are not to be found in the material sphere alone. Physical links are essential to the unifying process but true unity belongs to the realm

597 The Government of Canada, “The Order-in-Council,” xi.

598 The Government of Canada, “The Nature of the Task,” Report: Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences, 1949–51 (Ottawa: King’s Printer, 1951), 4.

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of ideas. It is a matter for men’s minds and hearts. Canadians realize this and are conscious of the importance of national tradition in the making.599

The commission’s report summarized: “The first charge of the National Gallery is...the development and care of the national collections.”600 The biennial series, tasked with building the national collection, and, alongside it, the institution’s national and international reputation—and, by extension, Canada’s very identity—came in immediate response.

Conception and Inception

In the late Fall of 1950, the Trustees, discussing the National Gallery’s practice of collecting Canadian art—in particular a “feeling” that the Western provinces were not

“sufficiently represented” in the national collection601—resolved, as a means of ensuring that the works coming before the Board for consideration for purchase were a full and fair representation of Canada, to revive the pre-war Annual Exhibition of Canadian Art series held between 1926 and 1933: a selection of painting, sculpture, and graphics chosen from the annual showings of the national and provincial chartered art societies from which each year works were acquired for the national collection with many becoming “acknowledged classics of Canadian painting.”602 The artist, Lawren S. Harris, formerly of the Group of Seven, and, since the Spring of 1950, a Trustee of the National Gallery of Canada representing the voice of the Canadian artist, was appointed to lead the organization of the new series. Harris

599 Ibid.

600 The Government of Canada, “Galleries,” Report: Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences, 1949–51 (Ottawa: King’s Printer, 1951), 77–78.

601 The National Gallery of Canada Archives, Board of Trustees: Minutes of Meetings, File 9.2-B, 504–5.

602 The series continued until wartime decreases in the National Gallery’s budget forced its closure. The National Gallery of Canada, Annual Exhibition of Canadian Painting 1953.

246 proposed an annual exhibition of the “best work done in Canada each year” selected by regional committees, sent to the National Gallery for exhibition, and then subsequently toured across the country—sixty paintings that would “set a standard all across Canada, attract large audiences and be an inspiration to artists generally.”603 In keeping with its primary goal as a national buying show, the series would run in line with the exhibition year and be synchronized with the yearly meetings of the Board to facilitate purchases.

Two aspects of Harris’ proposal were immediately drawn into debate. Harris’ sixty work limit—a number arrived at by virtue of his assessment that “there are not more than 60 artists of high standard in the country”604—was deemed too low by some members of the

Board to enable the different parts of the country to be fairly represented. A second exception was prompted by Harris’ proposed allocation: while Harris had suggested, and the Board had initially accepted, dividing the country along provincial lines—an early proposal outlined artist selection at the discretion of five “knowledgeable” regional committees: the Maritime provinces, Quebec, Ontario, the Prairie provinces, and British Columbia—H.O. McCurry,

Director of the National Gallery and not only a bureaucrat but also a nationalist with an eye to democratically representing the nation’s artists, took exception to Harris’ merit-based allocations wherein the principal art centres of Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal—those cities deemed largely responsible for the volume of artistic production in Canada—would dictate higher allocations in their corresponding regions. Instead, McCurry proposed tempering the issue of merit with some eye to representing Canada’s artists “more or less”

603 These were the words Lawren Harris wrote in a letter to the Director of the National Gallery, H.O. McCurry, in November 1950. The National Gallery of Canada Archives, Annual Exhibition of Canadian Painting 1953, File 5.5-A.

604 Ibid.

247 based on population “but not too rigidly”605—in short, a quota system. In the end the Board sided with McCurry and proceeded to plan the exhibition by organizing the country geographically along provincial lines and with the goal of selecting artists in proportion to population statistics.

Periodically Harris’ argument for merit would rear anew and, tied with the most contentious issue—the question of the membership of the regional selection committees—the resulting debates would grow the number of total works exhibited and, perhaps most key in this analysis, influence the profile of artists selected. While the notion that separate and democratic regional committees selected specifically for their knowledge of the area’s artistic activity be charged with making selections set Harris’ proposal apart from the pre-war series, a decentralized jury was more difficult to deploy than anyone could have conceived. To avoid accusations of bias—often working artists were appointed to regional committees resulting in artist majorities selecting from their own work—McCurry and the Board instead organized honorary advisory boards in certain regions to facilitate recommendations. Further, to stave off criticism, they kept the juries anonymous.606

The exhibition that materialized after three years of discussion and planning could only loosely claim to resemble Harris’ vision for the “best work” done in Canada. While preliminary plans had set the exhibition cap at sixty, some measure of artistic merit won out in the end and each region consistently surpassed its allotment. The plan for five regional committees became a plan for seven: one selection committee per Western province, one each for the provinces of Ontario and Quebec, and one for the Maritimes. And, in the touring

605 The National Gallery of Canada Archives, Board of Trustees: Minutes of Meetings, 517–8.

606 The National Gallery of Canada Archives, Annual Exhibition of Canadian Painting 1953.

248 segment, the notion of fair representation remained at play if not quite fairly: if the exhibition remained on view at the National Gallery of Canada for a total of twenty-seven days thus representing the province of Ontario, the subsequent touring schedule saw the exhibition represent the provinces of British Columbia for sixty-eight days, Alberta for fifty-eight,

Saskatchewan for thirty-four, and Manitoba for twenty-one—all provincial regions called home by the majority of artists selected. Notably, neither the Eastern provinces nor the North ever received the touring segment.607 These omissions were not the first signal of the scope of inclusion the Trustees envisioned in their (limited) conception of Canada.

A Geographic Canada

The Annual Exhibition of Canadian Painting opened at the National Gallery of

Canada on March 10, 1953, displaying seventy-seven works by seventy-seven unique artists.608 While twenty-eight of the artists exhibited were foreign-born,609 the majority, forty-

607 Ibid.

608 The seventy-seven unique artists exhibited, in alphabetical order: Peter Aspell, Maxwell Bates, Léon Bellefleur, B.C. Binning, Bruno Bobak, Molly Lamb Bobak, Paul-Émile Borduas, Eli Bornstein, Pierre de Ligny Boudreau, Richard Bowman, Fritz Brandtner, Miller Brittain, Oscar Cahén, Paraskeva Clark, Charles Comfort, Edwy Cooke, Stanley Cooper, Stanley Cosgrove, Reta Summers Cowley, Jean-Philippe Dallaire, Albert Dumouchel, Norman Eastman, L.L. FitzGerald, Jacqueline Gilson, H.G. Glyde, Eric Goldberg, Bess Harris, Lawren P. Harris, Yvonne McKague Housser, Edward Hughes, Jack Humphrey, A.Y. Jackson, Don Jarvis, John Kacere, Roy Kiyooka, Anthony Law, Jean-Paul Lemieux, Arthur Lismer, Luke Lindoe, Kenneth Lochhead, John Lyman, William McCloy, J.A.S. Macdonald, Donald Mackay, Isabel McLaughlin, Jack Markell, Henri Masson, Louis Muhlstock, Will Ogilvie, L.A.C. Panton, John Delisle Parker, Ruth Patric, Robert Pilot, Joseph Plaskett, Edward Pulford, Joseph Purcell, Marthe Rakine, Jeanne Rhéaume, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Goodridge Roberts, Margaret Robertson (Wickenden), Frederick Ross, Arla Saare, Charles Hepburn Scott, Marian Dale Scott, Jack Shadbolt, Reginald Shepherd, Ronald Spickett, Takeo Tanabe, Lionel Thomas, Harold Town, Joanna Vanterpool, F.H. Varley, Gordon Webber, York Wilson, Roland Wise, and LeRoy Zwicker. The National Gallery of Canada, Annual Exhibition of Canadian Painting 1953.

609 Artist birthplace (and birthdate) is cited in the National Gallery collections management database, see: https://www.gallery.ca/collection/search-the-collection. When an artist is uncollected by the National Gallery of Canada, the secondary Artists in Canada database was referenced. Of the artists born abroad, seven artists were born in the United States with the balance of twenty born variously in the countries of Barbados, Belgium, Denmark, England, Finland, France, Galicia (modern-day Ukraine), Germany, Poland, Russia, Scotland, and South Africa.

249 nine, were born in Canada.610 In terms of residency, the province or country each artist called home, Canadianness once again led as all seventy-seven artists exhibited lived and worked in

Canada.611 Rounding out these direct markers of identity—indexes of identity that required no interpretation or inference—was each artist’s political affiliation by way of their nationality: fifty-three of the artists exhibited were cited as Canadian in the nationality subject field of the National Gallery database;612 the balance—save one artist—held dual nationalities with Canada thus raising the overall Canadian contingent to seventy-six

610 Of the artists born in Canada, eleven artists were born in Quebec, ten in Ontario, six in each of the provinces of British Columbia and Saskatchewan, five in each of Manitoba and New Brunswick, three in Alberta, and two in each of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. There was no representation from Prince Edward Island and none from the North.

611 Artist current lives and works cities and provinces were cited prominently in the exhibition catalogue following each artist’s name, see: The National Gallery of Canada, Annual Exhibition of Canadian Painting 1953. Eighteen artists lived and worked in Ontario; sixteen in each of the provinces of British Columbia and Quebec; six in each of Manitoba and New Brunswick; five in each of Alberta and Saskatchewan; four in Nova Scotia; and one in Newfoundland.

612 See: https://www.gallery.ca/collection/search-the-collection. Nine artists never collected by the National Gallery (with thus no artist record existing in the database) were estimated as “Canadian”: Edwy Cooke, Reta Summers Cowley, Nornman Eastman, Bess Harris, Luke Lindoe, Ruth Patric, Edward Pulford, Margaret Robertson, and Joanna Vanterpool. Because not all works exhibited in the Canadian biennial exhibition series were acquired by the National Gallery, and because many artists were never acquired by the institution, ever, many artists (either of Canadian nationality, dual with Canada, or other) fail to appear in the National Gallery collections management database; further, while the ancillary Artists in Canada database (which includes artists active in Canada, not only artists of Canadian nationality) might include a record for an artist, frequently it is silent on nationality. In the absence of identity markers pointing to a different nationality, if an artist was born in Canada and lived and worked in Canada I estimated Canadian nationality.

250 artists.613 The remaining artist—the seventy-seventh—was the only fully non-Canadian inclusion: “American” John Kacere.614

A series of indirect markers also worked to signal identity (although, arguably, on more subjective terms), and these too pointed towards Canadianness. From the overall cohort of exhibited artists, eleven artists were cited for membership in the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, or R.C.A.,615 a national organization of established and professional artists from all regions of Canada founded in 1880 under the patronage of the Governor General of Canada, the Marquis of Lorne, who “recognized the importance of encouraging the visual arts and setting aesthetic standards that would compare favourably to those of other countries.”616 By way of the inclusion of the R.C.A. credential—the acronym fused with identity, following each artist’s name in the exhibition catalogue to, alongside birthdate and home city and province, represent the whole of an artist’s (visible) biography—the National Gallery not

613 Seven artists were cited as “British, Canadian,” five as “American, Canadian,” two as “German, Canadian,” and nine artists held the following nationalities dual with Canada: Belgian, Danish, Finnish, French, Galician, Polish, Russian, South African, and Swiss. Nine of these nationalities were estimated due to uncollected and thus undocumented artists: Eli Bornstein was estimated to hold “American, Canadian” nationality based on his American birth yet Canadian residency, and on the evidence of his selection for exhibition wherein the National Gallery selected Canadian residents that held at minimum dual nationalities with Canada; similarly for Richard Bowman, William McCloy, John Delisle Parker, and Roland Wise; Stanley Cooper and Anthony Law was estimated to hold “British, Canadian” nationality on the same terms yet for English births; Arla Saare as holding “Finnish, Canadian” nationality for her birth in Finland; and Jacqueline Gilson as “French, Canadian” for her birth in France.

614 Kacere’s nationality as “American” is an estimate since no works by him were collected by the National Gallery. Kacere was cited in the exhibition catalogue as born in the United States (in Walker, Iowa) but living in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in 1953. Yet the Artists in Canada database locates Kacere in Gainesville, Florida, in 1954 and countless internet searches report his nationality as American. Kacere died in Iowa in 1999.

615 Charles Comfort, H.G. Glyde, Yvonne McKague Housser, Arthur Lismer, L.A.C. Panton, and York Wilson were all cited as members of the R.C.A. while Stanley Cosgrove, Lawren P. Harris, Jean-Paul Lemieux, Goodridge Roberts, and Charles Hepburn Scott were cited as A.R.C.A., or Associates of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. The National Gallery of Canada, Annual Exhibition of Canadian Painting 1953.

616 “Who We Are: History,” Royal Canadian Academy (RCA), accessed June 26, 2019, http://rca-arc.ca/who- we-are/history/.

251 only explicitly located each artist among the highest ranks of national artistic achievement but also implicitly attached them to Canada, as belonging to the nation of Canada. However, both interrupting and (somewhat) complicating this Canadianness is the fact that three of these R.C.A. artists also carried British identity: Charles Comfort, Arthur Lismer, and L.A.C

Panton, all born in the UK, held until their death dual nationalities with Britain and so were, at least in part, British.617 This Britishness not only makes visible Canada’s English parentage, but hints from what direction, when not within its national borders, the National

Gallery sourced Canadian national identity at mid century.

If, in 1953, the National Gallery selected for exhibition its most Canadian cohort of artists selected exclusively from Canadian soil classified according to specific geographical markers of place it was no doubt driven, at least in part, by some hope of discovering the next great Canadian school of painting.618 Yet, despite this effort to mount an exhibition of

Canadian art by Canadian artists, not all of Canada was equally represented in the exhibition if at all. Although the institution had devised selections based “more or less” on population to ensure at least some element of fair representation, the final distribution of works (and artists) bucked provincial quotas in great favour to artists living and working in British

617 Two additional artists were marked for two further credentials deemed relevant to their identity as artists exhibited in a Canadian exhibition and deemed worthy of mention in the catalogue, also signalling competing Britishness: Will Ogilvie was cited as a Member of the Order of the British Empire (M.B.E.), a British order of chivalry rewarding contributions to the arts, among other acts of service, and A.Y. Jackson was cited as a Companion of St. Michael and St. George (C.M.G.), a British order of knighthood. The National Gallery of Canada, Annual Exhibition of Canadian Painting 1953. While Jackson was cited in the collections management database as “Canadian,” Ogilvie was cited as “British, Canadian.”

618 In a deliberate move to limit submissions to the medium of painting, the institution disclosed its privilege of the higher arts linking its collecting mandate to that of Western Europe and revealed its hopes, by locating grass-roots artists actively working across the country, of repeating the success of the Group of Seven. Interestingly, and in what might be interpreted as a salute to one of Canada’s most successful Canadian painting traditions, three original members of the Group of Seven and one later addition were included among the 1953 show: A.Y. Jackson, Arthur Lismer, Frederick Varley, and L.L. Fitzgerald. Ibid.

252

Columbia.619 In acquisitions, too, BC was favoured: half of the eight works acquired for the national collection came from the province of British Columbia;620 of the remaining four acquisitions, three works were acquired from Ontario621 and the last remaining work was acquired from New Brunswick. While the acquisitions from British Columbia and Ontario fell in line with the geographic priority the National Gallery had applied in sourcing artists for exhibition, Quebec’s strong representation was not supported by an acquisition and without a strong population base the lone purchase from New Brunswick also stood out.

Without a doubt the pull of major artistic centres drove the distribution of artists selected, and ensuing acquisitions: more than half of the artists exhibited came from the top three cities Harris had anticipated in his original proposal—Toronto, Vancouver, and

Montreal622—and all but the lone Ottawa purchase (and the Maritimes anomaly) came from these centres. The resulting Canada on exhibition, and subsequently collected, was thus one the organizers had envisioned from the start and had consequently designed. Yet in targeting

619 Ontario, with a population of some 4.6 million, led with some twenty-three percent or eighteen artists represented, yet Quebec, with the second-highest population of just over 4.0 million, yielded about the same percentage of representation, almost twenty-one percent or sixteen artists each, as the province of British Columbia with only one quarter of the population. The proportional rate of representation held in central and eastern Canada further signalled BC’s higher numbers as an anomaly: with a total representation of some twenty-one percent (more than six percent in Alberta and Saskatchewan each, and almost eight percent in Manitoba) and a combined population of just over 2.5 million, the allocations across the three Prairie provinces appear high against Ontario and Quebec until compared to BC and in the Maritime provinces, with a total population of some 1.6 million, some fourteen percent of artists yielded (five percent from Nova Scotia, eight percent from New Brunswick, and one percent from Newfoundland)—a rate (somewhat) closer to the representational leaders, Ontario and Quebec. Ibid.

620 Included here were Peter Aspell (living and working in Vancouver), Joseph Plaskett (New Westminster), Lionel Thomas (Vancouver), and Jack Leonard Shadbolt (Vancouver). The National Gallery of Canada Archives, Annual Exhibition of Canadian Painting 1953.

621 Included here were Pierre de Ligny Boudreau (Ottawa), Marthe Rakine (Toronto), and Oscar Cahén (King). Ibid.

622 A total of forty-four exhibited artists lived and worked in these centres: fourteen in Toronto and Montreal, and sixteen in the greater Vancouver area. Ibid.

253 artists active in key cities pre-identified as holding concentrations of Canadian talent, the

National Gallery excluded large swathes of the nation it believed held no promise: in addition to the travelling exhibition segment excluding the province of Quebec, the

Maritimes, and all of the North, and anticipating its almost exclusive focus on Central and

Western Canada in artists selected for exhibition and acquisition, no artist either born in nor living and working in either northern territory was ever considered.623

If, at mid-century, Canadian national identity was understood to be equal to Canadian residency regardless of where and in what part of the world an artist was born, trained, or lived up until that moment (and even despite nationality: recall “American” John Kacere), then Canadian provincial identity—the marker used by the National Gallery to locate and select artists for exhibition in 1953 and then guide fair representation in subsequent select acquisitions for the national collection—was similarly tied to the nation; specifically, to the province where an artist lived and worked that year. Yet the provincialness of the eight artists acquired in 1953—five artists of Canadian nationality and three duals with Canada—was not always direct and meaningful, any more than their attendant Canadianness.

Of the former group of full Canadians, Peter Aspell was firmly-established in the

Vancouver art scene and so was fittingly collected from the province of British Columbia.624

623 At mid century there were two territories of the North: Yukon and the (former) Northwest Territories. As in birth, in the 1953 exhibition there was no representation from Prince Edward Island and none from the North— omissions that could have been anticipated on account of there being no representation across the seven regional selection committees from either PEI (the Maritime Committee assigned personnel to New Brunswick and Nova Scotia only) or the whole of the North. Ibid.

624 Aspell was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he trained at the Vancouver School of Art (today called Emily Carr University) and the Académie de Ghent in Belgium before teaching at the Vancouver School of Art for most of his career before opening his own teaching institute in Vancouver in 1970. Aspell was a member of the British Columbia Society of Artists (BCSA) and the Canadian Group of Painters (CGP). Aspell’s work has been collected by the National Gallery of Canada, the Vancouver Art Gallery, and the University of British Columbia.

254

Similarly, Lawren P. Harris’ career in and contributions to the province of New Brunswick have been well documented.625 However, the biographies of Joseph Plaskett, Lionel Thomas, and Pierre de Ligny Boudreau signal an identity more complicated than one based solely on home province. Plaskett was born in New Westminster, British Columbia, attended the

University of British Columbia, and was a student of the Vancouver School of Art. However, the balance of Plaskett’s professional training as an artist took him abroad: in the years before the biennial exhibition series Plaskett studied in San Francisco (under David Park and

Clyfford Still), in New York City (under Hans Hoffmann), and in Paris (under Fernand

Léger).626 That Plaskett, regardless of the international education that brokered his reputation at home, was, as a Canadian artist, collected from the province of British Columbia, suggests that for the National Gallery, regardless of the source of the artistic influences exerted in the course of his or her training, an artist active at a particular moment in time and in a particular province stood frozen in time as an index of their current province and, by extension, of the whole of the nation.

A slightly different case presents in the biography of Lionel Thomas, yet one that suggests similar reasoning by the National Gallery in assigning provincial identity. Thomas was born in Toronto where he was raised and educated as an artist at the John Russell School

625 Harris was born in Toronto and trained as an artist variously in Toronto and Boston, and, during the war, served as a war artist abroad working under Charles Comfort in Italy. In 1946, some seven years before the first biennial, Harris joined the faculty of Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick, and would remain there until 1975 teaching occasionally at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and the Banff School of Fine Arts. Not only a member of the R.C.A., Harris was also a member of the Canadian Group of Painters, the Ontario Society of Artists, and the Maritime Art Association, and received two honourary doctorates: from Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia (1971) and Mount Allison University (1976). Harris died in Ottawa in 1994. His work is held in several public institutions across the provinces of Ontario, New Brunswick, and PEI.

626 Plaskett would eventually make Paris his permanent home in 1960 where he served as the unofficial ambassador to Canadian artists working in Europe, even creating a foundation to fund the European development of young Canadian artists. Plaskett moved to England in 2001 (the same year he received the Order of Canada), and died there in 2014. His work is held in many Canadian public galleries.

255 of Fine Arts, the Ontario College of Art, and the Karl Godwin School of Illustration. But in

1940 Thomas moved to Vancouver to teach at the School of Art there, and then continued his training as an artist with graduate education in the United States, at the Hans Hofmann

School of Fine Arts in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and, under a scholarship from the

Emily Carr Trust Fund, at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco with Mark

Rothko.627 Like Plaskett, Thomas was identified as a British Columbian artist due to his recorded residency in Vancouver; yet, interestingly, in order to make this assignment the

National Gallery had to overlook his Ontario birth, his early education as an artist (also in

Ontario), and his ensuing international finishing education. Last is the case of Pierre de

Ligny Boudreau: born in Quebec, Boudreau was recorded as living and working in Ottawa in

1953 and was thus identified as an Ontario artist; yet, by all accounts, for his lifelong engagement with French-speaking Quebec, Boudreau was more so an artist representative of that province.

The acquisition into the national collection of the three dual-nationality artists presents similar complications in assigning provincial identity as an index of national identity, and, further, raise questions around the relative meanings of an identity marked as partly Canadian in juxtaposition with one marked as whole. Oscar Cahén was born in

Copenhagen, Denmark, lived in seven different European countries, and was educated as an artist in Dresden, Italy, Paris, and Stockholm before emigrating in 1940 to Canada where he put his training as a designer to work in the cities of Montreal and Toronto. Marthe Rakine was born in Russia to a Swiss father and French mother, was educated as an artist in Paris,

627 Thomas exhibited widely throughout his career, in Canada and internationally, and his work is held in collections across Canada, in Ontario and British Columbia. Thomas died in British Columbia in 2005.

256 and emigrated in 1948 to Canada where she enrolled in Ontario College of Art in Toronto.

And lastly, Jack Shadbolt was born in England, was raised from a young age in Victoria,

British Columbia, was educated as an artist in New York, London, and Paris, and taught in high schools in Duncan and Vancouver, British Columbia, before eventually settling at the

Vancouver School of Art to teach. While all three artists were assigned their provincialness based on their 1953 city of residence—Ontario for Cahén and Rakine, and British Columbia for Shadbolt—in varying degrees each artist’s provincial tenure presents as the least compelling marker of their identity as an artist.

Notably, just as was the case with all five full Canadians acquired for the national collection, Cahén, Rakine, and Shadbolt all sought out and received professional, foreign training as artists—this was, in fact, the basis for each artist’s assignment as “significant.”

Not only did this training position each artist as the product of an international (rather than national and even provincial) system of artistic production,628 it arguably equalized part-

Canadians with full-Canadians in the sense that apart a foreign birth, Cahén, Rakine, and

Shadbolt carried no more and no fewer markers of Canadianness. It would seem that in its strategy of searching across the nation’s provincial regions to locate Canadian artists worthy of acquisition for the national collection, the National Gallery achieved less the collection of artists representative of the Canadianness the institution sought to exhibit and collect, and more a record of which artists were active in a particular province at the particular juncture in

628 Cahén received a robust artistic training in Europe, emigrating to Canada to work as a designer in both Quebec and Ontario; Rakine was similarly trained abroad and while she enrolled at the Ontario College of Art upon her emigration to Canada, she was in Toronto for less than five years before the opening of the 1953 show; and while Shadbolt’s connection to British Columbia as a long-time resident and art educator is compelling, he sought out education as a professional artist in the United States and abroad.

257 the development of mid-century Canadian art. These are distinct profiles carrying wholly different significances.

In 1953 the National Gallery selected for exhibition its most Canadian cohort of artists sought exclusively from within Canada’s physical borders—part of the institution’s expressed desire to ensure a full and fair representation of Canada. Yet, in a vestige of

Canada’s colonial heritage attributable at least in part to its status as a new nation, it also selected its most American, and its most British. With one of the highest rates of artists born and, as witnessed by a closer look at provincialness, oftentimes trained abroad, the second biennial readily accepted as Canadian born-abroad artists with the United States leading and

England a close second.629 No subsequent exhibition would lead with such high representations from two single countries.

In moving from colony to nation Canada had long negotiated tensions between its imperial connection with Britain and its continental link with the United States, and both forces were on display in this first exhibition in the guise of the identity of the artists selected. Yet, in terms making its national presence felt, Britain edged slightly ahead of the

United States due in large part to the National Gallery’s privilege of artists holding membership in the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. By way of the eleven artists cited for membership in the R.C.A.—an institutional descendant of the academic tradition generally and of Britain’s Royal Academy of Arts specifically, and a marker that carried a certain degree of British pedigree into the Annual Exhibition (and the series overall)—the legacy of

629 In an all-time series high nine percent of artists were born in the United States with just over six percent claiming dual “American, Canadian” nationality; and, in a close tie (and leading in foreign birth and nationality rates in every exhibition henceforth), was England with approximately eight percent of artists born there and more than nine percent of artists holding dual “British, Canadian” nationalities.

258 the British Empire loomed large on the nascent development of a uniquely Canadian art. The fact that three of the artists marked as academicians maintained their national ties with

England (recall dual citizens Comfort, Lismer, and Panton) only further entrenched the

British link yet simultaneously raised the question of how the (young) nation of Canada, brokered by the National Gallery of Canada, was navigating its support for the Canadian artist and its role in fostering a uniquely Canadian tradition. Only the outcome of the series’ future exhibitions would bear out the answer.

The Biennial is Born

Despite some public renunciation of the outcome of the first exhibition, the National

Gallery maintained the exhibition’s overall format and general spirit in the 1955 show. A notice sent to the regional committee members outlined the institution’s plans:

The method of selection for the Biennial will remain the same as for the Annual Exhibition in 1953. The preliminary choices will be made by regional committees acting in an advisory capacity for the National Gallery. The number of paintings sent from various regions is to be determined by the distribution of population, but some special consideration must also be given to the several leading artistic centres in the country…. The overriding consideration of each regional committee is making its choices should be that of high quality in the works chosen, for only thus can the exhibition be of value to the country.630

Even in their perpetuation of the regional representation model—namely, targeting a quota of works per province according to population—internal correspondence show National Gallery

Trustees increasingly concerned over questions of quality.631 In response, a number of

630 This text is excerpted from an undated draft document; see: National Gallery of Canada Archives, First Biennial Exhibition of Canadian Painting 1955, File 5.5-B.

631 The National Gallery of Canada Archives, First Biennial Exhibition of Canadian Painting 1955.

259 refinements reinforcing the purpose of the show—namely, to keep the institution abreast of

“developments of Canadian art”—were implemented. To afford more time for planning, the exhibition was reimagined as a biennial showing every two years instead of annually, and the scope was widened to now consider all artists, not just members of chartered art societies, and all works of art, whether in public exhibitions or private collections. Also significant was a reconsideration of the practice of externally-located provincial chairs. In their place a member of the institution’s Board of Trustees acting as ex officio was appointed. It was a move intended to provide a sense of cohesion and unity in the decision-making process, and to place final responsibility with the National Gallery.632

Five regional committees sent some eighty works to Ottawa where they were narrowed to just over sixty by National Gallery staff.633 Despite efforts to renew focus on quality over representation, the final distribution of exhibited works varied only minimally from that of the 1953 exhibition: slightly fewer cities were represented, and major ones dominated with several claiming all the quotas for their province—a trend that would mark the focus of the second show. While the touring segment now saw all provincial regions, if not all provinces and territories, access the show, it was never consistent (and oftentimes without strong reason).634 Across all facets of the exhibition’s organization, selection, and display, Canada, as a physical country—and particularly its centre—remained at the fore.

632 Robert H. Hubbard, the National Gallery’s curator of Canadian art (and soon-to-be chief curator), assumed responsibility for the exhibition’s organization. Ibid.

633 Ibid.

634 Ibid.

260

A Centred Canada

The First Biennial Exhibition of Canadian Painting opened at the National Gallery of

Canada on May 18, 1955, displaying sixty-two works by sixty-two unique artists—a drop of some twenty percent in both the art and the artists from the first biennial.635 Despite this paring down, an overwhelming twenty-nine artists from the first exhibition were selected again, leaving just over half, or thirty-three, new artists.636 In terms of the Canadianness of the artists exhibited, the recorded birth locations signalled a strengthened from-Canada profile: forty-nine of the sixty-two artists exhibited were born in Canada—an increase of approximately fifteen percent from the first show637—with the balance of thirteen artists born abroad.638 While in the first show all artists lived and worked in Canada, in 1955 all but one did: Paul-Émile Borduas, in a move from his hometown of Saint-Hilaire, Quebec (where he

635 The sixty-two unique artists exhibited, in alphabetical order: John Alfsen, Robert Annand, Gregory Arnold, Peter Aspell, Maxwell Bates, B.C. Binning, Paul-Émile Borduas, Fritz Brandtner, Jack Bush, Ghitta Caiserman, Paraskeva Clark, Alan Collier, Alex Colville, Edwy Cooke, Stanley Cosgrove, Albert Dumouchel, Benoît East, L.L. Fitzgerald, Pierre Gauvreau, Sidney Goldsmith, Lawren P. Harris, Sinclair Healy, Thomas Hodgson, Yvonne McKague Housser, Edward Hughes, Jack Humphrey, Don Jarvis, Henry Jones, Roy Kiyooka, John Koerner, Alexandra Luke, Grant Macdonald, J.A.S. Macdonald, Jack Markell, Henri Masson, Ray Mead, Alexander Millar, Janet Mitchell, Jean-Paul Mousseau, Louis Muhlstock, Kazuo Nakamura, Jack Nichols, William Ronald, Frederick Ross, Charles Hepburn Scott, Marian Dale Scott, Jack Shadbolt, Reginald Shepherd, Gordon Appelbe Smith, Robert Steele, William Le Roy Stevenson, George Swinton, Lionel Thomas, Anthony Thorn (alias: Anthony Goldman), Gentile Tondino, Jacques de Tonnancour, Harold Town, Gordon Webber, Gustav Weisman, James Willer, William Winter, and LeRoy Zwicker. The National Gallery of Canada, First Biennial Exhibition of Canadian Painting 1955.

636 Returning from 1953 were Aspell, Bates, Binning, Borduas, Brandtner, Clark, Cooke, Cosgrove, Dumouchel, Fitzgerald, Harris, Housser, Hughes, Humphrey, Jarvis, Kiyooka, MacDonald, Markell, Masson, Muhlstock, Ross, (Marian Dale) Scott, (Charles Hepburn) Scott, Shadbolt, Shepherd, Thomas, Town, Webber, and Zwicker. The National Gallery of Canada, First Biennial Exhibition of Canadian Painting 1955.

637 Some seventy-nine percent of artists were born in Canada in 1955, an increase from just under sixty-four percent in 1953. Of the artists born in Canada, fifteen were born in Ontario, thirteen in Quebec, five in Saskatchewan, four in British Columbia, three in each of the provinces of Alberta, Manitoba, and New Brunswick, two in Nova Scotia, and one in Newfoundland. For a second year in a row no artists exhibited were born in Prince Edward Island or in the North: while the former exclusion had been criticised, the latter had yet to be noticed.

638 Of the artists born abroad, four artists were born in England, and one in each of the countries of Austria, Belgium, (the former) Czechoslovakia, Galicia, Germany, Lithuania, Russia, Scotland, and the United States.

261 was cited as living and working in the 1953 exhibition catalogue), was now recorded as residing in the United States, in New York.639 Exhibited artists’ nationalities, too, reinforced a strong Canadian profile with an increase of thirteen percent from 1953 in pure nationalities: fifty-one out of the sixty-two artists exhibited were cited as Canadian in the subject field of the National Gallery database,640 while the remaining eleven artists held dual nationalities with Canada.641 In a break from the first exhibition—and, in what might be interpreted as

Canada resisting the pressures of American culture—the presence of any artist from the

United States was noticeably absent.642 However, the strong presence of Britain remained with four artists born in England (and all four maintaining dual “British, Canadian” nationalities).

Several indirect markers of identity worked to qualify, yet sometimes complicate, the direct markers pointing to a seemingly pure Canadian cohort. While in the first exhibition artist entries in the catalogue were sparse, listing only each artist’s date of birth and current lives and works location (and any credentials deemed relevant to their identity as an exhibited artist), in the second exhibition catalogue these markers were absorbed into short narrative biographies that emphasized the various artistic achievements that likely

639 Of the artists living and working in Canada, eighteen resided in Ontario, thirteen in Quebec, eleven in British Columbia, six in New Brunswick, five in each of the provinces of Alberta and Manitoba, two in Nova Scotia, and one in Saskatchewan. Foreshadowing a frequent future trend, no artists lived and worked in Newfoundland, and once again there was no representation from Prince Edward Island and none from the North.

640 Nine of these Canadian artist nationalities were estimated: Cooke, East, Healy, Jones, Luke, Shepherd, Steele, Stevenson, and Thorn.

641 Four artists were cited as “British, Canadian” and seven artists held the following nationalities dual with Canada: Austrian, Belgian, Czechoslovakian, Galician, German, Russian, and Lithuanian.

642 While in 1953 seven artists were born in the U.S. and five maintained “American, Canadian” nationalities (one pure American nationality), in 1955 only one artist of Canadian nationality was born in the States.

262 contributed to each artist’s selection as among the best in 1955.643 And even though most entries found their way to mentioning an artist’s current location either by way of their lives and works city (or, because many artists were also teaching at either a university, college, or school of art, by citing an artist’s academic employer), these mentions were secondary.

While these fuller biographies were one full step ahead of the first exhibition catalogue in terms of offering background, the 1955 catalogue did not stop there. Biographies also included an artist’s link to recognized names—accomplished artists of all nationalities from around the world under whom an artist had trained. B.C. Binning was cited as having studied at the Vancouver School of Art, and also in New York, at the Art Students League, with Kuniyoshi,644 and in London with Henry Moore645 and Ozenfant.646 L.L. Fitzgerald was cited as studying at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, and at the Arts Student League in

New York under Boardman Robinson647 and Kenneth Hayes Miller;648 yet also included in

Fitzgerald’s entry was mention of his affiliation with the Group of Seven—as a member,

643 Once again, a handful of artists carried the R.C.A. or A.R.C.A. credential following their name in the exhibition catalogue, a professional affiliation appearing to carry at least some weight in 1955 despite the National Gallery’s decision to open the exhibition to artists outside of national and regional societies: Yvonne McKague Housser was marked as a member of the Royal Canadian Academy (actually twice, in both the acronym following her name and in narrative within her catalogue entry) while John Alfsen, Jack Bush, Lawren P. Harris, Jack Nichols, and Charles Hepburn Scott were marked as Associates. Returning artists Housser, Harris, and Scott also carried the citation in 1953. Two further returning artists, L.L. Fitzgerald and Jack Humphrey, carried the citation of LL.D. following their name, most likely an honourary Doctor of Laws degree. Arthur Lismer also carried this citation in 1953. The National Gallery of Canada, First Biennial Exhibition of Canadian Painting 1955.

644 This was possibly a reference to Yasuo Kuniyoshi, a painter, photographer, and printmaker of Japanese birth who emigrated to the United States in 1906.

645 Moore was an English artist best known for his semi-abstract monumental bronze sculptures located around the world as public works of art.

646 This was likely a reference to Amédée Ozenfant, a French cubist painter and writer who, together with Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (later known as Le Corbusier), founded the Purist movement.

647 Robinson was a Canadian American artist, illustrator, and cartoonist.

648 Miller was an American painter, printmaker, and teacher.

263 between 1932 and 1933. Indeed, many artists, in addition to being tied to their mentors

(many by their surnames alone, a keen signal of the prominence of these internationally- recognized artists), were cited for their membership in key Canadian avant-garde artists groups linked each time to one of the major centres of artistic activity Harris had earlier earmarked: Jack Bush was cited for exhibiting with the abstract collective Painters Eleven in

Toronto,649 Paul-Émile Borduas as the leader of Montreal’s Automatistes, and Jean-Paul

Mousseau as “associated” with Borduas and the Automatiste group.650

A third kind of mention also worked to signal identity: the accomplishments of many artists were described by way of the awards and prizes they had received, many of which ranged internationally. Among the many professional accolades mentioned, Peter Aspell was cited as having travelled to Europe on an Emily Carr scholarship, Stanley Cosgrove as awarded a Province of Quebec prize for painting and also a government fellowship to study in France, and Benoît East for having won the Grand Prix de Peinture from Quebec.651

Lastly, and rounding out these mentions of awards of artistic merit, were inclusions that spoke loosely (and sometimes quite personally) of what it meant to be an artist at mid-

649 Thomas Hodgson, Alexandra Luke, Ray Mead, Kazuo Nakamura, William Ronald, and Harold Town were cited as members. Painters Eleven was active in Canada from 1953 to 1960. The group shared no common artistic vision apart from a commitment to abstraction. While the National Gallery exhibition catalogue describes Bush as a “participant” in their exhibitions, history recognizes Bush as a member of the group which consisted of himself, Oscar Cahén, Hortense Gordon, Jock Macdonald, and Walter Yarwood, as well as Hodgson, Luke, Mead, Nakamura, Ronald, and Town. Bush organized their first exhibition, at the Roberts Gallery in Toronto in 1954 (one year before the First Biennial of 1955).

650 The Automatistes were a group of Québécois artistic dissidents so called because they were influenced by Surrealism and its theory of automatism. The movement was founded in the early 1940s by Borduas and included Marcel Barbeau, Roger Fauteux, Claude Gauvreau, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Pierre Gauvreau, Fernand Leduc, Jean-Paul Mousseau, and Marcelle Ferron, and Françoise Sullivan.

651 Others include the following: Jack Humphrey was cited as having worked in France on a government fellowship; Roy Kiyooka as the recipient of an O’Keefe scholarship; Jack Nichols as having worked in the United States on a Guggenheim Fellowship; William Ronald as the winner of an I.O.D.E (war memorial) scholarship, a Hallmark award, and a C.A.H.A. scholarship; Frederick Ross as the winner of an O’Keefe award; and Jacques de Tonanncour as having worked in Rio de Janeiro on a Brazilian scholarship.

264 century and post-war, and collectively these references shaped a unique artist profile of pure

Canadianness: Ghitta Caiserman was cited as married to the (Canadian) painter Alfred

Pinksy; Alan Collier was noted as having worked as a miner, and Gustav Weisman as a forest ranger and a lumberman; and Sidney Goldsmith was cited as working at the National

Film Board in Ottawa. Lastly, some entries appeared to include rather random mentions, yet likely were not: Maxwell Bates was noted for serving in the British army, and for being held prisoner from 1940 until the end of the war; William Stevenson described as “self-taught;” and Anthony Thorn as practicing “ecclesiastical art.” All these mentions spoke loudly of the conditions of being a Canadian artist at mid-century.

In 1955, mindful of the institution’s mandate to make available for purchase for the national collection a full and fair representation of all of the country, the National Gallery selected for exhibition a strong Canadian cohort of artists belonging to the nation of Canada drawn almost exclusively from within its physical borders. Yet, upon closer examination, it was a selection that reflected only Canada’s centre. Despite the first exhibition’s clear privilege of the province of British Columbia, in the second show BC was only modestly reigned in with Ontario and Quebec once again taking up the lead to see these three provinces—in a sharpened reinforcement of the institution’s geographical preferences in

1953—emerge at the centre of the National Gallery’s sights in terms of where the institution located its very best Canadian artists.652 At play here was once again the pull of major cities

652 With a population of 1.4 million—just under half that of all three Prairie provinces put together and a third of the population of Quebec—British Columbia matched the representation of the Prairies at eighteen percent and fell just under Quebec’s twenty-one percent to once again eclipse representations. In parallel with this partiality for Canada’s most western province, Ontario, now drawing a population of some 5.4 million, led the nation with twenty-nine percent of artists—an increase in its overall representation at the expense of all other provincial regions. Second to Ontario (but ranking ahead of BC) was Quebec’s twenty-one percent: while only a marginal increase from the first exhibition, it was an increase nonetheless while certain other regions

265 of artistic production: almost sixty percent of the artists selected for exhibition lived and worked in the three major hubs of artistic production identified by Harris some years before—Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal;653 and continuing this trend, sixty-five percent of artists acquired were almost exclusively living in these cities as well.654

Interestingly, a decentring trend emerged in the touring segment of the show. While all regions were given access, the exhibition spent the least amount of time—only fifteen days—in the province that ranked first in regional distribution: Quebec. Conversely, on two separate occasions, the show toured the lowest-ranking province, Saskatchewan, for the highest total of forty-five days.655 While certainly venue availability played a role, perhaps more likely was a belief that longer runs would compensate for a lack of artist representation from those regions. Notably, the fatal error of the 1953 exhibition—that of failing to plan for subsequently ignoring the East—was corrected in 1955 to see the exhibition (technically)

decreased. Case in point: Saskatchewan was represented by only one artist (less than two percent of artists overall) while Alberta and Manitoba, with about the same populations (hovering in and around the one million mark), brought in some eight percent of artists each. While no artists were selected from either Newfoundland (despite, for the first time, that province being assigned a representative) or Prince Edward Island (no doubt a factor was the failure, for the second year in a row, to organize representation for the island), New Brunswick, with the third-lowest population base across Canada (one comparable to Newfoundland where no artists were selected), claimed almost ten percent of the representation of artists. By grouping the Prairies into one region and the Maritimes into another the National Gallery was able to camouflage low representations in certain provinces and inordinately high ones in others.

653 Some twenty-four percent of artists lived and worked in Toronto and the greater Toronto area, fifteen percent in Vancouver, and twenty-one percent in Montreal.

654 Perhaps most counterproductive to the National Gallery’s central aim—namely, to purchase the best works—as many works came to the exhibition already sold the Trustees had to purchase from what was left. Despite this restriction almost double the number of works were acquired from the first show: seventeen paintings. Some thirty-five percent of acquired artists lived and worked in Toronto, almost eighteen percent in Vancouver, and almost twelve percent in Montreal.

655 This was the same number of days as Alberta with five times the representation. The National Gallery of Canada Archives, First Biennial Exhibition of Canadian Painting 1955.

266 tour from coast to coast. However, once again it ignored Newfoundland and Prince Edward

Island; Manitoba was also excluded, and the North never came to mind.656

Brokering a National Canada

Displaying its deference for a physical Canada and a notion of Canadianness bound to the land, via the artists it selected for exhibition—and many for eventual acquisition—across the first two exhibitions of the biennial series the National Gallery of Canada brokered a national Canada. With close to one hundred percent of exhibited artists living and working in

Canada, the series would never again see such a high rate of artists drawn from within its borders. Yet, by also conceiving of the Canadian artist as one grass-rooted in recognized artist societies, groups, and associations at national and regional levels, and, notably, working exclusively in the (traditional) medium of painting, only those artists centred in a physical

Canada and all facets of its institutional mainstream were considered. Indeed, in its selections the institution legitimized the Canadian artist as one not only physically connected to

Canada’s geography by province but one increasingly defined by their engagement with artistic movements and styles incubated in key cities of artistic production identified across

Central and Western Canada to the exclusion of many provincial regions, and even the First

Peoples of Canada.

Simultaneous with and in contradiction to the very construct of Canadian the National

Gallery was seeking to build under the banner of the biennial as a group identity exhibition, in 1953, at just under sixty-nine percent, Canadian nationality rates were easily the lowest

656 Counting for the Maritimes was the time the exhibition spent in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick: twenty- five and forty days respectively. Ibid.

267 across the series. Just under one third of artists selected for exhibition held nationalities dual with Canada and one other country making these artists, at least to some degree, something other than—or perhaps in addition to—simply Canadian. While the number of artists who held a solely Canadian nationality would grow and eventually stabilize, this first cohort of artists and those following signal the complexity of assigning identity, and Canadian artistic identity, at mid-century.

In response to growing pressures to locate the institution on an international stage, the

National Gallery, beginning with the 1955 exhibition, moved away from foregrounding each artist’s qualifying Canadianness by way of their home province to strategically highlight their un-Canadianness by emphasizing, as a new basis for selection, each artist’s international biography and extensive professional network. A close examination of these networks reveals that it is these connections, and a nuanced understanding of their broad reach and implications in a global artworld, that offer a more complete and meaningful conception of Canadian identity at mid-century, much more than “birth” or “lives and works” location or even “nationality”—all subject fields captured in either the National Gallery of

Canada’s collections management database or in each exhibition catalogue, and forming the basis of each artist’s ties to Canada. Further, the National Gallery’s privileging of these connections as qualifiers for selection—grounds for the inclusion of the best and the most significant and important Canadian artists of the day—challenge the binaries of identity the institution sought to forge through the guise of the Canadian artist, and, by extension, a national art tradition and collection. Perhaps unintentionally but certainly presciently, the

National Gallery both introduced into its brokerage of identity the framework of networks of

268 connection of exchange and demonstrated the network’s relevance and even necessity for addressing the question of what it meant to be a Canadian artist at mid century.

A New Direction

In May of 1955 Alan Jarvis succeeded H.O. McCurry as Director of the National

Gallery. His first order of business was to address the growing debate that had peaked upon the release of the First Biennial exhibition; namely, how to produce a national exhibition of

Canada’s best work. Jarvis had been unimpressed by the inefficiencies of the first two exhibitions—the product of an overly-democratic model that had in his view taxed the institution in both dollars and effort, and with little reward. Yet, while Jarvis saw poor results, Lawren Harris saw only opportunity for growth and wrote to Jarvis proposing that the regional representation model be maintained but for breadth be coupled with a watercolour exhibition held every other year. Jarvis was quick to quash Harris’ suggestion and proposed instead a smaller all-media biennial striving for depth. A disillusioned Harris saw his idea for expansion dismissed and felt that his initial concept for the series was slowly being slowly dismantled; he withdrew himself from the exhibition’s planning and ceded the practical organization of the new show to the National Gallery’s Associate Director, Donald

Buchanan.657

This shift in the exhibition’s centre of responsibility—from trustee to staff member— was another step in shaping the direction of future exhibitions and the series as a whole. Now in the hands of senior administration the biennial quickly devolved from its original goal;

657 The National Gallery of Canada Archives, Second Biennial Exhibition of Canadian Art 1957, File 5.5-B.

269 namely, the full and fair representation of all of Canada, towards purposes designed to complement wider and shifting institutional initiatives. Jarvis wrote in an internal memo:

As it is essential that the National gallery [sic] staff, as soon as possible, make a fairly complete survey on the spot of artistic production in Canada by personal visits to artists’ studios, it would therefore be feasible to combine this investigation with the selection of works to be sent to Ottawa for possible showing in the 1957 Biennial....658

In some minor feat Jarvis had managed to convince the Board of Trustees that the permanent collection could only be strengthened by acquiring works by a select group of renowned artists chosen via studio visits conducted by National Gallery staff. Yet, even as Jarvis proposed circumventing the committee process by eliminating regional juries, he moved to maintain one aspect of the series’ initial concept: a geographically-segmented Canada in which the country would be divided into three broad regions: from the head of the Great

Lakes to the Pacific Coast; Ontario and the Ottawa Valley; and from Montreal to St. John’s,

Newfoundland.659

To ensure strict oversight, Jarvis proposed that once initial selection by staff was complete a jury comprised of the Director and two representatives—one Canadian and one international—would make the final selection: French-Canadian Jean Simard of the École des Beaux-Arts in Montreal and American Andrew Ritchie of the Museum of Modern Art in

New York were appointed. And to capture an otherwise overlooked cohort of artists—those

Canadians either studying or working abroad yet who still retained natural ties to the country—Jarvis proposed extending a second set of invitations to two international advisors.

658 This is an excerpt from an undated document entitled “Report on Organizing 1957 Biennial of Canadian Painting.” Ibid.

659 Ibid.

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Here Jacques Dubourg, an art dealer based in France, and Philip James of the Arts Council of

Great Britain in London, were approached. Both men accepted and confirmed their instructions: to forward no selections to the institution that did not meet “standards required for purchase by the National Gallery.”660 The network of selectors was set.

Over four hundred watercolours, drawings, prints, oils, and related media from just under two-hundred artists were sent to Ottawa; seventy-seven works described as “high- caliber”—advanced work by recognized, accomplished, and progressive artists—made it through to final selection and were exhibited. In his introduction to the exhibition catalogue

Buchanan described the task of locating “new and significant” artists:

This exhibition sets out to present the work of those Canadian artists who are making an impact in the post-war world…. There was plenty here to prove that the focal points of Canadian art where changing…. Did they discover anything noticeably Canadian in a national sense? Actually nothing at all, if by that distinct regional characteristics are meant. Clearly evident...was a full acceptance of the whole western world as their cultural home. The best of Canadian work is now being merged in the universality of art. Such national flavour as there was seemed to be related, not to subject matter, but rather to those subtle distinctions between the way some artists of French background handle pigment and brush and the often different way their Anglo-Saxon colleagues do.661

Rejecting nationalism per se in favour of a “universality of art” restricted to the Western world, Buchanan pitted French against English Canada to put abstraction on display making clear the difference between major and minor artists: “[m]any...active in this field, while serious in intent, only produce the non-flowering grasses and stalks of art, those that briefly shoot up in the warm sun of fashion and as briefly die to form the compost heap from which

660 This is an excerpt from an undated memorandum from Buchanan to Jarvis and others. Ibid.

661 The National Gallery of Canada, Second Biennial Exhibition of Canadian Art 1957 (The National Gallery of Canada: Ottawa, 1957).

271 the more powerful growths are fertilized.”662 The analogy was ill-received. An excluded

Paraskeva Clark retorted: “it is a compliment as I don’t belong to these modern fruitless...that make up the compost heap—oh well—perhaps I’ll rise yet...out of ashes of burned reality— wish me luck.”663 It would seem that Clark and many other Canadian artists were considered too national for an institution now setting its sights on international acclaim.

An Avant-Garde Canada

The Second Biennial Exhibition of Canadian Art opened at the National Gallery of

Canada on April 3, 1957, displaying seventy-seven all-media works by sixty unique artists.664

A pattern emerged to see a core group of nine artists included in all three shows to date—it was the beginnings of a developing canon of contemporary artists.665 Although only one of these artists would be included in all exhibitions in the series, many of this core group, as well as others, would find their way into four, five, and sometimes six exhibitions.

662 Ibid.

663 This is an excerpt from a letter from Clark to Hubbard, dated April 24, 1957. The National Gallery of Canada Archives, Second Biennial Exhibition of Canadian Art 1957.

664 The sixty unique artists exhibited, in alphabetical order: Edmund Alleyn, Herbert Ariss, Alistair Bell, Léon Bellefleur, Suzanne Bergeron, B.C. Binning, Molly Lamb Bobak, Bruno Bobak, Paul-Émile Borduas, Bruce Boyd, Dennis Burton, Pierre Clerk, Alex Colville, Stanley Cosgrove, Graham Coughtry, Jean-Philippe Dallaire, Jacques de Tonnancour, Albert Dumouchel, Gabriel Filion, Roland Giguère, Herbert Gilbert, H.G. Glyde, Thomas Hodgson, Jack Humphrey, Don Jarvis, John Koerner, Jean-Paul Lemieux, Kenneth Lochhead, Jock Macdonald, Denys Matte, Arthur McKay, Ray Mead, Louis Muhlstock, Franklin Palmer, Alfred Pellan, Claude Picher, Joseph Plaskett, Marthe Rakine, Maurice Raymond, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Suzanne Rivard, William Roberts, William Ronald, Élyane Roy, Jack Shadbolt, Gordon Appelbe Smith, John Snow, Walter Sorge, Robert Steele, Philip Surrey, George Swinton, Takao Tanabe, Anthony Thorn (alias: Anthony Goldman), Harold Town, Gérard Tremblay, Gerald Trottier, Tony Urquhart, Ruth Wainwright, Richard Williams, and York Wilson. The National Gallery of Canada, Second Biennial Exhibition of Canadian Art 1957.

665 Included here are Binning, Borduas, Cosgrove, Dumouchel, Humphrey, Jarvis, Muhlstock, Shadbolt, and Town (who would be selected for all eight shows). A number of artists had also been selected for one of the previous exhibitions: repeated from 1953 were Bellefleur, (Bruno) Bobak, (Molly Lamb) Bobak, Dallaire, Glyde, Lemieux, Lochhead, Plaskett, Rakine, Riopelle, Tanabe, and Wilson; and returning from 1955 were de Tonnancourt, Hodgson, Koerner, Mead, Ronald, Smith, Steele, Swinton, and Thorn.

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One significant departure in the profile of the 1957 biennial artist signalled the new, international tone. While the proportion of artists born in Canada and born abroad remained constant for a second year in a row,666 in a significant break from the lives and works locations of artists in the first and second exhibitions—in the former all artists resided in

Canada while in the latter all but one did (recall Paul-Émile Borduas)—a number of artists were now located abroad:667 six artists lived and worked in France, likely all in Paris, and one in the United States, in New York. Yet, even as more artists than ever before lived and worked outside of Canada, the trend of (nearly) one hundred percent of exhibited artists holding either single or dual nationalities with Canada persisted for a third year in a row to see all sixty artists claim Canadian as their nationality.668

666 It was an approximate eighty/twenty split. In 1957, just over seventy-eight percent or forty-seven of the sixty artists selected for exhibition were born in Canada: twenty in Quebec, nine in Ontario, six in each of the provinces of British Columbia and Alberta, four in Saskatchewan, and one in each of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. No artists were born in two of the Maritime provinces (Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland) nor in the North, and for the first time no artists were born in Manitoba. The remaining thirteen artists were born abroad: five in England, two in the United States, and one in each of the countries of Austria, (the former) Czechoslovakia, Galicia, Poland, Russia, and Scotland.

667 It was a drop in Canadian lives and works locations of almost fifteen percent: the lowest number to date, but not the lowest in the series. In 1957 fifty-one artists lived and worked in Canada: fourteen in each of the provinces of British Columbia and Quebec, three in each of Alberta and Saskatchewan, two in each of Manitoba and New Brunswick, and one in Nova Scotia; no artists lived and worked in Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island, or in the North. A number of current lives and works locations are unknown and cannot be guessed: as such, missing information has been omitted from calculation. It is important to note that exhibition catalogues at mid-century occasionally included this kind of biographical information in the artist summary but did not necessarily capture the information as a stand-alone field (as they do consistently in the present day). Unknown locations of artists exhibited in 1957 include: Stanley Cosgrove (all that is known is that he lived and worked in France, but not in what city), Roland Giguère, Denys Matte, and Suzanne Rivard (again, all that is known is France, but not what city).

668 Forty-nine out of the sixty artists exhibited were cited as Canadian in the nationality subject field of the National Gallery database (or, if never collected by the National Gallery and thus no artist record exists in the database, were estimated as Canadian). Nine of these Canadian artist nationalities were estimated: Bruce Boyd, Gabriel Fillion, Denys Matte, Suzanne Rivard, William Roberts, Walter Sorge, Robert Steele, Anthony Thorn, and Ruth Wainwright. The eleven artists remaining held dual nationality with Canada, thus bringing the overall Canadian contingent up to one hundred percent: five artists were cited as “British, Canadian,” one artist as “American, Canadian,” and five artists held (or were estimated to hold) the following nationalities dual with Canada: Austrian, Czechoslovakian, Galician, Polish, and Swiss. One non-Canadian artist nationality was estimated due to uncollected and thus undocumented artists: Richard Williams was estimated to hold

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As in the 1955 show, the exhibition catalogue included artist summaries bearing a number of indirect markers of identity. Every summary began with the phrase “Born in…” and many ended with an artist’s current lives and works location. In between the full trajectory of an artist’s career was traced highlighting—as a measure of their significance— where and with/under whom an artist might have studied, their key influences (a new inclusion), and any significant awards and prizes received. While milestones achieved in

Canada were emphasized, so too were those earned abroad: they were described with pride making clear that most artists had, at some point in their careers, not only studied and worked outside of Canada but were financially supported at home suggesting that following mid- century it was the norm, rather than the exception (and even expected), to receive at least some measure of artistic training elsewhere.669 Also included in the catalogue entries were mentions of an artist’s membership in a variety of a leading artist groups or collectives.

Yet noticeably absent from the 1957 exhibition was a cohort of artists that had been included previously; namely, former members of the Group of Seven. Either as a style or as an influence the Group was not mentioned. Instead, associations with avant-garde collectives were highlighted: Thomas Hodgson, Ray Mead, William Ronald, and Harold Town were cited as members of Painters Eleven; Paul-Émile Borduas and Jean-Paul Riopelle as

Automatistes; and one artist, Léon Bellefleur, as belonging to the Association des Artistes

Non-Figuratifs de Montréal. In its recognition of the “diminishing importance” of arts

“American, Canadian” nationality based on his American birth yet Canadian residency (the Artists in Canada database notes that Williams emigrated to Canada in 1954), and on the evidence of his selection for exhibition wherein the National Gallery selected Canadian residents that at minimum held dual nationality with Canada.

669 Across various years, Molly Lamb Bobak, Stanley Cosgrove, Jean-Paul Lemieux, Jock MacDonald, Denys Matte, Alfred Pellan, Joseph Plaskett, and Jack Shadbolt were cited as having worked in France on a “Canadian government scholarship;” and Arthur McKay was cited as currently attending Columbia University and the Barnes Foundation in the United States on a fellowship given by the Canada Foundation.

274 organizations—an assessment cited in a National Gallery report examining the 1955 exhibition670—not only had the institution, in its exhibition procedures, shifted away from artist selections based on society membership (in and of itself a strong signal of the waning influence of the Academy), but it either omitted or demoted in prominence the Royal

Canadian Academy designations that had previously followed an artist’s name. Even though several previously-marked R.C.A./A.R.C.A. artists were selected for exhibition (consider

Stanley Cosgrove, H.G. Glyde, Jean-Paul Lemieux, and York Wilson), only Glyde and

Wilson now carried the designation within their narrative summaries and here in equal balance with all other markers of artistic achievement. Interestingly, in and among these exclusions and inclusions was a new kind of marker, one that signalled less individual or even group identity but more the calibre of artist sought by the National Gallery: B.C.

Binning, Paul-Émile Borduas, and Jean-Paul Riopelle were cited as having shown their work in the Canadian section of the Venice Biennale of 1954, while Harold Town was cited for the

1956 Venice Biennale. It would seem that the old prestige of being associated with the legacy of Canadian landscape painting had been replaced by a new currency: an association with so-called abstraction—a turn in artistic value buoyed by the style’s enthusiastic reception at home and recognition internationally.

If, in 1957, the National Gallery selected for exhibition and eventual acquisition its most avant-garde cohort of Canadian artists, then it did so only by shifting its established marker of Canadianness. While in the first two exhibitions artists, marked for their Canadian identity not by birth country or even nationality but according to their home province, were

670 The National Gallery of Canada Archives, Board of Trustees: Minutes of Meetings, 730–1.

275 selected according to their current geographic place, in order to afford the institution increased flexibility in securing artists of significance who could service its ambitious acquisitions agenda the National Gallery now employed the portable marker of nationality in order to target Canadian artists of international reputation engaging with the most progressive movements in contemporary art production no matter where in the world they resided.

Following mid-century, as internationalism began to eclipse a fading nationalism, there was a flurry of Canadian artists pursuing training in Paris—either for short stays or on a semi-permanent basis—with the trend surging during the second biennial. In addition to some ten percent of exhibited artists living and working in Paris, another thirteen percent were cited as having once studied and/or once worked in Paris and another five percent as having trained “in France.” This growing connection between Canadian artists and Paris as a key centre of avant-garde artistic production was leveraged by the institution in its move to include in its selection network an external liaison located Paris, as well as other metropolitan cities recognized as key incubators of innovation: in New York and London abroad, and in Montreal at home. In so doing, and by actively seeking what it described as the changing “focal points of Canadian art” towards abstraction, the National Gallery declared its intention to bend and extend its notion of Canada towards the avant-garde.

The turn towards the avant-garde also presented in acquisitions. In what would be a show marked by the fewest artists selected for exhibition yet the most acquisitions ever—a staggering thirty-two or forty-two percent of works exhibited were acquired for the national collection, by far the most over any other exhibition either before or after 1957—sixty percent of acquisitions came from one of three cities: leading was Montreal, followed by

276

Toronto and Vancouver.671 Tellingly, the fourth city for acquisitions lay not within Canada, but rather abroad, in Paris.672 While the National Gallery had previously exhibited an artist residing outside of Canada (Borduas), it had never showcased its decision to stray outside its borders by acquiring the work of an expatriate Canadian for the national collection. Yet in

1957, in a biennial exhibition first, it did just that by purchasing four works by expatriate artists: from Paris, it acquired Suzanne Bergeron, Paul-Émile Borduas, and Jean-Paul

Riopelle; and, from New York, William S. Ronald.673 In total, close to two-thirds of artists purchased for the national collection lived and worked in the metropolitan cities of

Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, Paris, and New York.

In moving away from the strict requirement that Canadian artists reside within

Canada’s physical borders, the National Gallery not only extended the nation but shifted its conception of what it meant to be a Canadian artist away from the fixed marker of residency—Canadianness based on geographic identity—towards the very flexible and transportable marker of nationality—Canadianness based on political identity. With a sharpened focus on artistic merit coupled with an aggressive acquisition agenda—together, a wholly different mandate than the full and fair representation of all of Canada shaped

671 Montreal saw an overwhelming majority of acquisitions with some thirty-four percent. Vancouver (and area) and Toronto acquired some thirteen percent each of artists exhibited. These acquisitions were foreshadowed by representation, with BC garnering the highest representation per capita—this, its third year in a row: some twenty percent of artists lived and worked in Vancouver, twenty-two percent in Montreal, and fifteen percent in Toronto. The National Gallery of Canada Archives, Second Biennial Exhibition of Canadian Art 1957.

672 A fair percentage of works were acquired from the balance of Canada—some twenty-eight percent—yet these were so widely distributed that Paris managed to pull ahead. Ibid.

673 Of the six internationally-located artists, Bergeron’s Arrière Port (1955), Borduas’ La Grimpée (1956), Riopelle’s La Roue II (date unknown), and Ronald’s Fire (date unknown) were collected; the three remaining internationally-located artists were not collected: Edmund Alleyn, Stanley Morel Cosgrove, and Suzanne Rivard. See the National Gallery collections management database: https://www.gallery.ca/collection/search- the-collection.

277 according to population quotas guiding the first two exhibitions—the National Gallery responded to the realities of post-war internationalism by recognizing that a number of its highest-value Canadian artists lived and worked abroad and that, in order to capture their work for exhibition and possibly acquisition, they would need to move quickly and adapt their exhibition procedures in response. Of the four internationally-located artists collected—

Bergeron, Borduas, Riopelle and Ronald—all four were linked to the avant-garde not only by geography, but, by way of explicit mention in the exhibition catalogue, by artist group as well.674 In addition to also holding connections to the avant-garde, all four of the artists cited for representing Canada at the Venice Biennale in recent years—Binning, Borduas, Riopelle, and Town—were collected. The old guard, namely, Royal Canadian Academy members

Stanley Cosgrove, H.G. Glyde, and York Wilson, all figurative artists, while included in the exhibition, were not collected; from this group only Jean-Paul Lemieux was.

The potential loss of being able to exhibit and possibly acquire the four artists living and working abroad would have been significant for the National Gallery as it sought to establish itself among the network of influential international institutions at play in the global

674 Recall that in the exhibition catalogue Borduas and Riopelle were linked to the Automatistes, while Bergeron was noted for her study under Jean-Paul Lemieux (another avant-garde artist acquired) and Ronald was cited as a member of Painters Eleven. Similar links to either abstract or non-figurative styles abounded in a number of other artists acquired: Ray Mead and Harold Town were cited as members of Painters Eleven (Interestingly, from Painters Eleven only Thomas Hodgson was not collected),674 and Léon Bellefleur was linked to the Association des Artistes Non-Figuratifs de Montréal. Anticipating somewhat the future, also collected was Kenneth Lochhead: practicing in a bold non-figurative style, he would soon lead a group of young painters that would come to be known as the Regina Five, a group that also included Arthur McKay, Douglas Morton, Ted Godwin, and Ronald Bloore. All artists had studied in central Canada, the United States, and Europe before moving to Regina where the group combined the major currents of abstract expressionism in the context of 1950s Saskatchewan: the ensuing non-figurative work, which often employed a central or all- over image, represented a new direction in abstract painting in Canada and reflected theoretical considerations comparable to contemporary New York directions. The group’s breakout can be traced to the National Gallery of Canada’s 1961 circulating exhibition “Five Painters from Regina.” Alongside painter Roy Kiyooka and architect Clifford Wiens, the group shared a common professional commitment and became a small but active artistic community in Regina.

278 contemporary art world at mid-century. Yet these selections were assured not only by the strategic placement of key advisors and liaisons internationally—recall Dubourg in Paris and

Ritchie in New York675—but by the initial narrowing of artists of interest by the institution’s internal staff. Recognizing that artists of stature rarely worked in their cities or even countries of birth but, rather, were increasingly mobile, the institution adapted the series’ selection procedures in response.676 Indeed, the National Gallery displayed great pride in the work of its internationally-recognized and internationally-located Canadian artists, and was more than eager to acquire their avant-garde styles and artistic pedigrees for the national collection. In recognition of their stature as artists of reputation, eight “leading artists” (including some other avant-gardes) were the recipients of the inaugural biennial exhibition award of merit.677

Once, twice, and more, a core group of avant-gardes received accolade after accolade for their international reach.

The Biennial Reaches

Little changed in the organization of the 1959 Biennial. Most significant for this analysis, Canadian artists living and working abroad were once again eligible for inclusion:

Initial selection for works to go before a jury…[of] staff members of the National Gallery, who will visit each region of Canada for this purpose. Works so selected and sent to Ottawa will then be presented to a jury…. [T]he Trustees...expect to purchase a large number of the works picked by the jury…. The exhibition, after showing in

675 Significantly, despite the effort to locate a liaison in New York, no artists were collected from New York. It was the second year in a row that Americanness in the Canadian Biennial was hardly detectable.

676 Consider the mobility of Paul-Émile Borduas: had the marker of Canadian identity not shifted from geographic location to nationality, Borduas—an artist who had throughout his lifetime retained his Canadian nationality and, by extension, his identity as a Canadian artist—would have been eliminated from exhibition and his work, La Grimpée (1956), would not have been acquired for the national collection.

677 The nine recipients include: Léon Bellefleur, Paul-Émile Borduas, Alex Colville, Albert Dumouchel, Jean- Paul Lemieux, Jean-Paul Riopelle, William Ronald, Jacques de Tonnancour, and Harold Town. The National Gallery of Canada, Second Biennial Exhibition of Canadian Art 1957.

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Ottawa, will be circulated for approximately one year to each of the principal art galleries and art centres of Canada.678

Yet a number of refinements were instituted. While in 1957, studio tours conducted by

National Gallery staff brought artists to the attention of the institution, much like a curator’s proposal, now, in 1959, only select artists were invited to participate thus narrowing the pool.679

Key personnel also changed. National Gallery Director Alan Jarvis removed himself from the front lines to assume a leadership role and ceded his spot on the final Ottawa jury to

Associate Director Donald Buchanan. To work alongside Buchanan two additional jurists—

“distinguished authorities,” according to Jarvis—were selected, and were once again plucked from recognized institutions: Colin Graham, Curator of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, filled the Canadian spot while Gordon Washburn of the Department of Fine Arts at the

Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh was positioned as the international “expert.” Lastly, in what would prove to be a shrewd move, the role of exhibition organizer was filled by the Head of

Education Services: francophone Jean-Réné Ostiguy.680

It was by no means accidental that a francophone was placed in a position of considerable power. An internal scandal had erupted in the previous show when members of

Montreal’s Association des Artistes Non-Figuratifs penned a scathing criticism accusing the

678 The National Gallery of Canada Archives, Third Biennial Exhibition of Canadian Art 1959, File 12-4-64, Volume 1.

679 The Trustees had accepted the staff’s recommendation to “draw up a list of artists who would merit invitation...artists who have shown progress in their work and have submitted works of high standard to national and regional exhibitions.” Ibid. Likely in eager anticipation of the caliber of artists the institution was hoping to attract, National Gallery staff established a secondary procedure for soliciting work appraised over and above a “high standard”: artists described by the National Gallery as “highly influential” received both a letter and a studio visit.

680 Ibid.

280 institution of rejecting the Montreal style in its entirety in favour of such well-known international artists like Riopelle and Borduas, and the institution hoped that by placing its highest-ranking bilingual employee at the helm it could both mend feelings of neglect and guarantee that the grassroots movement would not be overlooked. The strategy proved effective. In his first corrective gesture, Ostiguy sent a confidential letter to John Steegman, the Director of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, organizing suggestions for French-

Canadian artists meriting an invitation to the biennial and proposing the names of almost fifty. In the end seventy artists submitted work to the final jury in Ottawa with thirty-two selected for exhibition. French Canada was well represented.681

By the time the Third Biennial Exhibition of Canadian Art launched, it was Jarvis’ successor, the artist Charles Comfort, who spoke at the exhibition’s official opening praising the show for its successes and stressing its wide reach: over seven hundred works of art had been assembled at the National Gallery for adjudication—“from Newfoundland to

Vancouver Island”682—with fifty-nine works in all media selected for exhibition. In the introduction of the exhibition catalogue—for the first time in the history of the biennial series published in both English and French—the jury noted key styles including abstract expressionism, automatism, and geometric abstraction, and while they also recognized the tradition of “wilderness landscape,” they observed that little talent was being channelled into traditional representational painting: “Canadian landscape today is more of the mind than the

681 For a full discussion of this controversy and details of the ensuing resolution see “Chapter Four: New Directors and Different Directions,” in Limbos-Bomberg, “The Ideal and the Pragmatic,” 98–131.

682 The National Gallery of Canada Clipping File: The Third Biennial Exhibition of Canadian Art 1959, untitled in the St. John’s Evening Times, May 4, 1960.

281 earth,” they wrote. Speaking throughout the introduction of Canadian art as one entity, they summarized with a broad claim:

One can no longer speak in nationalistic terms of “Canadian Art.” Canadian painters and print-makers have now merged themselves into the full stream of contemporary aesthetic expression in the western world. What is interesting, however, is that so many of the painters show no sign at all of being merely provincial followers fashionably imitating what goes on in the art capitals of Europe. More and more of them give proof of clear-cut characteristics and objectives of their own.683

This sweeping characterization of Canadian art and its assessment as now independent from

Europe’s avant-garde would find challenge in the biographies, demographics, and stylistic directions of many of the artists selected for exhibition. It would also reveal itself most tellingly in artists’ networks of connection and exchange.

A “French” Canada

The Third Biennial Exhibition of Canadian Art opened on June 4, 1959, displaying ninety-eight works by eighty-one unique artists—the most works, and artists, selected for exhibition to date.684 While a staggering thirty-two artists repeated from the previous

683 The National Gallery of Canada, The Third Biennial Exhibition of Canadian Art 1959: Organized and Circulated by the National Gallery (The National Gallery of Canada: Ottawa, 1959).

684 The eighty-one unique artists exhibited, in alphabetical order: Ralph Allen, Edmund Alleyn, Herbert Ariss, Peter Aspell, Maxwell Bates, Micheline Beauchemin, Paul Beaulieu, Léon Bellefleur, Roloff Beny, Suzanne Bergeron, Bruno Bobak, Molly Lamb Bobak, Paul-Émile Borduas, Rowell Bowles, James Boyd, Fritz Brandtner, Barry Clark, Alex Colville, Ulysse Comtois, Graham Coughtry, Peter Daglish, Charles Daudelin, Duncan de Kergommeaux, Jacques de Tonnancour, Albert Dumouchel, Marcelle Ferron, Pierre Gendron, Luba Genush, Roland Giguère, Herbert Gilbert, Ted Godwin, Marion Greenstone, Bruce Head, Robert Hedrick, Thomas Hodgson, Jack Humphrey, Don Jarvis, Jean-Paul Jérôme, Denis Juneau, Paul Lacroix, Fernand Leduc, Jean-Paul Lemieux, Rita Letendre, J.A.S. Macdonald, Marcelle Maltais, Denys Matte, Derek May, Jean McEwen, Arthur McKay, Suzanne Meloche, Mario Merola, Guido Molinari, Louis Muhlstock, Kazuo Nakamura, William Newcombe, Toni Onley, Franklin Palmer, David Partridge, Alfred Pellan, Joseph Plaskett, Charles Playfair, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Goodridge Roberts, William Roberts, Robert Rosewarne, Jack Shadbolt, Herbert Siebner, Gordon Appelbe Smith, John Snow, Michael Snow, Ronald Spickett, Takao Tanabe, Harold Town, Gwyneth Travers, Gérard Tremblay, Tony Urquhart, Armand Vaillancourt, Robert Varvarande, Ruth Wainwright, James Willer, and Walter Yarwood. The National Gallery of Canada, The Third Biennial Exhibition of Canadian Art 1959.

282 exhibition with a number repeating periodically since 1953,685 the core canon of artists appearing in all shows to date narrowed from nine to seven: Paul-Émile Borduas, Albert

Dumouchel, Jack Humphrey, Don Jarvis, Louis Muhlstock, Jack Shadbolt, and Harold Town.

There was one notable trend in artist birth locations and one strengthened trend in artist lives and works locations that together signalled a rising “French” quotient specifically, and the further embrace of internationalism generally. While the usual ratio of artists born in

Canada and artists born abroad persisted,686 of those born in Canada a remarkable thirty-five percent were born in Quebec.687 And while in the previous show only a small cohort of artists lived and worked abroad, now almost one quarter of artists resided outside of Canada making the 1959 cohort the most international across the series: the majority of artists were located in

France (mostly in Paris), and the remaining were dispersed across the countries of Italy,

England, Mexico, and the United States.688 Nationality rates were average in 1959—some

685 Returning from 1957 were Alleyn, Ariss, Aspell, Bates, Bergeron, Borduas, Boyd, Brandtner, Colville, Coughtry, de Tonnancourt, Dumouchel, Giguère, Gilbert, Hodgson, Humphrey, Jarvis, MacDonald, Matte, Muhlstock, Palmer, Pellan, Plaskett, Shadbolt, Smith, Snow, Tremblay, Town, Urquhart, and Wainwright. Since 1955: de Tonnancourt, Hodgson, and Smith. Included in the 1953 and 1959 exhibitions (skipping 1955 and 1957): (Goodridge) Roberts and Spickett. Included in the 1953, 1955, and 1959 exhibitions (skipping 1957): Aspell, Bates, Brandtner, and MacDonald. Included in the 1953, 1957, and 1959 exhibitions (skipping 1955): Bellefleur, (Bruno) Bobak, (Molly Lamb) Bobak, Lemieux, Riopelle, and Tanabe.

686 Once again the ratio was about eighty/twenty. In 1959, seventy-nine percent or sixty-four of the eighty-one artists selected for exhibition were born in Canada with seventeen foreign-born: six artists were born in England, two in each of the countries of Germany and the United States, and one in each of Barbados, China, France, Galicia, Poland, the UK, and Ukraine.

687 The balance saw thirteen artists born in Ontario, ten in British Columbia, five in Alberta, four in Saskatchewan, and one in each of the provinces of Manitoba, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. Following the previous year (and easily predictable based on the series to date), no artists were born in either Prince Edward Island or Newfoundland, and once again none in the North.

688 Only sixty-one out of the eighty-one artists selected for exhibition called Canada home: eighteen artists lived and worked in each of the provinces of Quebec and Ontario, eleven in British Columbia, five in Alberta, two in each of the provinces of Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and New Brunswick, and one in Nova Scotia; two further artists were listed in the exhibition catalogue only as living “in Canada” with no city or province listed: Micheline Beauchemin and Rowell Bowles (Bowles was cited as living and working in New York in 1961). Mirroring birth, no artists lived and worked in Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland, or in the North. There are a number of artists for which the 1959 lives and works location is only partially unknown: as noted above,

283 eighty percent of artists were cited as Canadian in the National Gallery collections management database689—but the balance, all dual nationalities, gave a sense of from where in the world Canada attracted its citizens and the institution its Canadian artists: Britain led with seven artists, while others drew from the U.S., Germany, France, Galicia, Poland, and

Russia.690 One artist was estimated to hold American citizenship.691

The exhibition catalogue followed a now-established formula including detailed artist entries containing key markers of identity, with artists’ birth city or country and lives and works location laying the ground for a robust outline of key artistic accomplishments often building on the previous year’s exhibition catalogue entry when artists repeated. Notably, in

Beauchemin and Bowles, and also Fernand Leduc (all that is known is that he was in France). The lives and works location is completely unknown for the following: Pierre Gendron, Denys Matte, Derek May, Suzanne Meloche, Guido Molinari, and Armand Vaillancourt.

689 Sixty-five out of the eighty-one artists exhibited were cited as Canadian in the nationality subject field of the National Gallery database. Eight of these were estimated: Roland Bowles, Paul Lacroix, Denys Matte, Charles Playfair, Suzanne Meloche, William Newcombe, William Roberts, and Ruth Wainwright.

690 Three of these were estimated due to uncollected and thus undocumented artists. Barry Clark is estimated to hold “Canadian, American” nationality based on his Canadian birth and undergraduate education at McGill University; however, while the Artists in Canada database in silent on his nationality, it lists his lives and works location as Cambridge, Massachusetts, as of 1958 (where he was pursuing a graduate degree), and a number of commercial auction houses claim him as American (likely due to his current lives and works location: Los Angeles as of the mid-1960s). Derek May is estimated to hold “British, Canadian” nationality due to his British birth, yet dual with Canada as the Artists in Canada database notes that he emigrated to Canada in 1953 and lists his address as “Quebec.” And Herbert Siebner is estimated to hold “German, Canadian” due to his German birth, yet dual with Canada as the Artists in Canada database notes that he emigrated to Canada in 1954.

691 The one American nationality is estimated: Marion Greenstone was not collected by the National Gallery and so no artist record exists for her; she does, however, appear in the Artists in Canada database, although it is silent on her nationality. What it does report is that Greenstone was born in New York in 1925 but emigrated to Canada in 1958, living in London, Ontario, in 1960. A closer look at Greenstone’s biography reveals further details. Greenstone received a B.A. from Brooklyn College and an M.A. from Columbia University, continuing her studies at the Arts Students League in New York, the Cummington School of Art Summer School in Massachusetts, and the Cooper Union School of Art. In 1954 she received a Fulbright grant to study in Italy. In 1957 she moved to London, Ontario, when her husband took a job there, and in 1960 she joined the Ontario Society of Artists. That same year Greenstone exhibited at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and was awarded the Jessie Dow Prize. In 1961 she won another award, the Baxter Foundation Award in Toronto, and went on to have several solo exhibitions at private galleries there. In 1961 Greenstone moved back to New York City but continued to exhibit work in Toronto, as well as at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Brooklyn Museum; she also taught for a period at the Pratt Institute.

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1959 only two artists carried the R.C.A./A.R.C.A. designation: Jean-Paul Lemieux and

Goodridge Roberts.692 Instead of being linked to regional or provincial artist associations, by association with an artist’s group or by collectively practicing a particular school or style tied to a specific city, or, via the student/mentor relationship, artists were linked to one another forming a number of networks of contemporary art practice within Canada, in the United

States, and abroad. Albert Dumouchel studied graphic arts with James Lowell and sculpture with Médard Bourgault in Montreal; Paul Lacroix studied under Alfred Pellan at the École des Beaux-Arts in Montreal, at the Grande Chaumière in Paris with “Zadkine,”693 and at the

Accademia Brera in Milan with Italian sculptor Mario Marini; Don Jarvis studied under B.C.

Binning, Jack Shadbolt, and others at the Vancouver School of Art; Charles Playfair studied with Canadian John S. Gordon in Hamilton, Ontario, and at the Arts Students League in New

York with Jon Corbino and others; and Ralph Allen studied under William Coldstream,

Graham Sutherland, John Piper, and others at the Slade School of Fine Arts in London,

England. Almost without exception artists studied in one, two, or three locations including always at least one school, or under one artist, abroad.

Despite this wide breadth, a large cohort of artists were explicitly linked to one location in particular—the city of Montreal—via its various artist schools and academies, many of them direct descendants of the French academic style: Charles Daudelin and Luba

Genush were cited for studying at the École du Meuble, and Paul-Émile Borduas for teaching

692 The first time Lemieux and Roberts exhibited in a biennial exhibition, in 1953, their R.C.A. designations were displayed prominently, as an acronym following their name, and they were among eleven academicians; now their markers were embedded within the narrative summary, at the very end, and they were the only two academicians marked as such in the exhibition (or perhaps included in the exhibition at all).

693 Likely a reference to Ossip Zadkine, a Russian-born artist who lived in France known primarily as a sculptor but who also produced paintings and lithographs.

285 there; Pierre Gendron and Roland Giguère were cited for studying at the École des Arts

Graphiques, and Albert Dumouchel for teaching there; Micheline Beauchemin, Paul

Beaulieu, Léon Bellefleur, Paul-Émile Borduas, Ulysse Comtois, Peter Daglish, Denis

Juneau, Paul Lacroix, Fernand Leduc, Jean-Paul Lemieux, Rita Letendre, Derek May, Mario

Merola, Guido Molinari, Louis Muhlstock, Goodridge Roberts, and Gerard Tremblay were cited for studying at the École des Beaux-Arts, and Jean-Paul Jérôme, Alfred Pellan, Jacques de Tonnancour, and Armand Vaillancourt for both studying and teaching there.694 A number of artists were linked to the academic style via other beaux-arts schools located both in

Canada and abroad: Edmund Alleyn, Suzanne Bergeron, Marcelle Ferron, Marcelle Maltais,

Denys Matte, and Alfred Pellan were cited for studying at the École des Beaux-Arts in

Quebec, and Paul Lacroix for both studying and teaching there; Micheline Beauchemin was cited for studying at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris; and Robert Varvarande was cited for studying at the École des Beaux-Arts in Lyon, France. And as in 1957, a large cohort of artists were cited for their connection to Paris and to France generally.695 The dominance of

French-Canada, and its colonial link with France, was undeniable.

In addition to connections to people and places, in the exhibition catalogue artists were once again marked for their association with avant-garde artist groups: Jérôme was cited for exhibiting with Les Plasticiens; Borduas as the leader of the Automatistes; Fernand

694 Two further Montreal art institutions were also mentioned: the art schools of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Art Association of Montreal. The National Gallery of Canada, The Third Biennial Exhibition of Canadian Art 1959.

695 Artists whose entries included direct references to Paris: Edmund Alleyn, Micheline Beauchemin, Léon Bellefleur, Suzanne Bergeron, Paul-Émile Borduas, Marcelle Ferron, Pierre Gendron, Roland Giguère, Jack Humphrey, Jean-Paul Jérôme, Paul Lacroix, Fernand Leduc, Jean-Paul Lemieux, Jean McEwen, Arthur McKay, Marcelle Maltais; Suzanne Meloche, Mario Merola, David Partridge, Alfred Pellan, Joseph Plaskett, Jena-Paul Riopelle, and Jack Shadbolt; to France generally: Paul Beaulieu, Fritz Brandtner, Charles Daudelin, Molly Lamb Bobak, Denys Matte, Goodridge Roberts, and Robert Varvarande. Ibid.

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Leduc, Suzanne Meloche, and Jean-Paul Riopelle for their association with the Automatiste group; Tom Hodgson, Kazuo Nakamura, Harold Town, and Walter Yarwood as members of

Toronto’s Painters Eleven; and Léon Bellefleur, Ulysse Comtois, Marcelle Ferron, Fernand

Leduc, Marcelle Maltais, Jean McEwen, Suzanne Meloche, and Guido Molinari as a members of Montreal’s Association des Artistes Non-Figuratifs. Two artists were cited specifically for their association with key movements within abstraction: Bellefleur as tending towards “controlled automatism” and Riopelle as a leading exponent of tachisme or

“action painting.” Lastly, once again artists who had represented Canada in a Venice

Biennale were highlighted: Riopelle in 1964 and Town in 1956. Town was also cited for winning a prize at the Bienal [sic] of São Paulo in 1957 and the Lugano exhibition in 1958.

Not one network of connection and exchange was left unexplored; all were strategically leveraged.

In 1959 the National Gallery selected for exhibition its most “French” cohort of

Canadian artists tied both physically and stylistically to Canada’s French province, Quebec, and to the leading centre for Canadian avant-garde artist expatriates at mid-century, Paris.

Whereas in 1957 the driving force guiding the selection of artists for exhibition was the value of their international currency and engagement with the avant-garde, in 1959, guided in part by the purposeful reorganization of the selection committee to position prominently among its ranks a francophone, this mandate was sharpened and focused on “French” artists both at home and abroad who worked in cities and in styles deemed cutting-edge by National

Gallery staff. With the highest number to date, and, in fact, in the history of the series, of

Quebec-born artists selected for exhibition and about the same proportion calling either

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Quebec or France home, artists with a French connection led.696 While certainly part of a larger effort by the institution to locate and bring to Canada for exhibition and possible acquisition the works of Canadian artists abroad, with ten of the fourteen artists residing outside of Canada located in France “French” artists easily accounted for the majority.

Yet, interestingly, as borne out of their extended biographies, all artists held Canadian nationality and thus presented as Canadians temporarily or semi-permanently living and working in France as they forged international, avant-garde reputations.697 Indeed, moving to

Paris for select periods throughout their careers as artists to strengthen connections across artists, movements, or styles, at all times these artists carried their Canadianness with them.

Even as Canadian artists training in French schools under French artists and/or in French avant-garde styles—and no doubt exchanging ideas and innovations, and impacting contemporary art in mid-century Paris as a result—they maintained their identity as

696 While Quebec had always ranked among the highest representation of all the provinces in any exhibition across the series in both city of birth and lives and works location, the growing number of Canadians included in the exhibition living and working in France—mostly notably in Paris—is of particular note: twelve percent.

697 A number of Paris-based artists present in example. Paul Beaulieu was born in Montreal and educated as an artist at the Montreal School of Fine Arts, and was selected only once for a biennial exhibition, in 1959, while he was living and working in Paris as part of his “dream” to live life as a Parisian artist. While Beaulieu returned to Montreal in 1945 and, throughout his lifetime, frequently exhibited in galleries there, his return to Europe in 1947 was semi-permanent until his final move home, to Quebec, in the early 1970s. Similarly, Quebec-born Marcelle Ferron was selected for only two biennial exhibitions, in 1959 and 1963: during shows both she lived in Paris (having moved there with her three daughters following her initial acclaim as an artist through her connection to Paul-Émile Borduas and the Automatistes), returning to Quebec only in 1966. Other artists exhibited frequently in the biennial series, spending significant amounts of time in Paris developing as artists yet often exhibiting at home, in Quebec, and eventually returning there to live. Edmund Alleyn was born in Quebec City and studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Quebec with Jean-Paul Lemieux and Jean Dallaire; by age twenty-four he won the Grand Prix aux Concours artistiques from the province of Quebec and, upon receiving a grant from the Royal Society, was able to move to France in 1955 where he remained until 1970 exhibiting in the 1957, 1959, 1963, and 1965 biennials. Léon Bellefleur’s work was selected for four Biennial exhibitions, in 1953, 1957, 1959, and 1961, yet he was only located in Paris for one, in 1959, having temporarily located there to connect with André Breton’s surrealist movement after a first, initial stay in Paris in 1954. Such was the situation with many of the remaining Paris artists including Roland Giguère, Fernand Leduc, Marcelle Maltais, Joseph Plaskett, Jean Paul Riopelle, and Paul-Émile Borduas (whose trajectory from Saint Hilaire, Quebec, in 1953, to New York in 1955, and then Paris between 1957 and 1959 prompted the National Gallery to reconsider its initial, geographically-based criteria for Canadianness).

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Canadians not only via their citizenship but also, on the evidence of their inclusion in the biennial series, on their competitiveness as Canadian artists.

Artists who remained in Quebec were able to also claim a certain degree of the

Parisian avant-garde. By way of their education and training, almost forty percent or thirty- two out of eight-one artists selected for exhibition were explicitly marked for their association with leading art schools in Montreal, many of them legacies of France’s beaux- arts training; a second category of cohort was linked more generally to Paris and/or France.

The accusation of the (almost) complete exclusion in the previous year of the Montreal-based

Association des Artistes Non-Figuratifs likely drove, at least in part, this notable lean towards Montreal artists specifically and “French” schools generally, yet it was not the only factor at play. In a correction of sorts the National Gallery chose eight out of a total of eighty-one artists who were members of the Association des Artistes Non-Figuratifs—close to ten percent of the overall representation. The institution also embraced stylistic experimentation taking shape abroad as artists engaged with the Parisian avant-garde, and at home, given the National Gallery’s selection of Montreal’s most grassroots artist collective.

If, in 1957, the National Gallery was criticised for exclusion, then in 1959 the institution was praised for inclusion though not without some risks or costs. For several years now, signalled by its patronage of such avant-garde artist collectives as Les Plasticiens, the

Automatistes, Painters Eleven, and now, in 1959, in its fostering of the Association des

Artistes Non-Figuratifs as well as key artists practicing cutting-edge styles abroad, the

National Gallery had fed its appetite for new work by new artists, and their exhibition lent a certain credibility to the institution as one that could reach into the realm of contemporary

Canadian art production as needed and as desired. But a certain distance was also created

289 with Canadian artists at home, specifically artists working in representational styles. In repair came its choices for acquisition: opting to leverage its purchasing power on well-established artists of international pedigree carrying the promise of art historical longevity, the National

Gallery cast aside the Parisian proportion of French artists by purchasing not one work.

Rather, it set its acquisition sights on artists at home with purchases representative of the full geography of Canada.698

The Biennial Opens

Despite the relative success of the 1959 biennial, the summer of 1960 opened with a call from National Gallery Director Charles Comfort for “procedural proposals” for the fourth biennial with a number of staff charged with submitting recommendations.699

Acknowledging that the series had proved to be a costly and time-consuming endeavour that had failed to yield results, a number of proposals advocated for the model of the pre-war series while others argued for a return to the original ideas of Lawren Harris. One submission sought a notable correction: that it was not the role of the National Gallery to foster younger artists but, rather, it was the purpose of the institution to “give recognition to artists who have

698 Acquisitions stretched from East to West with a slight advantage to Quebec, but on balance the selections reinforced familiar patterns of privileging (some of) Canada’s established artistic centres. Three works were acquired from the province of Quebec: one painting by Suzanne Bergeron (Valleyfield), one painting by Goodridge Roberts (Montreal), and one painting by Jacques de Tonnancour (Montreal); two from British Columbia: one painting by Bruno Bobak (Vancouver) and one work on paper by Herbert Gilbert (Vancouver); two from New Brunswick: two paintings by Alex Colville (Sackville); and one from Manitoba: one work on paper by James Willer (Winnipeg). The National Gallery of Canada Archives, Third Biennial Exhibition of Canadian Art 1959.

699 Submitting proposals were Associate Director Donald Buchanan, (the now) Curator of Canadian Art Jean- Réné Ostiguy, and, replacing Ostiguy as the Director of Extension Services, Richard Simmins, among others. The National Gallery of Canada Archives, Fourth Biennial Exhibition of Canadian Art 1961, File 12-4-91.

290 produced works of rare quality.”700 In true democratic fashion, the final procedures were an amalgamation of all proposals received with specific direction incorporating Comfort’s unique perspective as Director, and as an artist: the fourth biennial was to be a show open to all.701

In coming to settle on this approach—radical by any and all standards—it is likely that a key critique of the 1959 exhibition came into play; namely, the accusation of bias towards “fashionable” so-called abstraction at great cost to representational art including the nation’s coveted tradition of landscape painting. A review of the 1959 show published in the

Ottawa Citizen:

Only a few years ago, this chiefly abstract Canadian Biennial would have been not only “controversial”, it would have been—bewildering. It would have shocked gallery-goers who now—to keep up with the Jones—buy the modern “stuff” and hang it in their homes. Why, it’s the current fashion and some of their friends might think them hopelessly uncultured if they bought pictures with recognizable subjects! Some clever artists have switched their style, accordingly…. There are others, especially artists, who feel that the jury was biased in favour of abstract, non- representational trends. The fact is that some good, well-known painters are not represented in this cross-section of Canadian art.702

To address criticisms that the National Gallery was prone to favouring “the modern” over other “good” painters, an open approach was implemented: the show was to be advertised nationally in all the important daily newspapers nationwide yet, in order to keep the number of entries to a manageable number—the institution estimated that no more than eight hundred entries would be received under this approach—a limit of two works per artist was imposed

700 This text was quoted from an internal document by Ostiguy to Comfort, dated June 13, 1960. The National Gallery of Canada Archives, Fourth Biennial Exhibition of Canadian Art 1961.

701 The National Gallery of Canada Archives, Fourth Biennial Exhibition of Canadian Art 1961.

702 An excerpt from an article entitled “Inconclusive Epilogue to Canadian Biennial” that appeared in the Ottawa Citizen on June 27, 1959. The National Gallery of Canada Archives, Fourth Biennial Exhibition of Canadian Art 1961.

291 with an exhibition cap of ninety. On the most controversial and difficult point to settle—that of the jury—a panel of five was outlined yet, notably, included no National Gallery representative.703

Over nineteen hundred paintings, drawings, and prints were delivered to the National

Gallery for consideration and the jury of five considered “every one of them.”704 Indeed, to yield such a high return, the institution, which had spent the bulk of its budget on advertising, had managed though nation-wide broadcasts to reach even the most remote of artists:

Here’s good news for Canada’s artists! The national show will be open to all Canadian residents for the first time since the annual and biennial exhibitions began over 30 years ago. 705

Open in approach, the organizers were also shrewd. Aware that more established artists might be put off by being lumped with unknowns and amateurs, the institution organized a personal invitation for artists whom staff felt merited individual attention.706

Despite the institution’s best intentions, the combination of the open procedures—an appeal to every artist—and the personal invitations—a safeguard for the inclusion of the country’s best artists—resulted in a very uneven show both in representation and in quality.

While the exhibition was a bold and ambitious move on the part of the institution to attempt

703 The artist Alex Colville was appointed, and readily accepted. The other four jurors: Clare Bice, artist and Curator of the Public Library and Art Museum in London, Ontario; Dr. Ferdinand Eckhardt, Director of the Winnipeg Art Gallery; artist Jean-Paul Lemieux from the École des Beaux-Arts in Montreal; and, as Chairman, Philip James, Secretary of the Museum Association of England. The National Gallery of Canada Archives, Fourth Biennial Exhibition of Canadian Art 1961.

704 The National Gallery of Canada, The Fourth Biennial Exhibition of Canadian Art 1961: Organized and Circulated by the National Gallery (National Gallery of Canada: Ottawa, 1961).

705 This was the text of a broadcast dated November 12, 1960. The National Gallery of Canada Archives, Fourth Biennial Exhibition of Canadian Art 1961.

706 The National Gallery of Canada Archives, Fourth Biennial Exhibition of Canadian Art 1961.

292 to satisfy the largest stakeholder group—the Canadian artist—the attempt at catering to all meant risking the exclusion of major recognized names. The Ottawa press, which had supported the ideal of openness, now led the critique: “Are these 90 paintings and graphics

REALLY the ‘best’ among 1,800 entries chosen by the international jury to represent the

‘cream’ of Canadian art from coast to coast?”707 At issue was that as the National Gallery had predicted, despite the gesture of personal invitations certain established artists refused to enter. While the absence of pivotal artists was noted, the “international flavour” of previous years persisted and was described by jurists as located closer to home than ever before:

While allegiance to a group of painters in not the choice of many distinguished artists, it is clear that the established groups at Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal are a source of stimulus to their members and have a certain Indigenous quality. For instance, the only hard-edge painting of any significance came from Montreal; and there are indications of a new movement at Regina. But all these groups have an international flavour and one cannot today speak of a purely national Canadian style.708

In the wake of criticisms in 1959 for reaching too far from home, in 1961 the National

Gallery shifted its marker for Canadianness back to Canada’s geographic borders to host its most grassroots exhibition, and its most popular.

707 The article was entitled “Canadian Biennial: We Propose Salon of the Rejected” published in the Ottawa Citizen, July 8, 1961. The National Gallery of Canada Clipping File: The Fourth Biennial Exhibition of Canadian Art 1961.

708 The National Gallery of Canada, The Fourth Biennial Exhibition of Canadian Art 1961. Here the term “Indigenous” was used to describe Canadian art produced on Canadian soil. It would prove an interesting choice of words considering the continued shut out of certain parts of Canada.

293

A Connected Canada

The Fourth Biennial Exhibition of Canadian Art—the fifth of eight shows and the last to be organized internally (and the final biennial exhibition under consideration in the present analysis)—opened at the National Gallery of Canada on May 19, 1961, displaying ninety-one works by eighty-one unique artists.709 The exhibition’s open procedures yielded a high percentage of new artists, just over thirty percent—while perhaps not remarkable, it was nevertheless a minor feat considering what must have been an exhausted field.710 Once again narrowing the canon of core repeating artists, only four exhibited artists were included in all shows to date: Don Jarvis, Louis Muhlstock, Jack Shadbolt, and Harold Town. A large cohort was born in Canada yet, notably, a significant number, twenty-five artists, were born abroad in cities and countries across most continents. Second only to the inaugural year, it was the most artists ever born outside of Canada in the history of the series.711 And in a sharp

709 The eighty-one unique artists exhibited, in alphabetical order: Ralph Allen, Henry Almeida, Maxwell Bates, William Beeton, Alistair Bell, Léon Bellefleur, Rolph Blakstad, Ronald Bloore, Bruno Bobak, Molly Lamb Bobak, Rowell Bowles, Leonard Brooks, Robert Bush (alias: Charles Robb), Ghitta Caiserman, Alan Collier, Ulysse Comtois, Peter Daglish, Murray Devlin, McLeary Drope, Roland Fenwick, Charles Gagnon, Pierre Gendron, Luba Genush, Roland Giguère, Herbert Gilbert, Claude Girard, Gerard Gladstone, Ted Godwin, James Gordaneer, Frederick Hagan, Andries Harmann, Robert Hedrick, Thomas Hodgson, Mackay Houstoun, E.J. Hughes, Don Jarvis, Peter Kolisnyk, John Koerner, Patrick Landsley, John Lennard, Frank Lipari, Kenneth Lochhead, James McElheron, Jean McEwen, Arthur McKay, Ulli Maibauer, Frank Mayrs, Frank Mikuska, Gray Mills, Guido Molinari, Jean-Guy Mongeau, Henri Mongrain, Louis Muhlstock, David Mullen, Kazuo Nakamura, Louis de Niverville, Will Ogilvie, Toni Onley, Franklin Palmer, David Partridge, Margaret Peterson, Marjorie Pigott, Joseph Plaskett, Christopher Pratt, Jean-Paul Riopelle, William Roberts, Frederick Ross, Jack Shadbolt, Gordon Appelbe Smith, Ronald Spickett, Burrell Swartz, George Swinton, Gentile Tondino, Jacques de Tonnancour, Harold Town, Gerald Trottier, Tony Urquhart, Robert Varvarande, Wayne Whillier, York Wilson, and Lorna Wonsowich. The National Gallery of Canada, The Fourth Biennial Exhibition of Canadian Art 1961.

710 New artists included: Almeida, Beeton, Blakstad, Brooks, Devlin, Drope, Fenwick, Girard, Gladstone, Gordaneer, Hagan, Hamann, Houstoun, Kolisnyk, Landsley, Lennard, Lipari, Frank B. Mayrs, Mikuska, Mongrain, Mullen, Peterson, Pigott, Swartz, Whillier, and Wonsowich. Notably, of the seventeen works listed three were by artists new to the biennial exhibition series.

711 Of the artists born abroad, seven artists were born in England, four in the United States, and one in each of the countries of Austria, China, (the former) Czechoslovakia, France, Galicia, Germany, Holland, Japan, Poland, Scotland, South Africa, the UK, Ukraine, and Venezuela. Of the artists born in Canada, seventeen were born in Ontario, fifteen in Quebec, ten in British Columbia, four in each of the provinces of Alberta and

294 drop from the previous year, very few artists lived and worked abroad leaving the majority, sixty-nine out of eighty-one exhibited artists, calling Canada home.712 While most artists were cited as Canadian in the nationality subject field of the National Gallery database (or, if never collected by the National Gallery and thus no artist record exists in the database, were estimated as Canadian),713 twenty were cited as dual with Canada. It was the series’ most varied cohort.714

By way of various direct and indirect markers of identity, exhibition catalogue biographies promoted the qualifications of the wide mix of artists selected for exhibition.

Entries highlighted an artist’s education (including where and with whom they studied), mentions of any work or study abroad, affiliations and awards, residencies, key exhibitions,

Manitoba, three in Saskatchewan, and one in each of New Brunswick and Newfoundland. The Maritime provinces of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island were not represented, and neither was the North: it was the first year with no representation from Nova Scotia, yet status quo for PEI and the two northern territories. The birth location of one artist is unknown: Lorna Wonsowich was never collected by the National Gallery and so does not have an artist record. While included in the Artists in Canada database, her record is silent on her birth location.

712 One artist was located in France, one in Mexico, and one in the United States (in New York).

713 Fifteen of these Canadian artist nationalities were estimated: Robert Bush, Murray Devlin, Roland Fenwick, Claude Girard, James Gordaneer, Peter Kolisnyk, Patrick Landsley, John Lennard, Frank Lipari, James McElheron, Frank Mikusa, Gray Mills, William Roberts, Wayne Whillier, and Lorna Wonsowicz.

714 Twenty artists held (or were estimated to hold) dual nationalities with Canada: seven artists were cited as “British, Canadian,” two as “American, Canadian,” and eleven held the following nationalities dual with Canada: Austrian, Chinese, Czechoslovakian, Dutch, French, Galician, German, Polish, Russian, South African, and Venezuelan. Two non-Canadian artist nationalities were estimated due to uncollected and thus undocumented artists. Bowles is estimated to hold “Chinese, Canadian” nationality based on his Chinese birth (his parents worked for the China Inland Mission) yet when he was ten years old, he returned to Canada to live in 1926. While Bowles died in the United States, his five decades of service to Canada through his work the UN and with UNICEF mark him as Canadian (as does one of Canada’s leading newspapers; see https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/legendary-un-adviser-newton-bowles-held-record-for- service/article4786015/). The Artists in Canada database in silent on Bowles’ nationality. Hamann is estimated to hold “Dutch, Canadian” nationality due to his birth in The Hague, in Holland, yet his obituary claims that he and his mother immigrated to Canada in 1952 (see: http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/calgaryherald/obituary.aspx?n=andries-hamann&pid=157460529). Hamann died in Calgary. The Artists in Canada database is silent on his nationality.

295 and any administrative and/or teaching positions within institutions of higher education.

Among the artists who repeated from previous years were a number who bore Royal

Canadian Academy citations which appeared embedded within each artist’s entry—A.R.C.A. artists included Ghitta Caiserman, Alan Collier, Mackay Houston, and York Wilson (who also held the R.C.A. designation); and Ontario Society of Artists (O.S.A.) artists Houston and

Gray Mills were also cited. Affiliations with artists societies and collectives were mentioned too, but these were very few: Léon Bellefleur, Ulysse Comtois, Patrick Landsley, and Guido

Molinari were cited as members of Montreal’s Artistes Non-Figuratifs, and Jean McEwen as president; Tom Hodgson, Kazuo Nakamura, and Harold Town as members of the Painters

Eleven group in Toronto; and Gentile Tondino as a member of the Canadian Group of

Painters with Will Ogilvie cited as a founding member. Jean-Paul Riopelle’s artist entry had not been revised since its first inclusion in the 1957 exhibition catalogue and so once again he was referenced for his association with Borduas and the Automatistes, and as “[o]ne of the leading exponent of “action painting.” In addition, Riopelle’s entry also mentioned his participation in the 1954 Venice Biennale (again). Such repetitions also appeared for Town

(Venice in 1956, and São Paulo and Lugano in 1957), and Léon Bellefleur similarly retained his reference of “controlled automatism” in his entry.715

While some, but not many, repeating artist profiles carried mention of work or study outside of Canada—in the United States (New York mostly) and in Mexico, and abroad in

France (Paris), England, Belgium, and Italy—more cited connections with established contemporary artists located everywhere, and influence from historical artists of the past:

715 Ibid.

296

Ralph Allen was linked with William Coldstream, Graham Sutherland, and John Piper in

London, England; Léon Bellefleur was “influenced” by Alfred Pellan; and Bruno Bobak was linked with Carl Schaefer in Toronto. Also connected: Molly Bobak to Jack Shadbolt in

Vancouver; Ghitta Caiserman to Alexandre Bercovitch in Montreal, and to Moses Soyer in

New York; Alan Collier to J.E.H. MacDonald and to Franklin Carmichael in Toronto; and

Pierre Gendron to Jacques de Tonnancour and Albert Dumouchel in Montreal. The list went on, implicating almost all repeating artists, and to a lesser extent, new artists,716 serving as evidence of how far in space and time the Canadian network of artists reached, and its intricate links.717

Most artists, even if they had not devoted themselves to art-making full-time, had received at least some professional training or had exhibited in one or more regional or national art exhibitions, and/or carried memberships with long-standing Canadian artist societies; a slim number had trained abroad and could claim connection to a recognizable name. Henry Almeida was cited as the son of an artist, and for having studied at the St.

716 Entries for new artists were often, but not always, the briefest. At issue was the fact that many of these artists were amateurs—nascents or self-taught—and either did not hold a robust biography to carry longer summaries or did not boast the kinds of professional mentions the National Gallery was seeking to highlight.

717 The full list of links and connections: Robert Hedrick to Rico Lebrun and James Pinto in Mexico; Edward Hughes to F. H. Varley and J.W.G. Macdonald in Vancouver; Don Jarvis to B.C. Binning and Jack Shadbolt in Vancouver, and to Hans Hofmann in New York; John Koerner to F. Kausek in Prague and to Othon Friesz in Paris; Molinari to Marian Scott in Montreal; Louis Muhlstock to Louis Biloul in Paris; Toni Onley to Carl Schaefer in India; Frank Palmer to Jack Shadbolt in Vancouver; David Partridge to Carl Schaefer in Toronto, to André Bieler in Kingston, Ontario, and to William Hayter in Paris; Joseph Plaskett to B.C. Binning and Jack Shadbolt in Vancouver, and to Hans Hofmann in New York; Frederick Ross to Ted Campbell in Saint John, New Brunswick, and to Pablo O’Higgins in Mexico; Jack Shadbolt was cited as “influenced” by Emily Carr, and was linked to Victor Pasmore and William Coldstream in London, England, and to André Lhote in Paris; George Swinton to Goodridge Roberts and Jacques de Tonnancour in Montreal; Gentile Tondino to Adam Sherriff Scott in Montreal; Jacques de Tonnancour was linked to Goodridge Roberts in Montreal, and was “influenced” by Alfred Pellan and also the works of Matisse and Picasso; and Tony Urquhart was linked to Seymour Drumlevitch in Buffalo, New York. The National Gallery of Canada, The Fourth Biennial Exhibition of Canadian Art 1961.

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Martin School of Art in England; Rolph Blakstad for studying at the School of Architecture at the University of British Columbia and with B.C. Binning, and for having been awarded an Emily Carr scholarship for study in Florence; Leonard Brooks for studying extensively abroad, serving as a war artist with the Navy, as holding both A.R.C.A. and O.S.A. designations, and for being a member of the Society of Canadian Painters-Etchers; Murray

Devlin for studying at the Vancouver School of Art and as the recipient of an Emily Carr scholarship; Claude Girard for studying at the École des Beaux-Art in Quebec and for exhibiting at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; Gerald Gladstone for working “under the influence” of Walter H. Yarwood and Harold Town; Patrick Landsley for studying at the

Winnipeg School of Art and the school of art at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and for winning a Canadian government scholarship to study in Paris at the Académie Montmartre under Fernand Léger and at the Académie Ranson under Gustave Singier; David Mullen was cited as having no formal art training, but for currently working as a commercial artist and display designer in Toronto; Marjorie Pigott for studying oriental art and for her diploma from the School of Nanga; Wayne Whillier for having “received his art training in Regina and Calgary;” and Lorna Wonsowich for studying at the Winnipeg School of Art, for currently working as a fashion designer, and for exhibiting with the Manitoba Society of

Artists, at the Winnipeg Show, and at the Minneapolis Biennial.718 No matter their status as

718 Further artist names and summary highlights include: William Beeton for exhibiting at the Young Contemporaries Exhibition in London, Ontario; McLeary Drope as a graduate of Manitoba’s School of Art; Roland Fenwick for studying art at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick; James Gordaneer for studying at the Doon School of Art and in Mexico; Frederick Hagan for studying at the Ontario College of Art where he was currently an instructor of drawing and graphics; Andries Hamann for studying under James Boyd and Gerald Trottier in Ottawa; Mackay Houstoun as a member of a number of regional art societies including the O.S.A. and the Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour; Peter Kolisnyk for studying at the Western Technical School and the Ontario College of Art in Toronto, as well as in Europe; John Lennard for studying at the Ontario College of Art and under Morris Kantor at the Arts Students League in New York; Frank Lipari for studying at Sir Georges Williams School of Art in Montreal and at the Los Angeles Art Centre; Frank Mayrs for

298 emerging artists, all could lay claim to a network of connection and exchange that stretched beyond the nation’s borders.

In 1961, under its first—and last—open procedures, the National Gallery selected for exhibition its most varied cohort of Canadian artists sacrificing, in the opinion of many, the qualities of excellence and merit, the currencies of professional and artistic pedigree, and the cachet of national (and international) reputation in favour of a Canadian identity tied inextricably to home—to Canadian geography, to Canadian nationality, and, following

Canada’s first forays into multiculturalism following mid-century, to the very heart of the nation’s spirit of open immigration wherein any and all were welcome. Yet, as artist biographies testify, the institution also selected a cohort tied to the international art world.

Never were so many Canadian artists born outside of Canada, and in nationality represented more countries across more continents. And never were more artists marked for their

Canadianness as artists worthy of inclusion in a national biennial by way of their networks of connection and exchange located outside of Canada. In spite of or perhaps because of these contradictions, all were invited to compete in the nation’s most significant and prestigious art exhibition in a venue symbolic of both Canada’s political and artistic centre at a key period of increasing internationalism in which the assignment of “Canadian” was under such nuanced negotiation. Indeed, it was in Ottawa, in 1961, that the National Gallery of Canada found itself at the centre of an open brokerage of Canadian identity that would signal the

studying at the Vancouver School of Art and for winning a silver medal at the 13th Annual Contemporary Exhibition there; Frank Mikuska for studying at the University of Manitoba’s School of Art, for being an associate member of the Manitoba Society of Artists, and for currently working as a graphic designer in Winnipeg; Henri Mongrain for exhibiting at the École des Beaux-Arts in Quebec and for being awarded a bursary by the French government for study in France in 1955; Margaret Peterson as an associate professor in arts at the University of California; and Burrell Swartz for studying architecture at the University of Toronto, and for studying art at the Central School of Arts and Crafts and the Slade School in London, and at the Vancouver School of Art. Ibid.

299 institution as holding a dual role: first, in affirming the institution’s obligation as a national gallery to ensure the right of all Canadians to participate in an open call for exhibition hosted by the nation’s leading art institution, and second, in a display of Canadian art designed at its core to be an exercise in nation-building, to define the parameters of artists’ qualifying

Canadianness.

However, the 1961 exhibition was the only, and the last, of its kind. The overwhelming response to the National Gallery’s open invitation taxed its administration in terms of finances and workload, and in response the institution swung the pendulum in the opposite direction. Beginning with the 1963 exhibition the National Gallery ceded its authority to select artists for its signature Canadian exhibition to individual experts—men of professional reputation whose decisions could make or break careers719—and thus introduced an intermediary interrupting the institution’s direct role in shaping of Canadian national identity. But the new direction and wider reach that had been developing following the nationalist focus of the first two biennial exhibitions persisted through the next three shows to see the institution, culminating in the 1961 exhibition, slowly shift its notion of Canada from a physical country to a political one, and back again.

Brokering an International Canada

Beginning with the 1957 exhibition, the National Gallery affirmed its shift away from markers of Canadianness attached to birth and lives and works locations—and, in time, also

719 In the 1963 exhibition it was the National Gallery’s first professional-trained curator of Canadian art who chose for the institution, J. Russell Harper. In the remaining shows—in 1963, 1965, and 1968—it was a number of so-called international experts. See “Chapter Five: The Biennial Exits,” in Limbos-Bomberg, “The Ideal and the Pragmatic,” 132–59.

300 nationality—to capitalize on the extensive networks artists had established via their professional careers stretching both within Canada and outside of it (and sometimes both simultaneously) to broker an international Canada. As the institution sought out the best and most progressive artists active in the contemporary Canadian art scene—or, when this tie was not visible, selected artists linked to Canada by whatever tangible marker of Canadianness remained—it began to rely more heavily on the recommendations of a professionalized museum staff located internally and museum experts positioned internationally. Here arbiters of good taste were guided in their selections by their conception of Canada: one shaped by its so-called founding nations, France and Britain, and the legacy of ongoing colonial links

(consider the privilege of academic beaux-arts training as a qualifier for and artist’s inclusion), to the frequent exclusion of many of the nation’s eastern provincial regions and to the utter and complete exclusion of the First Peoples of Canada.

In making selections for the biennial series (and possible acquisition for the national collection), it was connections across artists internationally and avant-garde artist groups and collectives that weighed more heavily as a criterion for selection than any connection between an artist and the nation of Canada. Indeed, in the last three exhibitions in the series considered in this analysis—beginning with the 1959 show and up to and including the 1963 open experiment, its democratic format an ambassador for Canadianness if there ever was one—the National Gallery sought to move beyond the (former) Canadian tradition of the representational landscape painting made famous as a “national tradition” by the Group of

Seven to secure itself a place on the international stage via the avant-garde abstract. That the remaining two exhibitions in the series (the 1965 and 1968 shows) were curated externally

301 with international in interests in mind confirmed the institution’s move away from the limits of Canada as a physical country to now seek out and argue Canada’s international presence.

Yet, while for exhibition the institution enthusiastically sought out Canadianness beyond its borders, most notably in Western Europe—in a conformation of its colonial roots,

Britain in the early exhibitions, and, in an attempt to align Canadian contemporary art practice with the avant-garde, France in the later shows—for acquisition it cautiously sought out a more modest expression of Canadianness. In the later shows, despite the institution’s embrace of the very portable marker of nationality as its primary index of Canadianness as a means to secure artists living and working abroad, the National Gallery shied away from purchasing artists who stretched the institution’s tolerance for bending and extending national identity to resist the purchase of artists deemed too far afield from the nation in

“national character” or “national feeling.” Instead, the institution selected artists living and working within its borders to sometimes, in what might be interpreted as some contradiction

(as was the case with certain artists holding at least some other non-Canadian identity by way of dual nationality), inadvertently re-inscribe identities not tidily identified as Canadian.

This disconnect between artists shown and artists acquired signals the depth of tension between the paradigms of nations and networks at play within the National Gallery’s negotiation of Canadian national identity at mid-century and following, and it is here that a

World Art Historical networks of connection and exchange paradigm offers its greatest value in demonstrating the limits of national thinking. By at once striving to extend the nation by including in exhibition artists living and working abroad but who maintained their

Canadianness by way of nationality, the institution could not, in its acquisitions, necessarily extend its notion of Canada beyond strict nationally-tied thinking by purchasing works that

302 did not resemble the Canadianness the country had come to rely upon, and expect in its visuality of nationhood.

So too in the National Gallery’s exclusion of Canada at home. Under its limited and restricted notion of Canada—one extending beyond its borders by reaching only Europe’s most Western countries, and one physically centred in Canada to the frequent omission of the

East and the categorical exclusion of the North—the National Gallery, while intuitively answering the extensions afforded by thinking in terms of networks rather than nations, could not, in acquisition, break the bonds of its national formation and deeply entrenched national values—conceptions of Canadianness rooted within the country’s ideological foundations— to imagine a Canada that reached from coast to coast, or one that included a geography or an identity that did not resemble its Western European origins. In this way, by tracing negotiations of identity that moved from nation to networks (and back again), through the lens of World Art History the phenomenon of the Canadian Biennial series emerges less as report on Canadian acquisitions for the national collection and more of an index of the

National Gallery of Canada’s imagination of national identity, and its shifting tensions.

The biennial name appeared years later, in 1978, in a revamped format not at all in the tradition of the earlier series, but as single exhibition borrowing only the mid-century series’ nationalist focus: as the Canadian Biennial of Contemporary Art. The show’s curator,

Diana Nemiroff, recalled the old series for its apparent legacy—the successful birth of an internationally-recognized institution:

Those exhibitions were a young nation’s affirmation of the maturity and validity of its artists and its readiness to compete in the international artistic arena. They celebrated the winds of change in Canadian art, its creation of a national style and a national

303

subject—the northern landscape, its forays into modernism, and its contribution to an international language of abstraction.720

It was a legacy the institution had worked hard to cultivate and would seek to revive during the transcultural turn, but this time for a global stage.

720 Diana Nemiroff, Canadian Biennial of Contemporary Art (Ottawa: The National Gallery of Canada, 1989).

304

Chapter Seven: Collecting and Exhibiting a Global Canada

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, more than forty years after the Biennial

Exhibitions of Canadian Art series came to an end with the 1968 exhibition, for a second time in its history the National Gallery of Canada resurrected the notion of a biennial exhibition series of contemporary Canadian art.721 The new show was branded as the

Canadian Biennial and in its reverse format—an exhibition of recent acquisitions of contemporary Canadian art—was promoted as a celebration of the “diversity” of the National

Gallery’s collections.722

As the profile of the twenty-first century contemporary artist globalized, and as the identity of the contemporary Canadian artist was increasingly located outside of the marker of nationality, in order to locate contemporary Canadian artists for the national collection and for exhibition in the biennial exhibition series, the National Gallery—failing to find in its collections management database the capacity to express the complexities of identity generally and the multiplicity of Canadian artistic identity specifically—actively negotiated the basis of Canadian artistic identity across a number of markers that were at once flexible yet also conditional. With each new exhibition, in its mandate to exhibit from the national collection the country’s most significant contemporary artists in Canada, the National

721 An exhibition organized by the former Curator of Contemporary Art, Diana Nemiroff, and entitled the Canadian Biennial of Contemporary Art, was held in 1986. While the exhibition was heavily critiqued and was not continued as a series, Nemiroff’s efforts to not only link the process of collecting with the act of exhibition but to build the best collection possible warranted mention by the organizers of the first exhibition in the new series: “Nemiroff once described the curator’s fundamental activity of building a collection as a relay race, wherein the curator inherits a collection shaped by his or her predecessors onto which they continue to build, taking it into different directions, but ultimately continuing to push forward.” Josée Drouin-Brisebois, “Looking through the Fence and Building a Bridge: Reflections on Collecting Contemporary Canadian Art,” in It Is What It Is: Recent Acquisitions of New Canadian Art (Ottawa: The National Gallery of Canada, 2010), 11.

722 Ibid.

305

Gallery widened both spatially and temporally its fields of consideration and applied its most flexible markers of identity to include artists with both direct and indirect connections with

Canada—be they by birth, nationality, residency, or, as evident leading up to the 2017 exhibition, by an artist’s relevance to the contemporary Canadian art production no matter where in the world they lived and worked—to find artistic identity increasingly expressed through each artist’s network of connection and exchange.

As the institution very flexibly sought out artists beyond its borders linked with the

Canadian contemporary art scene, within Canada it continued to seek an alternative source for Canadian identity and here turned in part to the nation’s Indigenous pasts and presents.

As part of the institution’s contemporary project to, as discussed in Chapter Five, physically and conceptually integrate the representation of Canadian art history with the arts and visual cultures of the Indigenous Peoples of Canada, the National Gallery evoked Indigenous identity—set apart or distinct from Canadian identities—to serve, problematically, as a new and conditional marker for Canadianness, one that could, as needed, signal the level, the degree, or the kind of Canadianness each artist expressed (or not). This tension between the global artist and “supra-Canadian” would become evident in the collecting and categorizing processes of artists and their works as they navigated the infrastructural systems both internal to the institution, and those facing the National Gallery’s twenty-first century public.

Throughout the Canadian Biennial series the National Gallery responded to the realities of a now globalized Canada to negotiate the Canadianness of the artists considered for the national collection to collect and exhibit a constructed notion of Canadian identity that was, at the transcultural turn and continuing to the present, frequently based outside of the nation-state and even in contradiction to it, driven by the contemporary Canadian artist’s

306 self-identification within the global artworld, and located in the so-called margins. This negotiation positions the National Gallery of Canada as a discursive institution powerful in shaping notions of national identity and the biennial exhibition series an acute index of the shifting nature of national identity.

Resurrecting the Biennial Exhibition Series

To keep pace with the changing landscape of contemporary art production in Canada and globally, in the years preceding the resurrected biennial the National Gallery reconfigured its internal organization into a number of specialized curatorial departments managing separate collections each holding some Canadian content. Working collaboratively to offer the new series, a collective of “curatorial colleagues” drawn from the four departments most relevant to this discussion—the Departments of Canadian, Contemporary, and Indigenous Art, and the Canadian Photography Institute—declared the ambitious objectives of the 2010 exhibition: “our goal is to seek out the best and most innovative works being made today by engaging with the diverse practices of living artists working from coast to coast… [to take] the pulse of contemporary art production in Canada as it becomes part of our national art history.”723 In the selection of artists for the first exhibition and in the balance of the series—exhibitions held in 2012, 2014, and most recently in 2017—it would seem that

“coast to coast” included not only Canada from the Atlantic to the Pacific but also the coasts of every continent in the world, and that the artists collected under the guise of Canada’s

“national art history” would represent not only those of the nation at home and abroad but

723 “Exhibition Highlights: It Is What It Is,” National Gallery of Canada, accessed April 26, 2016, http://www.gallery.ca/itis/20.htm.

307 artists of such diverse citizenship, nationality, and identity that much more than the National

Gallery’s acquisitions of contemporary Canadian art were on display in the Canadian

Biennial.

To acquire contemporary Canadian art for the national collection—in the twenty-first century, a collection critically aligned with contemporary art production globally—and subsequently narrow for exhibition a selection of artists for the Canadian Biennial, the

National Gallery engaged its widest conception of Canada and what it meant to be a contemporary Canadian artist. Although an overwhelming majority of artists included in the series were Canadian by nationality, not all were; further, of those who presented as

Canadian artists, not all were identified as such in the nationality subject field of the National

Gallery’s collections management database.

There were two reasons artists without Canadian nationalities were included in the

Canadian Biennial. First, in the 2017 exhibition, to offer a “more well-rounded perspective on contemporary art,”724 the field of consideration was purposefully widened beyond the exhibition’s claimed parameters to, for the first time in its history, include international contemporary artists: almost half of the artists selected for exhibition in 2017 were not

Canadian but hailed and held nationalities from countries other than Canada. Second, beginning with the first exhibition in 2010 and across the full series ending with the last show in 2017, while many included artists were considered Canadian for the purpose of the

Canadian Biennial, a number of them did not hold Canadian nationalities but rather

724 Lynn Saxberg, “Biennial Boasts Diversity; National Gallery of Canada unveils new acquisitions in 2017 Biennial,” Ottawa Citizen, October 19, 2017, https://search-proquest- com.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/docview/1953078900?pq-origsite=summon&accountid=14656.

308 nationalities from countries across the world. In order to locate the source of the

Canadianness of these artists—that is to say, to trace the marker the National Gallery used to assign Canadian identity to these alternative-nationality Canadian artists—a full and oftentimes highly-flexible biographical analysis was required located outside of and leading away from the simple classifications organizing the National Gallery’s collections management database to explore each artist’s complex, and global, network of connection and exchange.

Adding to this mix of the Canadian artist, the non-Canadian artist, and the alternative- nationality Canadian artist was a fourth category of artist sought out by the institution: the

“supra-Canadian.” On one hand a delayed answer to the first series’ overlooking of the

North, and on the other, an historical reconciliation of the National Gallery’s collection of

Canadian art as explored in Chapter Five, in a mirror (somewhat) reflective of the institution’s revamped curatorial infrastructures, both intellectual and physical, represented in a biennial exhibition series for the first time were the Indigenous peoples of Canada: First

Nations, Métis, and Inuit artists. Signalled by the inclusion of either a direct or indirect

Indigenous-specific marker—a marker of indigeneity located either within the National

Gallery’s collection management database or, more robustly (and meaningfully), outside of it—it was these artists who, in the twenty-first century, deemed by the National Gallery as primary bearers of Canadian identity, were presented as holding some kind of special status that positioned the First Peoples of Canada as either more Canadian than other Canadian

309 artists or, in a potential echoing of certain First Nations artists’ “stance of refusal,”725 as artists separate from or independent of Canadian identity.

From Biennial to “Biennale”

In her opening essay for the 2010 exhibition catalogue, Josée Drouin-Brisebois,

Curator of Contemporary Art and one of three lead organizers for the inaugural 2010

Canadian Biennial It Is What It Is, confessed that being charged with organizing an exhibition that “celebrated” the National Gallery of Canada’s recent acquisitions of contemporary Canadian art felt “daunting.”726 She began the task by weaving together in narrative a robust body of work showcasing all that contemporary Canadian art production had to offer. Describing the show as seeking to evoke for contemporary Canadian art a

“specific moment in time and place in which we live and in which the artists have produced their works,”727 she also remarked that never far from mind in the organization of an exhibition by the most significant public collection of contemporary Canadian art in the world was a collection that would stand the test of time. She explained: “[W]e have striven to find the most innovative, diverse, and ambitious works being made today by focusing on the production of emerging, mid-career, and senior artists, working across the country.”728 One critic, finding the institution’s responsibility to showcase a survey of contemporary Canadian

725 This is a term used to describe First Nations curator Ryan Rice’s approach to his work and that of many well-known First Nations artists: that their practice of contemporary art cannot be lumped together with all others. Ryan Rice, quoted in Canadian Art, “Features: It Is What It is,” accessed March 21, 2015, http://canadianart.ca/online/features/2010/11/25/it_is_what_it_is/.

726 Drouin-Brisebois, “Looking through the Fence and Building a Bridge,” 11.

727 Ibid., 14.

728 Ibid., 11.

310 art practices at odds with its role in building the national collection, called out the National

Gallery for conflating the objectives of a national biennial with that of collections survey, and achieving only the latter:

[O]ne senses that tying these works together as a biennial was an afterthought parachuted into an exhibition well developed along prior lines. The curatorial texts make no mention—anywhere!—of a biennial as a unifying concept, and the resulting uncertainty is reflected (perhaps ironically, but still almost purposefully) in the exhibition title, which studiously avoids giving us a position with which to reflect on the show or on the larger question of the nation’s art.729

If the first series of biennial exhibitions seized upon the model of a national buying show organized every other year, then the second series sought to nationalize the phenomenon of the “biennale”—the boom of more than two hundred landmark shows of international contemporary art held across the globe that have, since the early 1990s, come to define contemporary art.730 Bringing together a regular series of exhibitions of recent acquisitions of contemporary Canadian art, in line with its forerunners—the nineteenth century World Fair and the Paris Salon—the National Gallery’s Canadian Biennial sought to brandish the critical power of “biennialization”731 as “institutional backing” for the task of nation building.732 In mandate the National Gallery’s Canadian Biennial was much like any

729 Reid Shier, “It Is What It Is: Or Is It?” Canadian Art, January 6, 2011, https://canadianart.ca/reviews/biennial/.

730 Charles Green and Anthony Gardner, Biennials, Triennials, and Documenta: The Exhibitions That Created Contemporary Art (Oxford, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., 2016), 3.

731 A term possibly coined by Gerhard Haupt in Berlin to designate “a phenomenon both cultural and mass- mediatic that archived its peak force during the 1990s and consisted (and still consists) of the multiplication of contemporary art Biennials in the world’s biggest capitals.” Wu, “Biennials Without Borders?” 107.

732 Oliver Marchart, “The Globalization of Art and the “Biennials of Resistance”: A History of the Biennials from the Periphery,” World Art 4, no. 2 (2014): 264.

311 other national biennial: consider the Whitney in the United States733 and the Tate Triennial in the United Kingdom734 which had, in their shows, sought to “take stock, to reflect and to showcase not only what a nation’s artists are achieving, but also their current conversations, their priorities and, critically, the means with which they are trying to achieve their ends.”735

While the Whitney and the Tate focused their series on promoting the nation as an incubator for emerging contemporary art production, in contrast the National Gallery sought with its series to promote the country’s image by locating contemporary artists exhibited on the global stage. Its selection of artists for exhibition would signal how the institution brokered the relationship between identity, nationhood, and its own national mandate during the transcultural turn.

It Is What It Is: Recent Acquisitions of New Canadian Art (2010)

The first exhibition in the Canadian Biennial series displayed seventy-five works by fifty-eight unique artists organized into fifty-three artist groups collected since April 2008 by three departments of the National Gallery of Canada: Contemporary Art, Indigenous Art, and the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography (CMCP).736 Ten artists were foreign-

733 The Whitney is a biennale of contemporary American art typically showcasing the work of younger and lesser well-known artists at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City: it began as an annual exhibition in 1932 and continued as a biennial in 1973.

734 The Tate Triennial is described as “a triennial exhibition showcasing new developments in contemporary British Art with the aim of presenting different perspectives on current developments. Initiated in 2000, curators of the triennial provide an important forum for the discussion of contemporary British art both in Britain and abroad.” “Tate Triennial,” Biennial Foundation, January 17, 2009, accessed May 23, 2018, http://www.biennialfoundation.org/biennials/tate-triennial.

735 Shier, “It Is What It Is: Or Is It?”

736 The fifty-eight unique artists exhibited, in alphabetical order: David Altmejd, Stephen Andrews, Shuvinai Ashoona, Mary Anne Barkhouse, Rebecca Belmore, Jasmine Bilodeau, Valérie Blass, Shary Boyle, James Carl, Patrick Coutu, Thirza Cuthand, Geoffrey Farmer, Karel Funk, Tim Gardner, Chris Gergley, Sébastien Giguère, Greg Girard, Rodney Graham, Pascal Grandmaison, Adad Hannah, Isabelle Hayeur, Antonia Hirsch, Kristan

312 born,737 with the balance born in Canada concentrated in Central and Western Canada.738 In terms of birth location the Maritimes was (once again) largely overlooked, but for the first time in the history of a biennial series the North was represented by way of two artists born in the former Northwest Territories.739 In each artist’s current residency—the city, province, or country they called home—the overall artist profile paralleled that of birth with most artists living and working in Canada (or in Canada and one other country),740 with most located in the three large metropolitan centres identified as sites of significant artistic production in the first series: Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal.741 While very few artists

Horton, Simon Hughes, Spring Hurlbut, Sarah Anne Johnson, Wanda Koop, Rodney LaTourelle, Nicolas Laverdière, Tim Lee, Mark Lewis, Pascal Lièvre, Liz Magor, Trevor Mahovsky, Luanne Martineau, Scott McFarland, Sandra Meigs, Chris Millar, Gareth Moore, Alex Morrison, Nadia Myre, Shelley Niro, Ed Pien, Tim Pitsiulak, Yannick Pouliot, Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay, Steven Shearer, Ron Terada, Susan Turcot, Jeff Wall, Ian Wallace, Chih-Chien Wang, Rhonda Weppler, Colleen Wolstenholme, Kevin Yates, Robert Youds, Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, and Etienne Zack. There were three collaborations: BGL (Jasmine Bilodeau, Sébastien Giguère, and Nicolas Laverdière) collaborated on Rapides et dangereux (2006); Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay worked with Pascal Lièvre on Patriotic (2005); and Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky worked collaboratively on two works: Large Hanging Plant (2008) and Perch (2007). The exhibition catalogue cites a temporal period of April 2008 to March 2010 but two works in the show were acquired in 2007: BGL’s Rapides et dangereux (2006) and Luanne Martineau’s Parasite Buttress (2005). Josée Drouin-Brisebois, Greg A. Hill, Andrea Kunard, with contributions from Heather Anderson...[et al.], It Is What It Is: Recent Acquisitions of New Canadian Art (Ottawa: The National Gallery of Canada, 2010).

737 Three artists were born in the United States, and seven in the countries of Germany, England, France, Taiwan, and Korea.

738 Eleven artists each were born in British Columbia and in the Prairies, nine in Ontario, and fourteen in Quebec; in terms of the rest of Canada: one artist born in Nova Scotia represented the four provinces comprising the Maritimes.

739 On April 1, 1999, Canada created a third territory called Nunavut split from the central and eastern area of the former Northwest Territories. Now residing within the territory of Nunavut are the cities of Kimmirut, Cape Dorset, and Iqaluit (the capital). The (new) Northwest Territories includes the regions of Dehcho, North Slave, Sahtu, South Slave, and Inuvik; Yellowknife is the capital.

740 Fifty-two artists lived and worked in Canada with three living abroad in either one or more locations across the United States, England, China, and Germany, and two sharing their time between Canada and another country, either British Columbia and Germany or Quebec and Germany. One artist’s current location was not disclosed in the exhibition catalogue: Pascal Lièvre; likely he was not considered a qualifying biennial artist (but as contributing to the work of a biennial artist) and for this reason his French nationality is not taken into account within the frame of this discussion.

741 Twenty artists lived and worked in Vancouver, six in Toronto, and nine in Montreal. Among the other cities: Quebec City, Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Calgary, London (Ontario), and Victoria, among a number of smaller

313 were female across the first series,742 now, in the twenty-first century, the proportion of representation of female artists became significant: in 2010 nineteen or close to one third of exhibited artists were female—a gender proportion that would stand as the series average

(yet be surpassed more than once in later years).

In a sweeping statement of Canadianness, all artists were cited as Canadian in the nationality subject field of the National Gallery’s collections management database with the exception of three: Ed Pien was cited as “Taiwanese, Canadian” and two artists, Shuvinai

Ashoona and Tim Pitsiulak, held special status signalled by the additional marker of “Inuit” in parentheses following “Canadian” under nationality. If these markers of identity can be considered direct—declared national identity within the assigned database field—a related series of artist cohorts carried identity markers of a more indirect nature raising the question of the nature of Canadian national identity during the transcultural turn. In addition to

Ashoona and Pitsiulak, five artists also on display and collected by Indigenous Art—Mary

Anne Barkhouse, Thirza Cuthand, Nadia Myre, Shelley Niro,743 and Lawrence Paul

Yuxweluptun—carried mention of their Indigenous status within the narrative of their catalogue essays and/or in the collections management database either as part of the

centres. Staying close to home, the lone Nova Scotian-born artist continued to live and work there (to remain the only representation from the Maritimes), and the two artists born in the former Northwest Territories lived and worked in Cape Dorset, Nunavut.

742 Only the first exhibition in the first series yielded a reasonable representation of artists who were female: in 1953 some eighteen percent. Subsequent shows dipped as low as eight percent for a series average holding at just over thirteen percent.

743 For reasons unknown, Shelley Niro’s work in question, a digital video entitled Living with Fire/From the Ashes (2005), does not appear in the National Gallery of Canada collections management database. Assigning her work as collected by the Department of Indigenous Art is a guess based on the pattern of collection for its medium: all Niro’s films are collected by Indigenous Art and all of her photographs are assigned to the Canadian Photography Institute (CPI). “Canadian”

314 summary biography section or in the artist statement narrative.744 This cohort of artists highlighted two further means by which artists’ identities were marked: the National Gallery department that collected an artist’s work and the department that authored the attendant catalogue essay. Interestingly, these were not always one and the same.

While most works exhibited in the biennial were collected as contemporary Canadian art with attendant catalogue essays authored by the corresponding Department of

Contemporary Art,745 the work of one artist collected as contemporary Canadian art—an ink jet print by Isabelle Hayeur—saw the attendant catalogue essay written from outside the collecting department: it was written jointly, by curatorial staff in Contemporary Art and the

Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography. As would be expected, of the eight works collected by the Department of Indigenous Art, two works by artists carrying the marker of

“Inuit”—Ashoona and Pitsiulak—had their exhibition catalogue essays written by a specialist of Inuit art, yet three of the six remaining Indigenous-collected artists had catalogue essays written not by curatorial staff in Indigenous Art but by a member of the

744 Barkhouse is cited as Aboriginal in the exhibition catalogue, as “Canadian (Kwakwaka'wakw)” in the database summary biography, and is described as a Kwakiutl artist elsewhere on the National Gallery website; Cuthand as Aboriginal in the exhibition catalogue (of Cree, Scottish, and Irish heritage), and as “Canadian (Cree)” in the database summary biography; Myre is cited as Algonquin and a member of the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg in the exhibition catalogue, and as “Canadian (Algonquin)” in the database summary biography; Niro is described as a member of the Turtle Clan, Bay of Quinte Kanien'kehaka (Mohawk) from the Six Nations Reserve near Brantford, Ontario in both the exhibition catalogue and in the database artist’s statement narrative; and Yuxweluptun is cited as Salish in the exhibition catalogue, and as “Canadian (Salish/Okanagan)” in the database summary biography. See the exhibition catalogue: Drouin-Brisebois et al., It Is What It Is; and the National Gallery collections management database: https://www.gallery.ca/collection/search-the-collection.

745 Yet more works were authored by the Department of Contemporary art than collected by them: eighty percent or forty-four out of fifty-five essays authored with seventy-seven percent or fifty-eight out of seventy- five works collected. The number of catalogue essays in any given biennial exhibition depended on the composition of unique artist groups. In 2010, while there were fifty-three unique artists groups there were fifty- five essays in the exhibition over catalogue for the curators authored one essay for each of the Weppler/Mahovsky collaborations, and one essay for Nemerofsky Ramsay’s solo work and one for his collaboration with Lièvre. Drouin-Brisebois et al., It Is What It Is.

315

Department of Contemporary Art: Rhiannon Vogl, a curatorial assistant in Contemporary

Art, introduced the work of Cuthand, Myre, and Niro.

In the 2010 exhibition the National Gallery selected from its recent acquisitions its strongest showing of Canadian artists in the history of the Canadian Biennial series. Across all three direct markers of national identity—place of birth, lives and works location, and nationality—the institution presented the contemporary Canadian artist as not only physically tied to Canada’s geographic borders but politically bound to them as well.746 Through a

(somewhat) proportional distribution of artists based on the population of each provincial region or territory, and by locating artists not only in the East and the West but also in the

North, the institution asserted a Canada that, at the beginning of the twenty-first century,

(finally) included the nation from “coast to coast.” Never again would the National Biennial advance such a clear and simple profile of national artistic identity—namely, one based on the notion that Canadian identity is inextricably linked to the nation’s borders, and to each of its regions.

Among the artists identified as Canadian in the National Gallery collections management database via a series of direct and indirect markers, the institution also recognized a select cohort collected by the Department of Indigenous Art for a kind of

Canadianness that was either added to nationality, or set apart from it. All Inuit-marked artists carried their Indigenous identity directly within the database subject field for and on par with nationality—as “Canadian (Inuit)”—thus declaring their national identity not only

746 Just over eighty-one percent of artists were born in Canada, some eighty-eight percent lived and worked exclusively in Canada (another three percent counted Canada as home at least part of the year), and, including the two artists marked as “Canadian (Inuit),” approximately ninety-seven percent held Canadian nationalities (one additional artist held dual nationality with Canada thus bringing the overall tally of artists holding Canadian nationalities to ninety-eight percent).

316 as Canadian, but also as one of three sets of culturally-distinct First Peoples of Canada with historical ties to the land. In contrast the balance of artists collected by Indigenous Art saw elements of their identity positioned less directly: their national identity as “Canadian” appeared within the formal field for nationality, while their Indigenous identity was marked outside of nationality in one or more biographical fields. It was within the more flexible summary biography section of the National Gallery database—a narrative field that often duplicates the information populating the nationality field proper but pulls from an

(unknown) secondary source of data entry—that Mary Anne Barkhouse was cited as

“Canadian (Kwakwaka'wakw),” Thirza Cuthand as “Canadian (Cree),” Nadia Myre as

“Canadian (Algonquin),” and Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun as “Canadian

(Salish/Okanagan).”747

By locating Indigenous identity—here, specifically Aboriginal identity—as separate from nationality while maintaining some connection between the two, by way of one word or several narrative phrases describing each artist according to people and nation, land and territory, and, occasionally, by language, all components of the unique networks of connection and exchange key and meaningful to Indigenous Peoples (and indigeneity generally), the National Gallery not only achieved the effective communication of the nuance and complexity of the culturally-distinct First Nations or Métis artist, but signalled an identity positioned in addition or secondary to, and perhaps even separate from or as a subset

747 For reasons unknown, Shelley Niro’s record does not populate a summary biography; rather, her record includes an artist statement narrative where her Indigenous identity as “a member of the Six Nations reserve, Turtle Clan, Bay of Quinte Mohawk” is described. This appears a trend: in instances where an artist collected by Indigenous Art has no summary biography an artist statement narrative does appear that includes some mention of Indigenous identity. See the National Gallery collections management database: “Shelley Niro,” accessed June 26, 2019, https://www.gallery.ca/collection/artist/shelley-niro.

317 of, that of (simply) Canadian. Significant here to note is that had the institution relied on political nationality alone to express Canadianness, Aboriginal identity would have been silenced, erased, and never brought to bear on the complexity of Canadian national identity.

Indeed, whether articulated as hinged to nationality (as with the Inuit artist) or held apart from it (as with the Aboriginal artist: First Nations or Métis), the National Gallery—as an institution collecting and exhibiting Canadianness via the vehicle of the Canadian Biennial, and by way of its reliance on both direct and indirect markers of identity to signal who an artist was and how this identity influenced their work—maintained that the Indigenous identity of all “supra-Canadians” was as equally meaningful as (and likely more important than) national identity.

Other institutional structures worked to similarly mark Indigenous identity in the

2010 exhibition (and after), and it was through these infrastructural systems that the practical application of the National Gallery’s critical engagement with the notion of identity came to bear. Incongruencies across key media—specifically, databases (architecture and content management), biennial exhibition catalogues essays, and attendant critical curatorial support—and physical space—the exhibition gallery itself—prompts the question of how the

National Gallery conceived of identity at the beginning of the twenty-first century and where, exactly, it located it.

The fact that the identity marker of Inuit appeared in the institution’s collections management database embedded within the subject field for nationality—almost as a qualifier for or even an extension of Canadian national identity—suggests that for this cohort of artists, Indigenous identity was always imagined alongside nationality. Further, that the database articulated not the acquisition of Inuit art by the Department of Indigenous Art but,

318 rather, the identification of Inuit artists purchased in the national collection, signaled an information management structure specifically designed to identify and track a select cohort of Canadian artists according to collective identity. In the critical evaluation of their work, too, it was exclusively specialists of Inuit art located within the department that liaised with each artist and researched and wrote each artist essay—a keen display of expertise that precluded the involvement of other curatorial departments. And, lastly, the presentation of

Inuit art in separate and dedicated exhibition galleries as they were in 2010 until (as discussed in Chapter Five), the institution reimagined Inuit art as part of the Canadian story in its new gallery space opened in 2017, indicated that Inuit artists were positioned not only as culturally distinct from all other Canadian artists but as absolutely protected in their fixed identity.748

Yet no such closed informational or exhibitional space existed for the other First

Peoples of Canada collected by Indigenous Art. Artists of First Nations or Métis heritage were marked for Indigenous identity individually, in biographical fields via descriptive narratives separate from nationality, and thus with no means for the National Gallery via its database to filter and group these artists under one collective identity. Although most artists marked as Indigenous were collected and had essays authored by Indigenous Art, not all were. Unlike Inuit artists, many Indigenous artists were collected under the umbrella of the

Department of Contemporary Art with some introduced by contemporary art specialists—a

748 The National Gallery has collected Inuit art since the 1950s, but it was only in the late 1980s when it secured its permanent home on Sussex Drive did it open galleries dedicated to the display of Inuit art separate from all other genres of Canadian Art (albeit in a windowless basement). It was likely a gesture intended to at once correct the long absence of Inuit art within the institution’s collecting and exhibiting history and also to celebrate Inuit art as a distinct art form. In 2017, Inuit art’s cache and collection would be raised—literally—to the main floor and displayed alongside all of art in Canada in the new Canadian and Indigenous Galleries. “Collecting Areas: Inuit Art,” National Gallery of Canada, accessed June 26, 2019, https://www.gallery.ca/collection/collecting-areas/Indigenous-art/inuit-art.

319 signal that for these artists, Indigenous identity could readily, and as necessary, be subordinated to the medium of the contemporary and exhibited as such with no loss to

Aboriginal identity. If, in the case of the Inuit artist, Indigenous identity was located in nationality, expressed collectively, and effected as fixed, then for artists of First Nations or

Métis heritage, Indigenous identity was located in biography, expressed individually, and effected as flexible. Such broad adaptability across collections and exhibitions practices yielded not only a powerfully elastic cohort of artists able to occupy several forums at once and without threat to identity, but it also cultivated a resilient notion of identity—a model for the politics of identity under debate during the transcultural turn.

Builders: Canadian Biennial 2012

In his preface to the 2012 biennial exhibition catalogue, Marc Mayer introduced a total of one hundred and nineteen works by forty-five unique artists collected since April

2010 by the Departments of Contemporary Art, Indigenous Art, and Photographs,749 and set them into context:

749 The forty-five unique artists exhibited, in alphabetical order: Vikky Alexander, David Altmejd, Benoît Aquin, Melanie Authier, Jim Breukelman, Michel De Broin, Edward Burtynsky, Lynne Cohen, Chris Cran, Max Dean, Susan Dobson, Marcel Dzama, Brendan Fernandes, Robert Fones, Christian Giroux, Will Gorlitz, Terence Gower, David Ross Harper, Faye HeavyShield, Dil Hildebrand, David Hoffos, Simon Hughes, Elisapee Ishulutaq, Sarah Anne Johnson, Brian Jungen, Myfanwy Macleod, Qavavau Manumie, Lynne Marsh, Scott McFarland, Jason McLean, Michael Merrill, David Merritt, Evan Penny, Sandy Plotnikoff, Jon Pylypchuk, Leslie Reid, David K. Ross, Mark Ruwedel, Michael Snow, Mark Soo, Derek Sullivan, Ron Terada, Joanne Tod, Steven Waddell, and Daniel Young. Interestingly, while all works were acquired within the last two years and the majority of works were dated between 2010 and 2011, some works dated to the early 2000s (thus overlapping with the first exhibition in terms of when works were made) with two dating to the mid- 1980s. Jonathan Shaughnessy with essays by Heather Anderson...[et al.], Builders: Canadian Biennial 2012 (Ottawa: The National Gallery of Canada, 2012).

320

[Builders] reflects how this national museum builds upon its permanent collection through an informed understanding of the dynamic and thought-provoking realm of Canadian contemporary art at the most ambitious levels, and across generations.750

For Mayer, the key role of the National Gallery lay in acquiring from the very best of

“Canada’s visual art production today” important works for the national collection held in trust for all Canadians. To this end, with the number of works selected for display up by more than half from the first biennial exhibition but the number of unique artists showcased down by approximately one quarter,751 the series shifted in focus to now privilege the display of complete bodies of work by fewer, select artists—a reflection of recent Canadian acquisitions in which the National Gallery, by collecting bodies of works by established artists or initiating new collections by emerging artists, sought to fill gaps in the collection and thereby strengthen it. Jonathan Shaughnessy, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art and lead organizer for the exhibition, remarked on the responsibility of the National Gallery in choosing wisely for the national collection, as well as the institution’s influential role shaping notions of the contemporary:

[T]he most important criteria in assessing these artists’ works has less to do with respective stages of careers or reputations as it does the ability of the artwork itself to resonate strongly and loudly within an oeuvre, and in the context of a broader aesthetic dialogue. That the works on view in Builders reflect on and address issues of present-day concern within art and culture is paramount, and sets definitions over what we call “contemporary.”752

750 Marc Mayer, “Foreword,” in Builders: Canadian Biennial 2012 (Ottawa: The National Gallery of Canada, 2012), 9.

751 Recall that in the first exhibition seventy-five works were exhibited from a total of fifty-eight artists.

752 Jonathan Shaughnessy, “Intro to Builders: Canadian Biennial 2012,” in Builders: Canadian Biennial 2012 (Ottawa: The National Gallery of Canada, 2012), 16.

321

Against this mandate Shaughnessy addressed the process that led to the selection of each work that now “entered the permanent collection.”753 In place of the usual curatorial descriptions, the exhibition catalogue published excerpts of acquisition justifications alongside short artist-authored narratives, which the curators referred to as “insights”:754

Versed with a comprehensive knowledge of art historical precedents and direct access to a diversity of art practices today, curators … strive to be as fully informed as possible and to translate this understanding into decisions about what to propose for acquisition. By way of disclosing this process the catalogue entries in this publication have been structured in two parts: first, a statement from each artist featured in Builders … followed by a passage drawn from the curatorial justifications.... The latter shares criteria on which informed judgements in building the collection are based, while the artist statements provide insight into dialogues between curators and artists which frequently lead to discovery.755

Evident in this introduction is that once again the institution was advancing the Canadian

Biennial as a collections survey packaged under the guise of a “biennale.” Indeed, it would be only in the final year of the series that the National Gallery would fully embrace the tenets that guided and nourished the international version of the phenomenon.

The second exhibition in the Canadian Biennial series—entitled Builders as a nod to the artists credited with shaping perspectives in Canadian art in recent years—displayed a strong cohort of Canadian-born artists.756 Yet, despite this overt marking of Canadianness, eight artists were foreign-born notably with birth locations stretching across the

753 Mayer, “Foreword,” Builders, 9.

754 There were forty-four catalogue entries, one for every artist or artist group exhibited: Daniel Young and Christian Giroux collaborated on Every Building, or Site, that a Building Permit was issued for a New Building in Toronto in 2006 (2008). Shaughnessy et al., Builders, 174.

755 Shaughnessy, “Intro to Builders,” 3.

756 As in the first show, artists born in Canada drew largely from four provincial regions: eight artists were born in British Columbia, seven in the Prairies, thirteen in Ontario, and seven in Quebec. One artist was born in New Brunswick and a single artist was born in the former Northwest Territories.

322 world.757Most artists living and working in Canada resided in only a handful of locations,758 while those residing outside Canada lived and worked in two and sometimes three countries across Canada, the United States, and one other foreign location.759 And, despite a decline in representation of female artists,760 the show saw a robust balance of forty new, never before exhibited, (mostly male) artists with only five repeating from the first exhibition: David

Altmejd, Simon Hughes, Sarah Anne Johnson, Scott McFarland, and Ron Terada.

All artists were cited as Canadian in the nationality subject field of the National

Gallery’s collections management database with the exception of six: Lynne Cohen was cited as “American, Canadian,” Max Dean as “British, Canadian,” Evan Penny as “South African,

Canadian,” and Mark Ruwedel as “American” (the only fully non-Canadian artist); Qavavau

Manumie and Elisapee Ishulutaq were cited with the additional marker of “Inuit” following

“Canadian” under nationality. Two additional artists, Faye HeavyShield and Brian Jungen, were marked indirectly for Indigenous identity in varying degrees via mentions of their territory or peoples in the narrative of their exhibition catalogue essays and/or within the narrative sections of the National Gallery’s collections database.761 There were few surprises

757 Thirty-seven of the forty-five artists exhibited were born in Canada with eight artists foreign-born: two artists were born in the United States, and six in the countries of Trinidad (British West Indies), the United Kingdom, Argentina, Kenya, South Africa, and Singapore.

758 Thirty-five out of forty-five artists: six artists lived and worked in British Columbia (almost exclusively in Vancouver), five artists in the Prairies (centred around Calgary, Winnipeg, and Lethbridge), seventeen artists lived and worked in Ontario (Toronto mostly), and five artists lived and worked in Quebec (exclusively Montreal); only two artists lived and worked in Nunavut, and there was no representation from the Maritimes.

759 These included Germany and the United Kingdom.

760 There were eleven artists selected who were female, the lowest the series would ever see.

761 Jungen is cited as born and raised in the Dane-zaa territory of the Peace River Valley in northern BC in the exhibition catalogue, and as Aboriginal and a member of the Dane-zee Nation in the database artist statement narrative; and HeavyShield is cited as a “Native woman” in the database artist statement narrative (the exhibition catalogue is silent on her Indigenous status and while her record in the database does not include a summary biography it does include one signal, her place of birth: Blood Reserve, Alberta). See the exhibition

323 regarding infrastructural markers of identity—which artists were collected by which department and which department was responsible for exhibition catalogue essays—yet one anomaly presented: four artists collected as contemporary Canadian art had essays written by curatorial staff in Photographs: Susan Dobson, Sarah Anne Johnson, Scott McFarland, and

Stephen Waddell.762 In these instances it would seem that the medium of photography trumped contemporaneity.

In the 2012 exhibition the National Gallery selected from its recent acquisitions its second strongest showing of Canadian artists in Canadian Biennial history. If in the first exhibition living and working within Canada’s physical borders signalled geography as a leading marker of the Canadianness of the artists selected—second only to the leading marker of Canadianness, nationality—then in the second show the National Gallery relaxed the requirement that artists call Canada home and once again relied upon Canada’s more flexible political border, the highly transportable marker of Canadian nationality, to stand as each artist’s primary marker of Canadianness. Though they may have held dual nationalities, might not have been born in Canada, or may not have been living within its geographic borders, either by way of single or dual nationalities close to ninety-eight percent of artists selected for exhibition were marked as Canadian making nationality, independent of current

catalogue: Shaughnessy et al., Builders; and the National Gallery collections management database: https://www.gallery.ca/collection/search-the-collection. Further marking both as Indigenous was the fact that they were collected by the Department of Indigenous Art and had their essays authored by members of that curatorial staff.

762 Most works—close to two thirds—were collected as contemporary Canadian art. The balance: less than one percent of exhibited works were collected by the Department of Indigenous Art, and thirty-one percent by Photographs By the two Inuit-marked artists and the two Indigenous-marked artists.

324 residency, the single strongest marker of Canadian identity for the second time in the series’ history.763

This reliance on transportable identity signalled one trend, and one reality. First, the trend of an increasing number of Canadian artists—artists holding Canadian nationalities— gravitating towards major international metropolitan centres recognized as active sites of artistic production,764 such as New York, Los Angeles, London, and Berlin. Second, the reality that no matter where in the world a Canadian artist called home, they retained their

Canadian nationality and could wield their Canadianness to the same effect as a resident.

While David Altmejd, Marcel Dzama, Terence Gower, David Ross Harper, Lynne Marsh,

Jon Pylypchuk, David K. Ross, Mark Ruwedel, and Mark Soo lived and worked abroad, all maintained their Canadianness by way of the very mobile marker of nationality.765

Yet for all these markers of Canadianness there were contradictions. For the one artist selected for exhibition not holding Canadian nationality, Mark Ruwedel, locating his

Canadianness involved invoking a series of markers of identity in the opposite direction of nationality. Born in the United States, Ruwedel was cited as American in the nationality subject field of the National Gallery collections management database yet was described as a

Canadian photographer within the narrative section of same database, in the artist statement summary. A full analysis of Ruwedel’s biography as described in the National Gallery

763 While in 2012 birth rates held steady at 2010 levels to see just over eighty-two percent of artists born in Canada, Canadian lives and works rates dropped by some ten percent just under seventy-eight percent of artists lived and worked exclusively in Canada (another almost nine percent counted lived and worked in Canada at least part of the year).

764 Take for example the fact that thirty-eight percent or seventeen out of a total of forty-five artists exhibited hailed from Ontario in 2012, almost twenty-seven percent or twelve artists from the city of Toronto alone.

765 Four of these artists resided outside of Canada at least part of the year.

325 collections management database and elsewhere reveals a number of indirect markers

(possibly) used by the institution to assign Ruwedel Canadian status: Ruwedel was one of four artists who counted Canada as their second home;766 Ruwedel was educated in Canada, receiving his MFA from Concordia University in Montreal in 1983, and taught at a number of Canadian institutions;767 Ruwedel often featured the signature western Canadian landscape as the subject of his photographs; and, lastly, Ruwedel’s work was not only collected by the such world-renowned Canadian art institutions as the National Gallery of Canada and the

(former) Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, but he was the recipient of a number of awards honouring artistic achievement reserved for Canadian artists.768 Yet

Ruwedel also carried a number of markers that supported the Americanness of his identity. In addition to being born in the United States and pursuing his undergraduate education there,

Ruwedel has lived in Long Beach, California, since 2002 and has taught at California State

University. In his work he has photographed much of the American West and it was these landscapes that were the subject of the images collected by the National Gallery in 2002.

And lastly, as an American artist Ruwedel’s work has been exhibited at and collected by

766 Yet, in Ruwedel’s case, likely not for professional reasons: Refuge Cove is a well-known vacation spot in coastal British Columbia.

767 Ruwedel taught at Concordia in Montreal, and at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax.

768 These include a Canada Council ‘A’ grant and the Scotiabank Photography Award (2014), both which require Canadian nationality for eligibility. Scotiabank Photography Award, “History: Mark Ruwedel,” accessed June 26, 2019, http://www.scotiabank.com/photoaward/en/0,,6336,00.html.

326 countless institutions across the United States,769 and he credits as his greatest influence the work of a number of renowned American landscape photographers.770

Given that eleven of Ruwedel’s works were collected by the Canadian Photography

Institute in 2012771 raises the question of how the Canadianness of the artists acquired for the

(Canadian) national collection was determined. Add to Ruwedel’s stake of some nine percent of the total number of works by Canadian artists acquired by the National Gallery and selected for exhibition the acquisition of other artists who held nationalities in addition to

Canadian—specifically, dual Canadians Lynne Cohen, Max Dean, and Evan Penny—and the number of works by artists claiming citizenship outside of Canada climbs to almost thirty percent.772 This number is not insignificant. It stands as an early sign of the National

Gallery’s shift away from the strict parameter of showcasing the work of “Canadian artists” to the gradual embrace of the less rigid notion of “artists in Canada.”

Shine a Light (2014)

Marc Mayer’s exhibition catalogue introduction presented the third biennial as a collections survey, one that “celebrates the National Gallery of Canada’s commitment to contemporary Canadian art…[and] highlights the efforts of NGC curators in building a

769 These include the National Gallery in Washington, the San Francisco MOMA, and the Tate Modern in London.

770 These include the artist Robert Smithson, and the photographers Walker Evans, Lewis Baltz, and Robert Adams.

771 According to the National Gallery database, a total of one hundred and fifty-two works by Ruwedel are held in the permanent collection. See the National Gallery collections management database: National Gallery of Canada, “Mark Ruwedel,” accessed June 26, 2019, https://www.gallery.ca/collection/search-the- collection?search_api_views_fulltext=mark+ruwedel&sort_by=search_api_relevance.

772 Lynn Cohen had five works displayed, Max Dean sixteen, Evan Penny one, and Mark Ruwedel eleven. Shaughnessy, Builders.

327 representative national collection that focuses on innovation and diversity.”773 Continuing the precedent set by the previous show, the exhibition saw the number of artists in the cohort decrease to twenty-six unique artists, about half the series average.774 However, the overall number of works collected since April 2012 by the departments of Contemporary Art,

Indigenous Art, and Photographs increased, to eighty-two works.775 In an effort to enable the institution to explore each artist’s range and depth with the goal of compiling an exhibition indicative of the practice of contemporary art in Canada, Mayer described the exhibition as

“conceived as a number of smaller solo and group shows.”776

Returning as lead organizer, Curator of Contemporary Art Josée Drouin-Brisebois wrote of a more ambitious mandate. She pointed to the show’s title, Shine a Light, as a modern-day reference to Plato’s The Allegory of the Cave, and likened the twenty-first century artistic endeavours of contemporary artists working across the nation with the

“release” of all humanity from darkness:

Artists can be seen as modern-day philosophers and visionaries who shine light on events, places and people that have been obscured, forgotten or marginalized by history and societies. At times they work as archaeologists and dig up stories and artifacts for reconsideration, and to question understandings of the past, the present

773 Marc Mayer, “Foreword,” in Shine a Light: Canadian Biennial 2014 (Ottawa: The National Gallery of Canada, 2014), 8.

774 The twenty-six unique artists exhibited, in alphabetical order: David Armstrong Six, Shuvinai Ashoona, Nicolas Baier, Shary Boyle, Edward Burtynsky, Tammi Campbell, Mario Doucette, Geoffrey Farmer, David Hartt, Isabelle Hayeur, Philippa Jones, Stéphane La Rue, Rita Letendre, An Te Liu, David McMillan, Damian Moppett, Luke Parnell, Vanessa Paschakarnis, Ed Pien, Tim Pitsiulak, Kelly Richardson, Jeremy Shaw, Althea Thauberger, Jutai Toonoo, Howie Tsui, and Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun. Josée Drouin-Brisebois, Greg Hill, Andrea Kunard, Jonathan Shaughnessy, and Rhiannon Vogl, Shine a Light: Canadian Biennial 2014 (Ottawa: The National Gallery of Canada, 2014).

775 The exhibition catalogue cites a temporal period of April 2012 and March 2014, although Ed Pien’s Ad Infinitum (1999–2000) was acquired in 2010. Ibid.

776 Mayer explained: “[T]he biennial showcases the production of twenty-six artists from different generations and backgrounds, working across the country in a range of media.” Mayer, “Foreword,” Shine a Light, 8.

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and even the future. They challenge perceptions of what is real, imagined and accepted as true.777

Just as each work “shone a light” in terms of subject matter and focus, so too did the diversity of artists on display. By way of their selection for collection and exhibition, many artists, some of them representing a Canada that had been excluded in the whole of the previous series, exemplified the notion that the label of Canadian carried implications much wider than simply the boundaries of geography and even political affiliation.

Twenty of the artists selected for exhibition were born in Canada; six were foreign- born—the highest rate to date of artists born outside of Canada (but not ever).778 The profiles of artists from Canada revealed a pattern set by previous exhibitions with the majority of artists tied to one of four dominant provincial regions either by birth or by current residence.

Yet a new trend emerged whereby the Canadian North gained steadily in representation to see three artists born in the former Northwest Territories.779 To allow for this increase in artists representing northern Canada, the distribution of artists born elsewhere in Canada had, over time, shifted down with Ontario and Quebec (and, to a degree, the Prairies780) reduced in representation.781 This more equitable distribution—namely, representation from not only

777 Josée Drouin-Brisebois, “Shine a Light, Cast a Shadow,” in Shine a Light: Canadian Biennial 2014 (Ottawa: The National Gallery of Canada, 2014), 10.

778 Two artists were born in Taiwan with the remaining four born in the United Kingdom, Scotland, Germany, and China.

779 Four artists were born in BC and Ontario each, three in the Prairies, and five in Quebec; in keeping with low numbers from the balance of Canada, only one artist was born in the Maritimes. The three NWT-born artists represented the highest rate of artists born in the North in the history of the Canadian Biennial.

780 In 2010 almost nineteen percent of artists were born in the Prairies; in 2012 this number declined to almost sixteen percent. In 2014 the representation of Prairie-born artists hit a series low, at about twelve percent.

781 While in 2010 almost forty percent of artists were born in Ontario and Quebec combined, and in 2012 just under forty-five percent, this number dropped to approximately thirty-five percent in 2014 to see close to twelve percent of artists born in the North—an increase of almost ten percent from 2010 and 2012 levels.

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East to West but also from the North—was further levelled in terms of artist lives and works locations which saw all provinces, as well as Nunavut, Canada’s newest territory, claim their fair share of artist representation.782 To allow for this—the highest showing ever of artists living and working in Canada (not to mention from all of Canada)—only three artists lived and worked outside of Canada, the lowest numbers to date.783 Of the artists and works shown, most were collected, once again, within the last two years (with the majority dating to

2012, 2013, and 2014). It would seem that filling gaps in the collection was once again a priority for one work acquired dated to 1990 and a small handful dated as early as the mid- to late-1990s.784 Also reinforcing the hypothesis that collections management priorities were at play, the artist Edward Burtynsky, displayed a body of seven works, and repeated from the second exhibition, and six other artists—Shary Boyle, Geoffrey Farmer, Isabelle Hayeur, Ed

Pien, Tim Pitsiulak, and Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun—all returned from the 2010 Canadian

Biennial, and displayed one and sometimes two works each.

All artists were cited as Canadian in the nationality subject field of the National

Gallery’s collections management database with the exception of six: David McMillan held a trifecta of identities to be cited as “British, American, Canadian,” while Ed Pien was cited as

“Taiwanese, Canadian” and Philippa Jones was cited as “British” (the only fully non-

Canadian artist in 2014 and the second in the history of the Canadian Biennial series: recall

782 Twenty-three out of twenty-six artists exhibited lived and worked in Canada: six artists hailed from British Columbia (Vancouver exclusively), two from the Prairies, five artists from Ontario (Toronto exclusively), and four artists from Quebec (Montreal and region); across the balance of Canada: three artists lived and worked in the Maritimes (one each in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Newfoundland), and, in balance, three artists lived and worked in Cape Dorset, Nunavut (the same artists born in the former Northwest Territories).

783 One artist each lived and worked in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany.

784 For example, the National Gallery exhibited nine works by artist Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun dating in range from 1990 onwards. Drouin-Brisebois et al., Shine a Light.

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Ruwedel in 2012). Three artists collected by the Department of Indigenous Art—Shuvinai

Ashoona, Tim Pitsiulak, and Jutai Toonoo—held special status signalled by the additional marker of “Inuit” in parentheses following “Canadian” in the nationality subject field.

Outside of the nationality field, identity—whether cultural or artistic—was signalled by way of a reinforcement with, or the disconnection or the connection from, the collection to which an artist was assigned and an artist’s exhibition catalogue essay departmental author. Without exception all artists collected by Indigenous Art had staff within that curatorial department author their artist essays: Rita Letendre, Luke Parnell, and Lawrence

Paul Yuxweluptun, who each carried varying degrees of an indirect marker of identity signalling their Indigenous status,785 had their catalogue essays authored by curators in

Indigenous Art. Notably, for the first time in a Canadian Biennial, Greg Hill, Audain Senior

Curator of Indigenous Art, emerged as an essay author to introduce Letendre and

Yuxweluptun—likely a curator of Aboriginal descent was well-suited to introduce such established artists (Hill, marked as Kanyen'kehaka from Six Nations of the Grand River

Territory in Ontario, is also an artist). Similarly, all artists marked as “Inuit” had their essays authored by specialists within Indigenous Art: Shuvinai Ashoona was introduced by

Christine Lalonde (with co-author Rachelle Dickenson), Tim Pitsiulak by Rachelle

Dickenson, and Jutai Toonoo by Christine Lalonde. In terms of disconnections and (new) connections, while once again the majority of works were collected as contemporary

785 Letendre is cited for her French and Abenaki heritage in the exhibition catalogue and is noted for a “growing interest in her Aboriginal heritage” in the database artist statement narrative; Parnell is noted for the traditions that influence his work, “drawing from principles of Haida, Nisga'a and Tsimshian design…” and “...a complicated celebration of Northwest Coast art” in the exhibition catalogue, and is cited as “Canadian (Haida/Nisga’a)” in the database summary biography; Yuxweluptun is cited as Salish in the exhibition catalogue and as “Canadian (Salish/Okanagan)” in the database summary biography. See the exhibition catalogue: Drouin-Brisebois et al., Shine a Light; and the National Gallery collections management database: https://www.gallery.ca/collection/search-the-collection.

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Canadian art by the Department of Contemporary Art, the essays for the works of four artists exhibited—one essay each for the photographs of Edward Burtynsky, Isabelle Hayeur, and

David McMillan, and one for a work on film by Kelly Richardson—were authored not by curators in Contemporary Art, but by Andrea Kunard, the former Associate Curator of the

Department of Photographs, once again signalling the importance of media over contemporaneity.786 Lastly, there was one further inter-departmental exception: Ed Pien’s essay was jointly authored by curatorial staff in Contemporary Art and, likely because Pien’s work was on paper, by Heather Anderson of the Carleton University Art Gallery—a specialist of works on paper.787

In its selection of recent acquisitions for the 2014 exhibition, the National Gallery shifted in earnest from privileging the “Canadian” artist to showcasing artists “in Canada”— a move that resulted in its most diverse cohort of Canadian artists in the history of the

Canadian Biennial. While in the first two exhibitions the institution considered the contemporary Canadian artist as necessarily tethered to the nation politically—the Canadian artist by way of nationality—in the third biennial the National Gallery strategically negotiated the basis of national identity to collect and exhibit a wider, more flexible notion of national identity tolerant of the multiplicity of artists living and working in Canada and abroad signalling the beginnings of the institution’s disengagement from membership in the nation-state as a hard prerequisite for assigning Canadian artistic identity. Indeed, since 2010,

786 It is important to note that no artists were collected under the umbrella of photography in 2012, likely due to the pending transition from the Department of Photographs to the Canadian Photography Institute.

787 “Heather Anderson Named New CUAG Curator,” Carleton Newsroom, Carleton University, accessed December 10, 2019, https://newsroom.carleton.ca/archives/2012/08/27/heather-anderson-named-cuags-new- curator/.

332 overall biennial exhibition rates of artists holding Canadian nationalities had been steadily declining, most notably within the cohort of artists marked incongruously as Canadian.788

With these falling nationality rates and a series low of artists born in Canada,789 the third biennial presents as the series’ lowest representation of Canadians by birth or by citizenship yet simultaneously boasts one of the highest percentages of artists of various nationalities either directly or indirectly engaged with contemporary art production in Canada.790 An ancillary effect of this shift away from the political Canadian towards the resident Canadian active within the contemporary Canadian art scene: welcome entry for other kinds of

Canadian artists historically overlooked by virtue of their location outside of the contemporary mainstream, yet artists equal to and sometimes more so Canadian than those marked by birth or nationality alone.

In the 2014 exhibition the National Gallery showcased almost twelve percent of artists marked for Inuit identity, and another twelve marked as Indigenous; together, work by these “supra-Canadians” collected by the Department of Indigenous Art claimed almost a quarter of the total number of works selected for exhibition. Both in the number of artists selected and the number of works exhibited, this representation of Indigenous artists in 2014 ranked as the highest in the series’ history—a strong messenger of (corrected) Canadian

788 A robust ninety-three percent in 2010 fell to some eighty-seven percent in 2012, and in 2014 landed at its lowest rate of seventy-seven percent for a total drop since the inaugural show of more than sixteen percent (herein excluding “Canadian (Inuit)” or artists holding dual nationalities with Canada). Yet the trend of decline holds true with the inclusion of these other Canadians: in 2010 some ninety-eight percent of artists exhibited fell under the widest conception of Canadian nationality; while this number was maintained in 2012, it dropped to ninety-six percent in 2014, buoyed only by the higher-than-average rate of Inuit-marked artists.

789 It was less than seventy-seven percent in 2014, a drop of just over five percent from 2010 and 2012 levels.

790 In 2014 some eighty-eight percent of artists lived and worked in Canada, second only to ninety percent in 2010 and an increase of nearly ten percent from 2012.

333 diversity.791 Another cohort of artists, one traditionally marginalized by gender, moved closer to the centre: almost thirty-five percent of exhibited artists were female in 2014—the series average, and the nearest the Canadian Biennial had ever come to gender parity. Addressing in small part the historical double-marginalization of Indigenous women, two of these female artists were also marked for Indigenous identity: Shuvinai Ashoona as Inuit and Rita

Letendre were cited as First Nations or Métis. Diversity of geographic region was also prioritized. In a dramatic increase from only two percent 2010, and no representation at all in

2012, almost twelve percent of artists in 2014 hailed from the historically underrepresented

Maritime provinces—a yield made possible by declining numbers in typically stronghold cities and provinces where, since 2010, the combined representation from British Columbia,

Ontario, and Quebec had been dropping.792 These moves to seek and secure for the national collection a diversity of Canadian identities from locations within Canada historically marginalized by institutions of art historical knowledge—including a very guilty National

Gallery in the first series—represents a significant shift in thinking likely both reconciliatory and rhetorical in tone: instead of considering the borders of the nation-state as central to the notion of Canadian artistic identity, or even national identity, the National Gallery began a turn towards networks; namely, the institution sought to align the profile of the biennial artist with that of the wider and more flexible profile of the twenty-first century globally-located contemporary artist. To search for and locate these artists—artists whose identities lay not in strict categorizations feeding the infrastructural systems the institution had relied on so

791 This representation includes six works by three Inuit-marked artists: Ashoona (three), Toonoo (one), and Pitsiulak (two); and twelve works by three Indigenous-marked artists: Letendre (one), Parnell (two), and Yuxweluptun (nine).

792 This decline settled at a series low of fifty-eight percent (it was seventy-one percent in 2010 and sixty-two percent in 2012).

334 heavily in the first series to mark artists for Canadianness—now, during the transcultural turn, the National Gallery turned to the more robust marker of networks.

If the decline in Canadian nationality rates contributed to a rise in representation of

“supra-Canadians,” it also opened the door for a unique kind of Canadian artist grounded in place. UK-born artist Philippa Jones, cited by the National Gallery collections management database as holding exclusive British nationality, was the second non-Canadian artist to be marked indirectly for Canadian identity and included in the Canadian Biennial (recall

American artist Mark Ruwedel from the 2012 exhibition). A number of indirect markers of identity were likely invoked for her inclusion: in 2009 Jones relocated to St. John’s,

Newfoundland and Labrador, where she has lived and worked since; Jones often takes her home, specifically the physical land upon which she lives and works, as the subject of her work; and lastly, Jones has exhibited widely at museums and galleries across Canada including the Two Rivers Gallery in British Columbia, the National Gallery of Canada in

Ottawa, the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in New Brunswick, and, closer to home, at The Rooms

Provincial Art Gallery in Newfoundland and Labrador as well as the Newfoundland provincial art bank and the City of St. John’s. Likely the rationale for Jones as a Canadian

Biennial artist implicates all three of these markers, and possibly one more which proved key.

Jones’ most significant artistic accomplishment has been described as her fifteen-foot pen and ink wash MIRIAD Island (2012) selected for exhibition in the 2014 biennial—a fictionalized depiction St. John’s imagined as “rock, desolate trees and ocean pierced with a

335 few buildings and other signs of life.”793 By way of this work, Jones becomes the first artist living and working in Newfoundland and Labrador—“from” the long-overlooked Maritime province—to be included in a Canadian Biennial. There is little doubt that it is here that

Jones gains her Canadianness: in the absence of Canadian nationality, and despite no claim to an Atlantic Canadian birth or to any familial or cultural connection to the province, Jones’ residency and, most critically, her work as an artist of “the Rock”—the island of

Newfoundland—has led Jones to self-identify as a “St. John’s-based artist,”794 an identification often used by others to describe her. In the same way long-overlooked “Inuit” artists and also artists from the Atlantic provinces were marked for collective identity inextricably tied to “the North” and “the East” respectively, and for the National Gallery’s purposes—provincial regions historically underrepresented in the biennial exhibition series,795 Jones was marked for her Canadianness not according to held nationality but rather according to the place she signified—a slightly new introduction of identity-marking, one more flexible and conditional that the provincial markings that dominated many selections in the first series. Here, not as a Canadian—but as an honourary ambassador for the province of

Newfoundland and Labrador—Jones stands as an example of a constructed notion of

Canadianness that locates and advances an alternative-nationality artist as Canadian due in large part to her (self-)identification as an artist tied to a specific location within the nation

793 Jonathan Shaughnessy, “Philippa Jones,” in Shine a Light: Canadian Biennial 2014 (Ottawa: The National Gallery of Canada, 2014), 106.

794 The National Gallery of Canada, “Sobey Art Award: Philippa Jones,” accessed June 26, 2019, https://www.gallery.ca/whats-on/sobey-art-award/artists/sobey-art-award-atlantic#jones.

795 See: Suzanne A. Crowdis, “Atlantic Canadian Representation in the National Gallery of Canada's Biennial Exhibitions of Canadian Art (1953–1968)” (master’s thesis, Carleton University, 2010), https://doi.org/10.22215/etd/2010-08793.

336 rather any political attachment to the nation as a whole. It will be such notions of identification, and self-identification, that would lead to revised notions of Canadianness in the fourth and final biennial exhibition, in 2017.

2017 Canadian Biennial

A new direction for the final exhibition in the biennial series was set out simply and directly in an in-gallery publication: “[The 2017 Canadian Biennial] is the first Canadian

Biennial to feature works of international contemporary art alongside leading examples of art in Canada.”796 More than seeking the addition of international artists, the institution, for the first time in the history of the biennial exhibition series, moved to collapse under the auspices of the Canadian Biennial series both contemporary Canadian and International art to show, in parallel with Canadian artists, the work of international artists representing some nine other nationalities. Reinforcing this wider scope was the institution’s framing of exhibition’s mandate and purpose: “This exhibition reflects upon the dynamic nature of the global art world and the active presence of Canadian and Indigenous artists within it.”797

Two points of consensus were signalled by this new direction: first, that the transition from “Canadian Art”—the direct target of exhibition in 2010—to a softer and more inclusive

“art in Canada”—the oblique target of the 2014 show, and one of two aims in 2017—was complete; and second, that the “global art world” was the context within which the National

Gallery now openly recognized it was operating and, arguably, had been all along. The latter point was promptly seized by the press who remarked that the inclusion of artists from

796 The National Gallery of Canada, “Unnamed Publication,” Fall–Winter, 2017–2018.

797 Ibid.

337 outside Canada had the “welcome effect” of positioning recent acquisitions by the National

Gallery in a “global light.”798 In 2017, the founding exhibition’s mandate, “to take the pulse of contemporary art production in Canada,” was indeed erased and replacing it was an effort on the part of the institution to align the Canadian Biennial with the phenomenon of the international “biennale.” To that end the National Gallery articulated a reimagined series that sought to establish a new international pedigree located on a global stage:

The contemporary collection not only reflects the hybridity that exists within art production today, but also serves to position Canadian artists within a larger international context, to explore our place within an increasing globalized art world. The contemporary department is responsible for coordinating the Canadian Pavilion at the Venice Biennial, and has presented artists such as BGL, Shary Boyle, Geoffrey Farmer and Steven Shearer to an international audience. Founded in 2010, the Canadian Biennial has a mandate to include not just artists working in Canada, but also international artists—generating wider conversations about the relationships between contemporary art here and further afield.799

Less important to the National Gallery now was its previous emphasis on the collection and exhibition of Canadianness. In its place, a new criterion for biennial inclusion was applied: the critical capacity of each artist to hold their own on the global stage, and to stand alongside such “biennale” artists as BGL, Shary Boyle, and Geoffrey Farmer, and Steven

Shearer. In short, the National Gallery had evolved the Canadian Biennial from a national exhibition to an international “biennale” located in Canada and organized by its leading art institution for a global audience.800

798 Rupert Nuttle, “Worlds Inside Worlds: Review of 2017 Canadian Biennial,” in Canadian Art, November 1, 2017, https://canadianart.ca/reviews/canadian-biennial-2017/.

799 The National Gallery of Canada, “Collecting Areas: Contemporary Art,” accessed July 31, 2018, https://www.gallery.ca/collection/collecting-areas/contemporary-art.

800 Quite likely the National Gallery was seeking to compete nationally with global biennale initiatives. Consider the longstanding Vancouver Biennale (https://www.vancouverbiennale.com/explore-art/2018-2020- exhibition/) and the forthcoming Toronto Biennial of Art (https://torontobiennial.org/).

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The fourth (and, to date, the final) exhibition in the Canadian Biennial series saw the cohort of artists increase to its second highest, to fifty-five unique artists,801 presented in fifty-one unique artist groups,802 collected since April 2014 by the departments of

Contemporary Art, Indigenous Art, and the Canadian Photography Institute (CPI).803 In an early sign of the National Gallery’s more global outlook, almost half of the artists exhibited were foreign-born.804 To make way for this considerable representation the proportion of artists born in Canada was cut dramatically to see provincial representation pared back in some instances, completely eliminated in others, and, in opposition to these cuts, all but maintained in “the North.”805 In parallel was a return to a deprivileging of “the East”

801 The fifty-five unique artists exhibited, in alphabetical order: Barry Ace, John Akomfrah, Benoit Aquin, Shuvinai Ashoona, Boyle Shary, Jasmin Bilodeau, Sébastien Giguère, Nicolas Laverdière, Valérie Blass, Shannon Bool, Mark Bradford, Anthony Burnham, Nick Cave, Patrick Coutu, Chris Curreri, Beau Dick, Stan Douglas, Jessica Eaton, Latifa Echakhch, Tracey Emin, Cynthia Girard-Renard, Christian Giroux, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Houseago, Christian Jankowski, Brian Jungen, Shelagh Keeley, Ruben Komangapik, Jonathan Lasker, lessLIE (Leslie Robert Sam), Maya Lin, Elaine Ling, Angela Marston, Julie Mehretu, Kent Monkman, Wangechi Mutu, Nadia Myre, Chris Ofili, Jamasee Padluq Pitseolak, Susan Point, Mika Rottenberg, Collier Schorr, Ursula Schulz-Dornburg, Wael Shawky, Steven Shearer, Taryn Simon, Kiki Smith, Monika Sosnowska, Zin Taylor, Mickalene Thomas, Wolfgang Tillmans, Jutai Toonoo, Renée Van Halm, Hajra Waheed, and Daniel Young. Jonathan Shaughnessy, with contributions by Nicole Burisch, Rachelle Dickenson, Josée Drouin-Brisebois, Greg Hill, Jasmine Inglis, Andrea Kunard, Christine Lalonde, Ann Thomas, and Rhiannon Vogl, 2017 Canadian Biennial (Ottawa: The National Gallery of Canada, 2017).

802 Shuvinai Ashoona and Shary Boyle collaborated on Inagaddadavida (2015); BGL (Jasmine Bilodeau, Sébastien Giguère, and Nicolas Laverdière) had one work included, Canadassimo (Dépanneur) (2015); and Daniel Young and Christian Giroux collaborated on Eunoia (2013). Ibid.

803 The exhibition catalogue cites a temporal period of April 2014 and March 2017. Ibid.

804 Some forty-four, or twenty-four out of the fifty-five artists exhibited were born outside of Canada: seven artists were born in the United States with the balance of artists born in cities large and small in the countries of Ghana, Morocco, England, Germany and West Germany, China, Ethiopia, Kenya, Argentina, Egypt, Poland, and the Netherlands.

805 Of the approximate fifty-six percent or thirty-one artists born in Canada, eight were born in British Columbia (some fifteen of all artists, the lowest representation to date), three in the Prairies (just over five percent, a steady decline from the first exhibition and the series’ high of approximately nineteen percent), seven in Ontario (just under thirteen percent, another series low), and nine in Quebec (just over sixteen percent, only marginally higher than in 2012, the lowest in the series).

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(imbedded in notions of art in Canada since the series was first organized post-war),806 and on the heels of the series’ new-found recognition of artists located in the North, no artists included were born in the Maritime provinces but the exhibition boasted a high number of artists, just over seven percent, born in the former Northwest Territories.807

In terms of where artists lived and worked, the profile of artist residencies paralleled that of birth. Most artists living and working exclusively in Canada did so in the key artistic strongholds established at the beginning of the biennial series (and which rarely wavered) with two exceptions: in a sweeping exclusion, no artists lived and worked in either the

Prairies or the Maritimes,808 but three artists lived and worked in Cape Dorset, Nunavut— down from the four who were born there as Ruben Komangapik now lived and worked in

Toronto. Of the twenty-five foreign-based artists, eleven lived and worked exclusively in the

United States (the highest rates were for New York City and Los Angeles), one shared their time between the United States and abroad (Wangechi Mutu lived and worked in New York and Nairobi), and twelve lived and worked variously but exclusively in the counties of

England, Germany, Switzerland, Trinidad, Egypt, Poland, and France. Lastly, signalling the trend of artists moving globally for work, and for networks of opportunity, one artist shared their time living and working in both Canada and abroad: Daniel Young split his time between Toronto and Berlin.

806 Again, see Suzanne Crowdis.

807 This number was surpassed only in 2014, the series high of almost twelve percent.

808 Of the fifty-five percent or thirty artists living and working in Canada, almost fifteen percent or eight artists lived and worked in each of the provinces of Ontario and British Columbia (the majority in Toronto and Vancouver), and twenty percent or eleven artists in Quebec (principally in Montreal).

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In 2017 the biennial exhibition series finally approached gender parity, surpassing the series average with approximately forty-five percent or twenty-five female artists selected for exhibition. All works were acquired within the last two years with a good number dating to the early 2000s signalling that the National Gallery was continuing to fill gaps in its collection, and stood as solid confirmation that the Canadian Biennial was still, at least in part (and perhaps always at heart), an acquisition survey. Fueling this argument further was the number of artists returning from previous exhibitions, many of whom were “biennale” alumni: Jutai Toonoo (2014), Shuvinai Ashoona and Shary Boyle (2010 and 2014); Christian

Giroux, Brian Jungen, and Daniel Young (2012); and Jasmin Bilodeau, Valérie Blass, Patrick

Coutu, Sébastien Giguère, Nicolas Laverdière, Nadia Myre, and Steven Shearer (2010).

Almost exactly half of the artists exhibited were cited as Canadian in the nationality subject field of the National Gallery’s collections management database. In addition to this

Canadian cohort, four artists carried the additional marker of “Inuit” following “Canadian” in the nationality subject field: Shuvinai Ashoona, Ruben Komangapik, Jamasee Padluq

Pitseolak, and Jutai Toonoo; all four were born in the former Northwest Territories. Bringing the total Canadian contingent up to sixty percent, an additional cohort of two artists held joint nationalities with Canada: Elaine Ling was cited as “Chinese, Canadian” and Renée Van

Halm as “Dutch, Canadian.” Supplementing these direct markers of national identity— namely place of birth, lives and works location, and nationality—in addition to the four

“Inuit” artists exhibited another nine artists collected by the Department of Indigenous Art were marked for Indigenous identity indirectly: Barry Ace, Shary Boyle, Beau Dick, Brian

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Jungen, lessLIE, Angela Marston, Kent Monkman, Nadia Myre, and Susan Point.809 Save for

Boyle,810 all carried markers of Indigenous status within their exhibition catalogue essays and/or in the National Gallery collections management database.

If these indirect markers worked to identify each artist as Indigenous, then the

National Gallery department that authored the attendant exhibition catalogue essays served as a signal that either solidified each artist’s identity as a “supra-Canadian” or complicated slightly the meaning of Indigenous identity in the face of contemporaneity. Just over one quarter of works were collected by Indigenous Art. Without exception the four Inuit-marked artists had their essays authored by specialist curatorial staff in Indigenous Art.811 However, the balance of eight Indigenous artists’ catalogue essays was authored variously. The essays for Ace, Dick, lessLIE, Marston, Monkman, and Point were authored by Indigenous Art; for the second time in the biennial series Greg Hill emerged to pen the essays of select artists,

809 Ace is cited as Anishinaabe in the exhibition catalogue and as “Canadian (Anishinaabe-Odawa)” in the database summary biography; Dick is described as an “artist, activist, and hereditary chief from the Namgis First Nation” in the exhibition catalogue, and is cited by the more generic “Canadian (Kwakwaka'wakw)” in the database summary biography (in addition, his place of birth, Alert Bay, British Columbia serves as an additional signal of Indigenous status); Jungen is cited for a maternal link to the Dane-zaa nation in the Peace River Valley in northern British Columbia in the exhibition catalogue and his parental lineage is traced (noting his father as Swiss and his mother as Aboriginal and a member of the Dane-zaa Nation) in the database artist statement summary; lessLIE (born Leslie Robert Sam) is cited as a Coast Salish artist in the exhibition catalogue and as “Canadian (Coast Salish)” in the database summary biography; Marston is cited for her Coast Salish heritage in the exhibition catalogue and as “Canadian (Coast Salish)” in the database summary biography; Monkman is cited for his Swampy Cree and English/Irish ancestry and as a member of the Fisher River Band in northern Manitoba in the exhibition catalogue, and is noted for the same in the database artist statement narrative; Myre is cited as holding Indigenous (Algonquin) identity in the exhibition catalogue, and as “Canadian (Algonquin)” in the database summary biography; Point is described as drawing upon the Coast Salish traditional values taught to her at an early age in the exhibition catalogue and as “Canadian (Coast Salish)” in the database summary biography. See the exhibition catalogue: Shaughnessy et al., 2017 Canadian Biennial; and also the National Gallery collections management database: https://www.gallery.ca/collection/search-the-collection.

810 Boyle is not an Indigenous artist but is included in this list of artists collected by the Department of Indigenous Art for her collaboration with Shuvinai Ashoona, an Inuit artist, on Inagaddadavida (2015).

811 These essays were authored by Christine Lalonde with the essay for Komangapik co-authored with Jasmine Inglis, a curatorial assistant in Indigenous Art. Shaughnessy et al., 2017 Canadian Biennial.

342 this time in collaboration with Jasmine Inglis: for lessLIE, Monkman, and Point. And the essays for Jungen and Myre were authored via curatorial collaborations between the

Departments of Contemporary Art and Indigenous Art. Also representing an anomaly was the case of “Chinese, Canadian” artist Elaine Ling: while collected as contemporary

Canadian art, her exhibition catalogue essay (an introduction to her oeuvre of nine inkjet prints) was authored by Andrea Kunard, Associate Curator for the Canadian Photography

Institute.

By tracing essay authorship to the source—namely the curatorial expertise backing an artist’s introduction—a number of extrapolations regarding the flexibility and conditionality of identity as perceived by the National Gallery during the transcultural turn can be reached: without exception, all Inuit-marked artists were categorically protected in their Indigenous identity; some Indigenous-marked artists, Jungen and Myre, had their indigeneity de- emphasized in favour of the contemporary (but maintained their Canadian nationality); and

Elaine Ling—a female artist of dual nationality complex in her artistic identity812—had the whole of her identity (and her contemporaneity) subsumed into the medium of photography.

The balance of artists exhibited represented forty percent of the total number of artists on display. Among these were twenty-two fully non-Canadian artists holding single and, in some instances, dual nationalities from around the world including American, British,

German, Moroccan, American/British, Argentinian, Egyptian, German/American, and

812 Ling was trained as a family doctor, and, up until her death in the summer of 2018, practised in Toronto. She was also a published author and a cellist in Orchestra Toronto. Her work is collected internationally and is international in subject matter: she has photographed the deserts of Mongolia, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Timbuktu, Namibia, North Africa, India, South America, Australia, and the American Southwest; the citadels of Ethiopia, San Agustin, Persepolis, Petra, Cappadocia, Machu Picchu, Angkor Wat, Great Zimbabwe, Abu Simbel; and the Buddhist centres of Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam, Tibet, and Bhutan. Elaine Ling Photography, “Biography,” accessed July 31, 2018, http://elaineling.ca/about/.

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Polish. As would be expected, these artists’ works were collected as instances of contemporary International art with one exception: German artist Ursula Schulz-Dornburg was collected by the Canadian Photography Institute (CPI)813 and had her attendant exhibition catalogue essay authored by Ann Thomas, Senior Curator of Photographs at the

CPI. The remaining artists collected by the international arm of the Department of

Contemporary Art had their essays introduced by one or several members of the department of Contemporary Art suggesting that like (some) Canadian Indigenous artists (recall Jungen and Myre), whether International or Canadian, the specialist knowledge for interpreting these artists rested with contemporaneity and not, as shown with Canadian Inuit artists, solely with identity.

In 2017 the National Gallery collected and exhibited their version of a global Canada.

In order to showcase the very best of contemporary Canadian art production, the institution had, in the 2012 and 2014 shows, begun the process of gradually shifting the series’ mandate away from showcasing the work of the Canadian artist to feature the “artist in Canada”—a broader and more inclusive notion—to finally, in 2017m prioritize the display of artists of global stature who could serve to locate and position the institution on the international

“biennale” stage regardless of the absent marker of Canadian nationality (or even any evidence of either a direct or indirect tie to the nation). Even as the National Gallery worked carefully across its various infrastructural systems to strategically display artists tethered to

813 Sixteen of Schulz-Dornburg’s gelatin silver prints dating from the first decade of 2000 depicting scenes of everyday life in various public locales in Armenia (the former Soviet Republic) represented fourteen percent of the total number of works exhibited in 2017.

344 the nation via direct (and infrastructurally visible) markers of Canadianness814—likely an affirmation of the series’ founding mandate and the institution’s core commitment to

Canadian art—the profile of the biennial artist was never less Canadian than in the fourth biennial exhibition. With not quite sixty percent of artists marked for Canadian nationality (a dramatic drop from ninety-six percent bearing Canadian nationality in 2014, and a whopping ninety-nine percent in 2010 and 2012), barely half of the artists exhibited were born in

Canada,815 and just over half called Canada home.816 The Canadian Biennial in 2017 was in part—at least half, in fact—non-Canadian. This division cannot be seen as anything other than deliberate.

If, in 2017, the biennial artist was not strictly Canadian in profile, then he or she was firmly global. With few exceptions—and regardless of place of birth, lives and works location, or nationality—the National Gallery selected artists of global reputation active in cities and regions recognized as hubs connected to the global production and dissemination of international contemporary art. Of the sixty percent of artists marked as Canadian,817 the majority lived and worked in one of three metropolitan centres—the globally-connected

814 In 2017, almost sixty percent of artists were cited as Canadian in nationality (herein including all Indigenous-marked artists and dual citizens with Canada) and the total Canadian contingent of works settled at just over fifty-seven percent (almost thirty percent or thirty-four works out of one hundred and fourteen works were exhibited from the contemporary Canadian art collection and some twenty-seven percent or thirty-one works from Indigenous art).

815 This number represented a decline of twenty-one percent from 2014, and twenty-six and twenty-five in 2012 and 2010 respectively.

816 In 2014, some eighty-eight percent or twenty-three artists lived and worked in Canada; in 2012 it was just under seventy-eight percent, or thirty-five artists (another nine percent lived and worked in Canada part-time), and in 2010 it was just under eighty-five percent (another three percent or so lived and worked in Canada part- time).

817 This number included artists marked as “Canadian (Inuit)” and those holding dual nationalities with Canada.

345 cities of Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal818—thus accounting for thirty-eight percent of the total numbers of artists on display and an astounding forty-six percent of the total numbers of works exhibited. Add to this tally of globally-located Canadian artists the

(perhaps surprising) case of the city of Cape Dorset—the fourth most frequent location from which artists hailed in 2017 thus earning, by at least that measure, global status819—and the total number of Canadian artists active on the global stage of contemporary art production and exhibited in the fourth biennial rises to forty-four percent to represent exactly half of the works exhibited. A parallel trend occurred with regards to the cohort of artists whose nationalities were marked as non-Canadian: artists of varied nationalities living and working in the globally-connected cities of New York, Berlin, and Los Angeles accounted for twenty- seven percent of the total numbers of artists with works on display laying claim to some fifteen percent of the total numbers of works exhibited.820 Taken together this global cohort of globally-connected artists—both Canadian and non-Canadian artists living and working in one of seven cities: four in Canada and three abroad—represented seventy-one percent of the artists on display and lay claim to sixty-five percent of works exhibited. These staggering statistics make for a compelling argument that more than any other marker of identity, it was

818 Out of a total of thirty artists living and working in Canada, seven artists lived and worked in Toronto (Shary Boyle, Chris Curreri, Shelagh Keeley, Ruben Komangapik, Elaine Ling, Kent Monkman, and (part-time) Daniel Giroux), six in Vancouver (Beau Dick, Stan Douglas, Brian Jungen, Susan Point, Steven Shearer, and Renée Van Halm), and eight in Montreal (Benoit Quin, Valérie Blass, Anthony Burnham, Patrick Coutu, Jessica Eaton, Cynthia Girard-Renard, Nadia Myre, and Hajra Waheed).

819 I am excluding three artists living and working in Quebec City as these were all members of one artists group, BGL: Bilodeau, Giguère, and Laverdière.

820 Out of the twenty-five artists living and working abroad, nine artists lived and worked in New York (Jonathan Lasker, Maya Lin (part-time), Julie Mehretu, Wangechi Mutu (part-time), Mika Rottenberg, Collier Schorr, Taryn Simon, Kiki Smith, and Mickalene Thomas), four in Berlin (Shannon Bool, Christian Jankowski, Wolfgang Tillmans (part-time), and Daniel Young (part-time), and two in Los Angeles (Mark Bradford and Thomas Houseago).

346 an artist’s global citizenship and tangible connection to wider currents of contemporaneity that mattered most when the National Gallery sought to collect, and very publicly exhibit, the very best of contemporary art production in the Canadian Biennial.

Global in orientation, the cohort of artists selected for exhibition in 2017 was also incredibly diverse, at least by National Gallery standards. Twelve artists exhibited were marked for Indigenous identity—either Inuit or Aboriginal. While in and of itself this showing is not particularly remarkable (but a continuation of the new series’ ongoing commitment to Indigenous representation),821 it was the robust display of work by

Indigenous artists that positioned the fourth biennial exhibition as a leader in cultural diversity: thirty-one out of the one hundred and fourteen works on display—close to twenty- seven percent—were by Indigenous-marked artists.822 In another display of diversity, some forty-five percent of artists exhibited were female—by far the highest representation to date

(thirty-five percent was the series average)—yet once again it was the number of works exhibited by this female cohort that set the fourth biennial apart in terms of seeking and securing gender diversity: a heavy representation of almost seventy percent of works exhibited were by female artists.823 Likely the overwhelming female-artist majority in 2017 was the result of not only the National Gallery’s dedication to a diverse biennial artist profile, but also to some kind of reckoning with the previous years’ misshapen one, for to make way

821 This number peaked at twenty-three percent in 2014, a strong rise after an initial showing of fourteen percent in 2010 and a low nine percent in 2012.

822 Five percent of works exhibited were by Inuit artists, and, in the highest representation in the history of the Canadian Biennial, twenty-two were by Aboriginal artists (the closest high was an almost fifteen percent in 2014).

823 It is interesting to note that while the series had come out strong in 2010 with twenty-nine percent of works exhibited by female artists (and had maintained and even grown this representation with some thirty-four percent in 2012), numbers dropped to a very low eighteen percent in 2014.

347 for widened notions of what it meant to be a global contemporary artist during the transcultural turn—not only diversity of citizenship and nationality, but also of culture and gender—the number of male artists selected for exhibition was cut, somewhat dramatically, to fifty-five percent824—to bring the total number of works by male artists to thirty-four percent, about half the series average.

While at once presenting in the fourth and final biennial exhibition a firm Canadian majority, the National Gallery deliberately sought to yield it from a globally-connected artworld—one in which nationality carried little currency, if any at all, signalling that, in the contemporary art world of the twenty-first century, the notion of nationality as a frame through which to filter artistic identity can obscure rather than contribute to an understanding of its meaning and relevance. It is a notion encapsulated by the shift in the positioning of the series itself; namely, from a collections survey to an international “biennale.” Indeed, by the series’ final exhibition year, the title of Canadian Biennial signalled not the nationality of the artists showcased nor even the nation from which the art was collected and exhibited. Rather, by 2017, the “Canadian” in the series title signalled only Canada as its host country. It is a transition that positions the National Gallery of Canada of the present as a transcultural agent in the contemporary Canadian arts scene actively negotiating new meanings and relevancies for the Canadian artist in the twenty-first century, and the Canadian Biennial as an index of that new global identity.

824 This number is down from sixty-five percent in 2014, seventy-five in 2012, and sixty-eight in 2010.

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The Shift from National Identity Towards Transcultural Identity

A robust analysis of the full profile of the overall cohort of artists selected for exhibition brings to the forefront the notion of national artistic identity as not only an artificial construct, but one of such complexity that it cannot be satisfactorily understood from within the nation-state paradigm. However, by applying principles of World Art

Historical theory—the basis of a rival paradigm that challenges the legitimacy of national identity as a satisfactory system for art historical analysis—new questions emerge and, as a result, a new reading of the biennial series is possible.

Through the lens of World Art History, the phenomenon of the Canadian Biennial series emerges less as report on Canadian acquisitions for the national collection and more of an index of the National Gallery of Canada’s—and, by extension, the global artworld’s— changing conceptions of national identity. Despite the National Gallery’s collections management database trading in identity binaries thereby diminishing and even silencing all other identity formations, by way of secondary database fields supported by explanatory narratives published in attendant exhibition catalogues, a more nuanced approach to understanding the meaning and relevance of identity is possible. If the National Gallery’s nationality subject field attributed to an artist one or more fixed national identities or, in the case of artists marked for their Inuit identity, conflating nationality with ethnic identity into the one database field reserved for the former to, as examined in Chapter Five’s discussion of the decolonization of the museum, informationally tokenize the Inuit as standing for and equal to quintessential Canadianness, in its embrace of networks the institution largely disregarded these categorizations to search outside of the nation-state for identity thereby assigning an artist to a (sometimes) contradictory group identity.

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Case in point: despite being marked for indigeneity, generally, by the global artworld, a small cohort of First Nations and Métis artists presented with a conflict between the department into which their work was collected—Indigenous Art—and the curatorial expert selected to present their work in the biennial exhibition catalogue (recall discussions focused on Cuthand, Myre, and Niro in 2010, and also intra-departmental collaborations between the department of Contemporary Art and photographs for the essays introducing Jungen and

Myre in 2017). Such decisions—to either move to confirm an artist’s Indigenous identity by having their catalogue essay authored by the corresponding Department of Indigenous Art, or to maintain the primacy of their work (and perhaps their very identity) as contemporary by having curatorial staff in Contemporary Art introduce their work—can be read, in part, as an institutional negotiation of Canadian artistic identity and provides an opportunity to consider how the National Gallery, in the twenty-first century, when political identity alone via the binary category of Canadian or non-Canadian nationality carried reduced meaning, if any at all, expressed shifting notions of national identity.825

These negotiations do more than signal a simple tug between two (competing) curatorial departments, or even a “grey area” between collecting areas. To quote Ruth

Phillips, such instances of the “blurring” and even “interpenetration” of key museum

“disciplinary spaces” are “systematic of moments when paradigms are changing,”826 and signal the beginnings of a slow redress of the troublesome legacy lying beneath the surface of

825 Here no doubt in some cases a certain amount curatorial weight came into play: often, a senior member of the National Gallery’s curatorial team would assume responsibility for an artist’s essay if said artist warranted the breadth and experience (and likely the personal connection) such an expert lent to the relationship between the institution’s curatorial team and the artists it curried for the national collection.

826 Ruth Phillips, “How Museums Marginalize,” in Museum Pieces: Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums, 95–101 (Montreal and Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011), 99.

350 the systems of classifications used to name, organize, and store knowledge in the Western museum. By at once stubbornly adhering to typologies derived from outdated notions of identity—specifically, the imagination of “nationality” as conceived as part of the rise of racist models in nineteenth-century discourses on natural history, history, and art history— and simultaneously challenging and debunking these discourses in its gallery spaces and curatorial practices, the National Gallery at once perpetuates the nation-state paradigm as useful and meaningful in identity-formation yet explores the knowledge gained under the more robust networks of connection and exchange paradigm. Such efforts are connected, wittingly or unwittingly, to the project of re-disciplining the museum as Phillips discusses in her assessment of the continued marginalization of indigeneity by way of naming practices.

According to Phillips, the Western museum fails to:

[R]ecognize interconnectedness as well as difference, to rid the object of its aura of essential meaning so that it can travel as freely within the museum as it has in history.827

While Phillips focuses specifically on the art and artifact paradigms that drive “outdated notions of otherness by denying to objects made or used by Aboriginal people a diachronic and historical positioning,”828 many aspects of this critique can be applied to the ethno- nationalist paradigm the National Gallery reinforces in the structure and priorities of its collections management database (and in the structure of many of its siloed departments).

The Western museum, and the National Gallery of Canada in particular, is actively, if perhaps unwittingly, participating in the paradigmatic shift from national identity to transcultural identity. In other words, from nations to networks.

827 Ibid., 100.

828 Ibid., 99.

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What the preceding analysis shows is that identity presents as increasingly complex and nuanced, and it is often inextricably linked to both an artist’s work and their very positioning within the global web. Consider the cases of Rebecca Belmore, Faye

HeavyShield, Rita Letendre, and Brenden Fernandes.

Despite having her installation Thin Red Line (2009) collected by Indigenous Art (it was exhibited in the first Canadian Biennial It Is What It Is in 2010), Rebecca Belmore carried no markers of her Indigenous identity in any publicly-available National Gallery of

Canada publication or database. Apart from having her essay authored by a member of the curatorial team from Indigenous art—an indirect marker of identity, and one that the exhibition’s audience was unlikely to note and then read as a signal of her indigeneity— nowhere within the narrative of her catalogue essay did Belmore’s Aboriginality come to bear. While cited for her Canadian nationality in the collections management database, her record carried no marker of her Indigenous identity either in the summary biography or in her artist statement narrative. It was only by way of a brief description of the content of her work that she was linked to the Indigenous community, and there tangentially at best:

Rebecca Belmore’s work in performance, installation, photography and video addresses the politics of representation. Her images of provocation, subtle intervention and resistance are rooted in the tragic history of native cultures in North America. She tackles the difficult issues of injustice, racism, violence and the plight of the disenfranchised and marginalized in society, convinced that art has the potential to effect social change. A series of recurring themes or elements connect her work: the questioning of official narratives, the labouring, struggling or missing body, the repetitive gesture and the use of natural materials.829

Yet in other curatorial venues and outputs outside of the National Gallery Belmore is widely recognized for her identity as a First Nations artist—as Anishinaabe (Ojibwe)—and she

829 See the National Gallery’s collection management database: The National Gallery of Canada, “Rebecca Belmore,” accessed June 26, 2019, https://www.gallery.ca/collection/artist/rebecca-belmore.

352 herself places her identity at the centre of her work. This is made clear in an excerpt from the introduction to the exhibition catalogue for her entry Fountain (2005) to the Venice Biennale of 2005, where, significantly, Belmore was the first Aboriginal artist ever to represent

Canada at the event:

Every country has a national narrative, and Canada is better than most at attempting to integrate multiple stories into the larger framework, but the process is still a colonial project. The Americas need to be read as a colonial space with aboriginal or First Nations people as seeking decolonization. The art world has embraced the notion of transnational citizens, moving from one country to the next by continuously locating their own subjectivities in homelands like China, Africa and elsewhere.

The curator, Jolene Rickard, went on to locate Belmore’s identity within the framework of the “Canadian”:

As a First Nations or aboriginal person, Belmore’s homeland is now the modern nation of Canada; yet, there is reluctance by the art world to recognize this condition as a continuous form of cultural and political exile. The inclusion of the First Nations political base is not meant to marginalize Belmore’s work, but add depth to it. People think of Belmore as both Canadian and Anishinaabe—l think of her as an Anishinaabe living in the continuously colonial space of the Americas. Belmore prefers to let her work articulate her positions or “interstices.”830

Similarly, Faye HeavyShield carried only oblique markers of her Indigenous identity in her presence as an artist collected by the National Gallery of Canada. HeavyShield’s extensive photographic oeuvre Body of Land (2002–10)831 was exhibited in 2012, in the second Canadian Biennial Builders. Like Belmore, HeavyShield’s work was collected by the

Department of Indigenous Art, and her catalogue essay was authored staff in Indigenous Art.

830 Richard was evoking Homi K. Bhaba in her essay; specifically, his notion of “interstices”: “the overlap and displacement of domains of difference that the intersubjective and collective experiences of nationness, community interest, or cultural value are negotiated.” Homi K. Bhabha, quoted in Jolene Rickard, “Rebecca Belmore: Performing Power,” Rebecca Belmore: Fountain (Venice Biennale, Canada Pavilion, 2006), 68.

831 A work that included four hundred “portraits” made from close-up colour photographs of human skin. See the National Gallery collections management database: The National Gallery of Canada, “Faye HeavyShield: Body of Land,” accessed June 16, 2019, https://www.gallery.ca/collection/artwork/body-of-land.

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Also like Belmore, HeavyShield was cited for her Canadian nationality in the National

Gallery collections management database. Yet unlike Belmore, HeavyShield carried at least some reference to her Indigenous identity—in the form of a passing mention to her as a

“Native woman”—in the database artist statement narrative, a reference that, alongside her birthplace on the Blood Reserve in Alberta, would be read as Indigenous (if not by the audience of the exhibition per se, unless they chose to research her biography further).832

However, it is important to note that these markers did not find their way into the exhibition catalogue which was absolutely silent on HeavyShield as a First Nations artist. However, elsewhere, outside of the National Gallery’s public-facing information management systems and scholarly publications, HeavyShield’s Indigenous identity, like that of Belmore, was inextricably tied to her work as evidenced by her presentation as an artist:

Faye HeavyShield is a member of the Blackfoot Confederacy from the Kainaiwa (Blood) Nation in the foothills of Southern Alberta. She is a fluent speaker of the Blackfoot language and studied at the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary, Alberta. The landscape of HeavyShield’s home community near Stand Off, Alberta is evident in her continuous use of natural materials and imagery found in her minimalist works.833

The artist Rita Letendre presents as a unique case, and an opportunity to examine how notions of both artistic identity and Canadian national identity have shifted under the custody and agency of the National Gallery of Canada from its very first Canadian identity exhibition series during the 1950s and 1960s through to the present with the Canadian Biennial.

Letendre was exhibited four times in a biennial exhibition: three times in the first series, in

832 See the National Gallery collections management database: The National Gallery of Canada, “Faye HeavyShield,” accessed June 16, 2019, https://www.gallery.ca/collection/artist/faye-heavyshield.

833 “Faye HeavyShield,” Art Gallery of Alberta, accessed June 26, 2019, https://www.youraga.ca/bio/faye- HeavyShield.

354 the 1959, 1963, and 1968 Biennial Exhibitions of Canadian Art, and once in the second series, in the 2014 Canadian Biennial, Shine a Light. Interestingly, despite the full oeuvre of

Letendre’s acquisitions collected by the Department of Indigenous art—eleven works are recorded in the National Gallery collections management database dating back to as early as

1961 (notably pre-dating the creation of the Indigenous Art department) and leading up until the present with her most recent acquisition, Cosmic Storm (2013), as exhibited in the second-to-last exhibition, in 2014—only once, in the most recent exhibition, was Letendre marked for her indigeneity. While there is a brief reference to Lentendre’s “Aboriginal heritage” in her collections management record (in the summary biography, a reference that attributes her stylistic shift post-1960 from Automatism to the “geometric mode” of the

Plasticiens to an awareness of her Indigenous self), her entry up until that point focuses on her relationship with Borduas.834 Because Letendre’s summary biography appears to temporally end in 1960 (and thus in need of updating to bring it current to the present day), it can be argued that this Aboriginal reference belongs properly to the first series of exhibitions which ran through the 1950s and 1960s.

Yet, at no time during the Biennial Exhibitions of Canadian Art, was Letendre referenced as anything other than a Canadian artist. It was only in the second series, in her exhibition catalogue entry as the opening phrase, that she was presented as holding both

834 Here is the full entry, for context: “These early paintings used vibrant oils defined in loose patterns of repeated geometric shapes to suggest a sense of movement. Increasingly her work exhibited more space and tension, indicating a greater commitment to form, shifting from the abstract Automatiste style to the more ordered, geometric mode of the Plasticiens. Colour fields are broken apart and expanded, while a reduced range of pigmentation creates a feeling of intensity. The surfaces became more compelling with densely applied gestural strokes that evoke raw states of emotion, restlessness and energy. It has been suggested that these changes may have been prompted by the artist’s growing interest in her Aboriginal heritage. By the 1960s Letendre had reached an international audience exhibiting in New York and at the National Gallery of Canada.” See the National Gallery collections management database: The National Gallery of Canada, “Rita Letendre,” accessed June 16, 2019, https://www.gallery.ca/collection/artist/rita-letendre.

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French and Abenaki heritage.835 Yet, unlike previous artists marked for indigeneity, there is no further connection made by the National Gallery to Letendre as an Aboriginal artist, and no self-connections made by Letendre by her own voice. Further, no Canadian art institution, in their biographical sketches tracing the (long) arc of her career, make any connection to

Letendre’s indigeneity other than to repeat her parental heritage; rather, the focus remains on her work as contributing to the body of abstract work she has consistently been associated with. An excerpt from an essay linked to Letendre’s most recent show in 2017, a solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario entitled Fire & Light; speaks of Letendre’s spirituality, but not her indigeneity:

Often the sole female artist in their group shows, she broke away from their approach to painting, finding it restrictive. Seeking to express the full energy of life and harness in her powerful gestures an intense spiritual force, Letendre worked with various materials including oils, pastels, and acrylics, using her hands, palette knife, brushes and uniquely the airbrush, which she began using in 1971.836

One further case presents an interesting study in the meaning and relevance of national identity in the twenty-first century. Brendan Fernandes’ digital film Foe (2008) was exhibited in the 2012 biennial Builders and was acquired into the National Gallery’s collection of Contemporary Canadian Art in 2013 (as a gift from the artist). While Fernandes was marked for his Canadian nationality in the collections management database and his

Canadianness was reinforced in the narrative of his online biographical summary, its opening line also foregrounded the complicated nature of Fernandes’ identity by stressing his international birth, and American lives and works location: “Brendan Fernandes is a

835 Greg Hill, “Rita Letendre,” in Shine a Light: Canadian Biennial 2014 (Ottawa: The National Gallery of Canada, 2014), 120.

836 “Rita Letendre: Fire & Light,” Art Gallery of Ontario, accessed April 1, 2019, https://ago.ca/exhibitions/rita- letendre-fire-light.

356 prominent Kenyan-born Canadian artist of Indian (Goan) heritage who lives and works in

New York.”837 Despite both these global markers, Fernandes is Canadian by way of political affiliation—a nationality likely acquired during the period of time he lived and was educated in Canada.838 This cosmopolitanism is at the forefront of Fernandes’ mind, and represents a significant driver of his identity as an artist. Commenting on his identity, in 2010:

When people see me, they say ‘well, you’re Indian.’” But I don’t have a close connection with that at all. What’s more we’re Goan Indians, so we’re Portuguese heritage too. But I have no connection to that at all. I’m Kenyan, but also Canadian— I’ve lived most of my life here. But what does that mean?

Expanding his thoughts on identity, and self-identity, in 2011 Fernandes asked:

Have I lost some of my Canadian identity and am further away from my Kenyan heritage now that I live in America? This must be true if you, like myself, believe that identity is in a constant state of flux.839

There is no mistaking that Fernandes’ relationship with his identity and how it is perceived by others is central to his work. Case in point is Foe (2009), a short digital film held in the

National Gallery’s collection of contemporary Canadian art. In it the artist, accessing the complexity of his background as rich content for protest, links language with culture:

Foe represents video footage of me receiving lessons from an acting coach hired to teach me the “accents” of my cultural backgrounds. I am not interested in the authenticity of these accents but in the idea of being taught to speak in these voices. The text that I have learned is taken from a book with the same title as my piece. This

837 See the National Gallery’s collection management database: The National Gallery of Canada, “Brendan Fernandes,” accessed June 26, 2019, https://www.gallery.ca/collection/artist/brendan-fernandes. Indeed, while Fernandes was born in Nairobi, Kenya, of parents of Indian descent, at the time of the exhibition he lived and worked in the United States, in New York. In 2019 Fernandes was living and working in Chicago, represented by Monique Meloche Gallery. Brendan Fernandes, “Bio,” accessed June 16, 2019, http://www.brendanfernandes.ca/bio.

838 This was between 1988 and 2005. Fernandes was nine his family immigrated to Newmarket, Ontario, where he attended elementary and high school. He received a BFA from York University in Toronto in 2002, and an MFA in Visual Arts from the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario.

839 Brendan Fernandes, quoted in the National Gallery collections management database: The National Gallery of Canada, “Brendan Fernandes,” accessed June 26, 2019, https://www.gallery.ca/collection/artist/brendan- fernandes.

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book, a sequel to “Robinson Crusoe” was written by J. M. Coetzee. In this book, Friday (the savage) has been mutilated; his tongue has been removed and he cannot speak. For this work I have memorized the specific passage where Crusoe explains this to another.840

In varying degrees, all artists exhibited across both series of the National Gallery of

Canada’s biennial exhibitions of contemporary Canadian art—beginning with the first exhibition in 1951 through the final in 2017—possessed similarly complex identities, regardless of whether the institution chose to highlight and foreground the question. In its search for a national style of art the National Gallery chose to first, assert a homogenized conceptualization of Canadianness—be it one tied to the land, to Canada’s borders, to its nationhood, or, regardless of the physical location of an artist, to its polity—and, in time, to revise its conception of what it meant to be a contemporary Canadian artist and make first moves to correct and (largely) disregard nationhood. As the series evolved, and as the perception of the global artworld changed to view the contemporary as one and united across borders, the notion of identity shifted from one grounded in the nation-state, to one positioned against it, to eventually emerge as independent of nationality with a focus on the complexity of cultural connection as tied to an artist’s conception of self, and how this new connected identity related to an artist’s oeuvre. By shifting away from Canadian national identity as a prerequisite for inclusion in the 2017 Canadian Biennial to now include artists from all nationalities, the National Gallery completed the arc of transition from an institution actively brokering its negotiation of national identity as one that was meaningful and

840 The National Gallery of Canada, “Brendan Fernandes,” Builders: Canadian Biennial 2012 (Ottawa: The National Gallery of Canada, 2012), 86. This excerpt also appears on Fernandes’ website, see: http://www.brendanfernandes.ca/foe/0he3sku5vi49jlzj5c0plyphl2u5qn. Fernandes, in his self-authored exhibition catalogue summary, goes on to explain: “I was interested in the power relationship between myself and the teacher, the expert educating me on how to speak in “my” cultural accents. But is she? She is giving me direction on how to me a more authentic version of myself, while she shares none of my cultural heritage.”

358 relevant, to a realization that on the global stage national identity lacked significance. The result is the determination of Canadian identity as a mistaken identity—one that requires investigation rather than assignment.

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Chapter Eight: Conclusion

I perceive transnational history largely as a “way of seeing,” open to various methodological preferences, and to many different questions. It takes at its starting point the interconnectedness of human history as a whole, and while it acknowledges the extraordinary importance of states, empires, and the like, it pays attention to networks, processes, beliefs, and institutions that transcend these politically defined spaces. What precisely this transnational history will eventually look like is far from certain; it is being written as we speak. But it is already providing fresh insights into old and tired issues. — Sven Beckert, “On Transnational History,” 1459.841

It has been more than twenty years since John Onians, in full redress of persistent

Eurocentrism in the study of art, first proposed a “new framework” prompting art historians from many regions of the world to once again take stock of their discipline—the discourse of

World Art History as examined in this dissertation was one result. To date, across North

America and the globe, and despite the beginnings of some agreement on the meaning of the term, no clear understanding has been reached on the implications a turn towards World Art

History might have on the discipline of art history. While the impressive range of views that have been brought to bear on the question inherent on Onians’ call—can World Art History still be art history?—might appear fragmented and perhaps even dislocated from the traditional discipline of art history as it has come to be theorized and practiced in the so- called West, the discourse of World Art History as it is emerging in the North American context maintains a certain shape measured by the presence that it holds and the contours that it outlines across three sites of art historical knowledge-creation: theory, scholarship, and museums.

841 Beckert is Laird Bell Professor of American History at Harvard University, where he teaches the history of the United States in the nineteenth century, and global history. “Sven Beckert,” Department of History, Harvard University, accessed June 26, 2019, https://history.fas.harvard.edu/people/sven-beckert.

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World Art History’s Theoretical Debates and Scholarly Practices

As examined in Part One’s “Chapter Two: Debating World Art History,” first attempts to come to terms with Onians’ call for the application of wider frames to surround the study of art focused on crafting the “one” master narrative of art history, yet scholars quickly moved to the topic of the globalization of the discipline. In both contexts a single argument was advanced as cause to resist the turn towards World Art History: the discipline of art history was “irredeemably” Western and could not survive the “threat” of theoretical or methodological tamperings that would destabilize the use of the nation-state as guiding protocol. Swiftly rejected by scholars in the early phases of the debate was the adoption of a multicultural approach, but for various reasons: David Carrier declared a “multicultural” art history impossible until each culture had written its own “story,” while James Elkins, less concerned with the specifics of agency and authorship—the discerning question of “whose” art history—argued the impossibility of any “story” other than the “familiar” finding acceptance across the global art historical community.

In this position Elkins was challenged by many scholars who argued that his conception of the discipline being centred on the West was false; in counter they proposed their own solutions to the “problem” of Eurocentric bias. In addition to Carrier’s advancement of “intersecting” art histories—his version of multiculturalism, an antidote to

“monoculturalism”—David Summers proposed an “intercultural conversation” using neutral tools. While criticised by Elkins for remaining at its core a “Eurocentric attempt,” as a methodological direction the notion of “interculturalization of the arts” was picked up by

Kitty Zijlmans and Wilfried van Damme who, adopting the conceptual framework of Onians’

World Art Studies, focused on a shared humanity for a comparison of cultures and cultural

361 expression across the world by way of cultural exchange. These grounds not only set the tone for the equality of cultures around the globe, but also extended the temporal and spatial frame through which art-making was viewed. It also prompted a key question, one that was posed by Elkins: Is art history global?

With trademark detail Elkins made his case for the measurable (and irrevocable)

“Westernization” of the discipline of art history, and delivered his ultimate argument summing up his position on the viability of a world history of art: “Art history can’t diagnose its Westernness without taking in other perspectives, and without being willing to see itself dissolve.”842 According to Elkins, art history’s ability to sustain its “shape”—a metaphorical euphemism distracting from its formula of siloed cultures organized chronologically and separated into nations and then divided into periods and styles—would be diminished to the point of “unrecognizability” once it was severed from its ideological roots in the logic of the nation-state. Indeed, as a criteria for difference, the use of the nation-state to distinguish between “ethnies” and peoples on some basis of comparison and hierarchy in order to legitimize differential modes of practice, while perhaps a troubled foundation, is the scaffolding upon which the discipline’s understanding of itself and the field is erected. This, the centrality of the nation-state—or ethno-nationalism—to art historical thought, beginning in the nineteenth century, and via the continued legacy of Eurocentrism underpinning much scholarship in the twenty-first century, serves, despite his interests in entertaining the debate, as the basis for Elkins’ (vested) interests in the rejection of any and all proposals for

842 Elkins, “Can We Invent a World Art Studies?,” 112.

362 disciplinary reconsideration. It also drives much of the scholarly response to Onians’ call for new approaches to the study of the object or work of art in the twenty-first century.

While scholarship across such fields in the humanities as history, literary studies, film, performance, and anthropology, among other disciplines, have, for decades, been focused on concepts that reach beyond the nation-state paradigm, it is only in the recent past that the practice of art history, and the study of global contemporary art, has embraced alternative epistemological frameworks for thinking about the world’s art. Either in the form of discourse, defining terminology, or as a research project—consider the plethora of university courses emerging on the subject of art histories (rather than art history)843—these new concepts offer much promise towards the development and advancement of World Art

Historical research principles. While early attempts to think against the nation included postcolonialism (and, related but separate, multiculturalism and interculturalism844), such concepts as transnationalism and transculturalism in the age of globalization—processes that draw upon the complex history of cultures “in a permanent and fluctuating relationality”845— have dominated recent scholarship with a select body aligning with World Art Historical theory; namely, concepts that take as their object of concern not the artificial political construct of the nation, and not even objects themselves, but rather the processes of

843 Case in point is a new art history “textbook”: Diana Newall’s Art and its Global Histories: A Reader (2017).

844 Described by Sociologist Ulrich Beck as two terms that evoke the “container theory” wherein national cultures are viewed as “separate entities.” Heinz Antor, “From Postcolonialism and Interculturalism to the Ethics of Transculturalism,” in From Interculturalism to Transculturalism: Mediating Encounters in Cosmopolitan Contexts, ed. Heinz Antor, Matthias Merkl, Klaus Stierstorfer, and Laurenz Volkmann (Heidelberg, 2011), 11.

845 A characterization by Monica Juneja, see: Symposium on Transnational and Transcultural Studies, Ottawa, April 6–7, 2018, last modified April 1, 2018, symposium-on-transnational-and-transcultural-studies-ottawa-6-7- apr-18.

363 movements, connections, circulations, and networks that operate at a global level through, across, and between cultures and sometimes across national borders.

Part One’s “Chapter Three: Practicing World Art History” examined recent turns in art historical scholarship towards processes of transculturation, a term coined by Fernando

Ortiz, the Cuban political analyst:

The word transculturation better expresses the different phases of the process of transition from one culture to another because this does not consist merely in acquiring another culture, which is what the English word acculturation implies, but the process also necessarily involves the loss and uprooting of a previous culture, which could be defined as deculturation. In addition it carries the idea of the consequent creation of new cultural phenomena, which could be neoculturation.846

Across a body of scholarship linked by the processes of relationality traversing cultures, a number of scholarly practices best described as aligning with the rubric of a paradigm of networks of connection and exchange emerge, and, with them, the development of a number of World Art Historical research principles; namely, the application of a widened global framework, the use of stories (rather than summaries), and consistent and repeated challenges to Eurocentrism and its many assumptions.

Under the “geography of art,” notions such as the worldwide phenomena of art and its contexts, and the necessary application of interdisciplinarity and multidisciplinarity to the study of art in the twenty-first century, lead. Under “global versus local,” the processes of trade are introduced—among the most powerful of all agents at the disposal of networks of connection and exchange—as well as the place of the local within a global context; here, as well, world art historical thinking is aligned with successful methodological approaches

846 Fernando Ortiz, quoted in Anne Helmreich, “Review of Transculturation in British Art, 1770–1930,” Victorian Studies 56, no. 3 (2014): 543–45. doi:10.2979/victorianstudies.56.3.543.

364 across parallel fields, and alternative sources of documentation are used to bring forward the voices of previously silent or marginalized actors of cross-cultural engagement for a three- hundred-and-sixty degree understanding of the tone and multidirectionality of the ensuing exchange. As a stand-alone practice, both formal and informal networks across not only established world regions but (yet) unexplored nodes of connection extended either temporally or spatially—think of linkages that are geographically, rather than politically, based—enable the exploration of under-studied circulations often smaller in scale but equally significant alternative narratives.

Under “encounters,” strategies for connection and exchange in the colony and in diaspora are explored with special attention to hierarchies and agency—necessary considerations in a postcolonial and decolonizing world—and are shared with research directions that examine “cultural exchange” as reciprocal. Across both, stressed is the complexity of interaction: uneven, fluctuating, and contextually-specific. Often these profiles of interactions are examined as case studies attached to specific spatial and temporal contexts that help debunk and challenge accepted and often essentialist dominant narratives. Here, in addition to reciprocity, a number of notions are introduced to describe the nature of cultural exchange—fluid, in flux, the dilution of culture, diversity, and imitation, simulation, and mimicry—to form such complex yet flexible conceptual frameworks as mimesis and hybridity for lucid and specific descriptions of the realities of the global transcultural.

Under “centre versus periphery,” not only is the directionality of exchange challenged but the very nature and quality of partnership—both with meaningful consequence for knowledge creation. Lastly, under “circulations,” many (if not all) of the previously- mentioned approaches are brought together to make possible a reading of new or under-

365 studied networks, or to offer an alternative to established ideas about a specific frame of circulation. Examinations are concerned with notions of authenticity, identity, and social and cultural meaning, and put into question many of the discipline’s long-held assumptions and beliefs whether they may be held consciously or not. Implicated in the way circulations link the world across space and time are the processes that fall outside of the discipline of art history but are illuminated by in application, all to showcase how powerfully case study stories or “stories” narrate the art history of the world.

Indeed, many concepts common across the study of transcultural visual and material product history emerge into full view when analyzing scholarship that aligns with World Art

Historical theory: the notion of multiple authors or producers, as well as multiple audiences; complex yet systematic visual codes and strategies specific to a network located in one moment in time yet across space; the adoption and, further, the adaptation of technological inventions, consumer products, and other like progresses to a local context; and, finally, the constant and unending challenge of power and its (re)directions across borders, many of them political but always imaginary and across cultures. The resulting new narratives contribute to new understandings of the world, and present as alternatives to those derived under the nation-state paradigm. They also explicitly reject Eurocentrism.

World Art History and the Museum

Part Two’s investigation of the site of the twenty-first century museum as the third and final prominent institution of art historical knowledge-creation examined in this dissertation was positioned as an alternative exploration of the viability, in application, of a

World Art Historical approach to the discipline of art history—one in direct confrontation to

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James Elkins’ arguments for the impossibility of applying wider frames of reference to the

“one” story of art (Elkins’ favourite avatar for the discipline of art history itself) lest the discipline lose its “shape” and become “unrecognizable.” Indeed, just as Elkins posits the art historical narrative “formula” underpinning the staple art history survey text as holding deep and lasting power over the discipline, anchoring it forever within “Western” waters—a formula that continues to be relied upon today in many post-secondary institutions across

North America and beyond to introduce and in fact to inculcate disciplinary premises and practices—so it may be argued that the North American museum holds a parallel ability to represent the discipline of art history and communicate its values, assumptions, and habits.

Yet, via two of the museum’s most outward-facing narrative outputs—the narrative of the online didactic essay and the narrative of the museum display, each, to reference Elkins, museum “stories” in their own right—the museum’s various narratives emerge not only as a competitor to the impact and influence of the art history survey text but, due to their wider reach and depth of audience, supersede it to position the museum as an “agent” of the discipline:

Museums are ideal places where stories can be told that encourage visitors to make their own meanings… “Stories are the most fundamental way we learn. They have a beginning, a middle, and an end. They teach without preaching, encouraging both personal reflection and public discussion. Stories inspire wonder and awe; they allow a listener to imagine another time and place, to find the universal in the particular, and to feel empathy for others. They preserve individual and collective memory and speak to both the adult and the child.”847

847 Leslie Bedford, quoted in Lynda Kelly, “The Role of Narrative in Museum Exhibitions,” The Australian Museum Blog.

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The notion of the museum as memory is crucial.848 If storytelling in the museum is achieved at both the level of text and image, and at the level of exhibition, then in both narrative outputs the museum is capable of at once perpetuating older “memories” of the discipline, and serving as its remedy and corrective.

The task of analyzing a redrawn art history by way of a key museum narrative form— the very visible and highly-accessible online didactic essay—was the mandate of “Chapter

Four: Writing World Art History for the Public.” Here the developing research principles of a

World Art Historical approach—located and isolated via an analysis of the theoretic and scholarly discourses shaping World Art History as a school of thought and body of art historical knowledge—were distilled and applied into practice, testing the viability of a new disciplinary paradigm capable of narrating away from the nation-state towards rather networks of connection and exchange: first was the practice of geographic and temporal networks as context; second, the connecting of objects and groups of objects, and third, harnessing the power of the digital to tell stories. Indeed, by applying all three principles to a number of written text and image narrative experiments—original essays written for the lay museum audience via the museological output of the well-read online didactic essay—the ensuing “stories of art,” while referencing much of the same quantitative data art historians have relied upon for close to a century but reimagined qualitatively, responded with an art history different than one produced under art history’s nation-state paradigm. These experiments also worked to assess the effectiveness and in fact the very necessity of digital technologies in support of a World Art Historical approach in the museum.

848 See: Claire Farago, “The Future of World Art History as Cultural Memory,” in Memory as the Subject and Instrument of Art Studies, ed. Anna Korndorf (Moscow: State Institute for Art Studies, 2014).

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What these narrative experiments showed, and worked to contribute to the sum of

Part Two’s exploration of museological stories of art told in accordance with World Art

Historical research principles, is that in contrast to some models in which practice is born out of theory, in a World Art Historical paradigm—a constellation of research principles that foreground networks of connection and exchange and model for the discipline alternatives to national art histories that seek the inclusion of the whole of the world in art’s history—it is the scholarship of application that leads the development and advancement of World Art

Historical theory. Indeed, via practical experiments engaging with World Art Historical networks of connection and exchange—herein including a number of scholarly practices and museological applications that have increasingly disregarded the nation-state as organizing principle in favour of approaching objects from around the globe not only transnationally, but transculturally as well—have yielded compelling evidence of the ability of a World Art

Historical paradigm to effectively respond to the critique of Eurocentrism.

Building upon the conclusions of Chapter Four, “Chapter Five: Displaying World Art

History” sought to argue that in two key permanent exhibition gallery reinstallations in the

North American context—the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Galleries for the Art of the

Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia, and the National Gallery of

Canada’s Canadian and Indigenous Galleries—it was the museum, first at the level of the local-global (the Met) and second at the national level (the National Gallery), that, by working to displace master narratives that had long-positioned the West at centre, serves as an agent active in the telling of World Art Historical stories of art. Indeed, as part of a larger trend in scholarship working to challenge received notions of the discipline, the museum emerges as a site for the advancement and progress of the art historical discipline towards

369 wider, more robust frames of reference that work against the nation-state. Addressing the shift within the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, a global museum in every sense of the word, one critic wrote:

In recent years, a newer, so-called transnational approach to telling [the story of art] has emerged. Its practitioners have been making room in the 20th-century art’s familiar narrative, which usually focuses on Western Europe and North America, for less-known artists, movements, ideas and events from other parts of the world.849

This shift within the museum world denotes not only a resistance to the constraining category of the nation-state including all its familiar actors and select world regions, but also an interest in redirecting the discipline towards a new World Art Historical paradigm of networks of connection and exchange that fully embraces the globalization of the world’s cultures as its permanent condition:

[A global view] has both reflected and anticipated the age we live in. Globalization has created a new consciousness about the interconnected world and given us tools to think about art histories from Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East, challenging a certain parochialism in the art world and redrawing the way we write art history.850

Encapsulated here and as evidenced in Chapter Five are three curatorial practices that earmark a World Art Historical approach in the twenty-first century museum: first, the collapsing of boundaries between collecting areas and the departmental infrastructures that have historically maintained these divisions; second and related, the active collaboration of cross-disciplinary teams of curators and other museum professionals in order to assure the interdisciplinarity required by wider epistemological frameworks; and, third, the display (if

849 Edward M. Gomez, “A Whole Planet of Modern Art,” The New York Times, March 17, 2016, accessed April 18, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/17/arts/design/a-whole-planet-of-modern-art.html.

850 Alexandra Monroe, the senior curator of Asian art at the Guggenheim, and the institution’s first “senior advisor, global arts,” quoted in Edward M. Gomez, “A Whole Planet of Modern Art,” The New York Times, March 17, 2016, accessed April 18, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/17/arts/design/a-whole-planet-of- modern-art.html.

370 not the acquisition) of objects and works of human creation that break down the categories of art that have been imagined only to sustain and persist Euro-American conceptions. All three of these practices, when invoked in support of permanent exhibition gallery “retellings” of signature narrative exhibition displays, hold the power to strike in counter to the persistence of Eurocentrism in the discipline of art history.

Yet the rise of World Art Historical approaches across the twenty-first-century institutions of scholarship and the museum attests to more than its increased acceptance and theoretical maturation. In its turn away from the nation-state towards a new paradigm of networks of connection and exchange, North American art historical practice—following trends towards wider more robust frames upon which to platform the basis of knowledge discovery—signal not only a depreciation of the traditional paradigm of art history resulting in an immediate undermining of its principles, but can even be seen as an interrogation of ethno-national art history’s deep entrenchment in the belief in the inseparability of the nation-state from the discipline of art history. Equally significant is how the advancement of

World Art Historical approaches in key intellectual venues at the centre of the practice of the discipline of art history attest to a radical transformation currently underway in the discipline: recognition by a large cohort of scholars of the waning meaning and relevance of the nation- state in the exploration of art’s histories revealing a growing disconnect between how the discipline of art history is theorized and how it is increasingly being practised.

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A World Art Historical Perspective on the National Gallery of Canada’s Canadian Biennial Exhibition Series

If the nation-state is no longer unquestioningly accepted as a paradigm by which the discipline of art history might be organized, then the viability of nationality, or national identity, as a basis for understanding artistic identity requires rigorous evaluation. The case of Canada, and its National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, informs how one nation, via its leading art institution, shifted away from ethno-nationalist and geographically-rooted conceptions of artistic identity towards more cosmopolitan ones reflecting the crucible of diverse cultures, racialized communities, languages, and artmaking that so many nation- states are becoming. The case also informs the intersecting concerns of the fields of World

Art History and global contemporary art, both which attempt to address an unprecedented age of global interaction. Here, an examination of the shifting nature of national identity as conceived and expressed through the evolution and development of its signature group identity exhibition—two series of biennial exhibition of contemporary Canadian art held over seven decades of development, between 1953 and 1968, and then 2010 and 2017—serves to demonstrate the untenability of national identity in a once, and always, globalized world.

Across two chapters, “Chapter Six: Exhibiting and Collecting a National and

International Canada” and “Chapter Seven: Collecting and Exhibiting a Global Canada,” the biennial exhibition series’ ever-evolving approach to nationality and nationhood was traced, each of these constructs lying at the heart of World Art History’s challenge to the nation- state’s viability as a category for the arts. While on balance the sum of the biennial exhibition series was promoted as a transparent and public disclosure of the National Gallery of

Canada’s consideration of contemporary Canadian art for the national collection—in the first series, only mildly disguised in its ultimate purpose as a national buying show, as an

372 exhibition of Canada’s most recent and best work; and in the second, as a showcase of acquisition highlights from the National Gallery’s most important contemporary Canadian purchases aimed at taking the “pulse” of contemporary art production in Canada—the notion that together the two series stand simply as a collection of exhibitions of Canadian art by

Canadian artists belies the complexity of what it meant to be regarded as Canadian by the nation’s leading art institution at the mid-century mark and following, and in the present during a period of heightened globalization.

With each series and with each new exhibition, as the relationship of the contemporary Canadian artist with the nation of Canada transformed and extended, the

National Gallery of Canada actively negotiated the Canadianness of the artists the institution sought to represent it and the country. This negotiation of the terms for Canadian in Canadian artistic identity suggests the National Gallery of Canada as more than a venue for collection and/or exhibition, and the biennial exhibition series more than the output of the institution’s attendant curatorial practice. By shifting the ideological centre of Canadian identity from one stably-grounded in physical presence and legal status to one alternatively-positioned and in a constant state of flux, through the biennial exhibition series the National Gallery actively participated in the shaping of national artistic identity positioning it, in its governing access of the artists included in an identity exhibition positioned as Canadian, as a discursive institution powerful in mediating the physical and the symbolic display and collection of a constructed national identity both flexible and conditional. By extension, the phenomenon of the National Gallery of Canada’s biennial exhibition series—the sum of both the first historical series and the second ongoing series—emerges not only as an expression of the

Canadian artist’s negotiated artistic identity, but as an acute index of the shifting nature of

373 national identity. The ability, authority, and agency of the National Gallery of Canada to negotiate Canadian artistic identity, and the recognition and wide acceptance of its various shifts across the national, international, and global stage, put into question the meaning and relevance of national identity with regards to the contemporary Canadian artist. It also challenges the stability and usefulness of the nation-state paradigm arguing the untenability of national identity in a once-and-always globalized world.

From Nations to Networks

Does World Art History represent a meaningful response to the Euro-American conception of ethno-national art history and address the critique of entrenched Eurocentrisms to move current disciplinary theory and practice in the direction of wider, more robust frames of reference? Across a number of intellectual spaces through which the discipline of art history generates its shape, a significant shift is underway. Marked by a turn away from epistemological frameworks that foreground the nation in their terminologies, methodologies and approaches, and in the world regions and temporal frames that focus study, developing across the three institutions of art historical knowledge examined in this dissertation a mass migration of scholars, with confidence waning in the ability of the discipline to adequately address the critique of Eurocentrism, are seeking in their theoretical approaches and, most significantly, in their practices, to adopt a new disciplinary protocol that takes in its scope and directionality networks of connection and exchange. Yet more than simply rejecting national borders in favour of thinking transnationally, scholars are moving the disciplinary framework of art history towards transculturalism taking as a new focus not nations but rather networks. The result is a different art history, however one that represents not an epistemological break as posited by some scholars but a paradigm shift within the discipline

374 of art history. It was Thomas Kuhn who argued that in coming to accept any new paradigm, a community of scholars must come to agree on a set of principles that guide the acquisition of and valuation of knowledge. This consensus is well underway.

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Appendix A.1: Apollo 11 Cave Stones

Apollo 11 Cave Stones by NATHALIE HAGER Published November 21, 2015 Word Count: 1,032

This image has been removed due to copyright restrictions. The original image can be found online (under AP art history): https://smarthistory.org/courses-and-syllabi/

Apollo 11 Cave Stones, Namibia, quartzite, c. 25,500–25,300 B.C.E. Image courtesy of State Museum of Namibia.

A significant discovery Approximately 25,000 years ago, in a rock shelter in the Huns Mountains of Namibia on the southwest coast of Africa (today part of the Ai-Ais Richtersveld Transfrontier Park), an animal was drawn in charcoal on a hand-sized slab of stone. The stone was left behind, over time becoming buried on the floor of the cave by layers of sediment and debris until 1969 when a team led by German archaeologist W.E. Wendt excavated the rock shelter and found the first fragment (above, left). Wendt named the cave “Apollo 11” upon hearing on his shortwave radio of NASA’s successful space mission to the moon. It was more than three years later however, after a subsequent excavation, when Wendt discovered the matching fragment (above, right), that archaeologists and art historians began to understand the significance of the find.

Location of the Huns Mountains of Namibia, © Map Data Google

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Indirect dating techniques In total seven stone fragments of brown-grey quartzite, some of them depicting traces of animal figures drawn in charcoal, ocher, and white, were found buried in a concentrated area of the cave floor less than two meters square. While it is not possible to learn the actual date of the fragments, it is possible to estimate when the rocks were buried by radiocarbon dating the archaeological layer in which they were found. Archaeologists estimate that the cave stones were buried between 25,500 and 25,300 years ago during the Middle Stone Age period in southern Africa making them, at the time of their discovery, the oldest dated art known on the African continent and among the earliest evidence of human artistic expression worldwide.

[What was the Middle Stone Age? The Middle Stone Age was a period of African prehistory between the Early Stone Age and the Later Stone Age, generally considered to have begun around 280,000 years ago and ended around 50–-25,000 years ago.]

While more recent discoveries of much older human artistic endeavors have corrected our understanding (consider the 2008 discovery of a 100,000-year-old paint workshop in the Blombos Cave on the southern coast of Africa), the stones remain the oldest examples of figurative art from the African continent. Their discovery contributes to our conception of early humanity’s creative attempts, before the invention of formal writing, to express their thoughts about the world around them.

The origins of art? Genetic and fossil evidence tells us that Homo sapiens (anatomically modern humans who evolved from an earlier species of hominids) developed on the continent of Africa more than 100,000 years ago and spread throughout the world. But what we do not know—what we have only been able to assume—is that art too began in Africa. Is Africa, where humanity originated, home to the world’s oldest art? If so, can we say that art began in Africa?

100,000 years of human occupation

View across Fish River Canyon toward the Huns Mountains, /Ai-/Ais – Richtersveld Transfrontier Park, southern Namibia (photo: Thomas Schooch, CC-BY-SA-3.00)

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The Apollo 11 rock shelter overlooks a dry gorge, sitting twenty meters above what was once a river that ran along the valley floor. The cave entrance is wide, about twenty-eight meters across, and the cave itself is deep: eleven meters from front to back. While today a person can stand upright only in the front section of the cave, during the Middle Stone Age, as well as in the periods before and after, the rock shelter was an active site of ongoing human settlement.

Inside the cave, above and below the layer where the Apollo 11 cave stones were found, archaeologists unearthed a sequence of cultural layers representing over 100,000 years of human occupation. In these layers stone artifacts, typical of the Middle Stone Age period— such as blades, pointed flakes, and scraper—were found in raw materials not native to the region, signaling stone tool technology transported over long distances. Among the remnants of hearths, ostrich eggshell fragments bearing traces of red color were also found—either remnants of ornamental painting or evidence that the eggshells were used as containers for pigment.

This image has been removed due to copyright restrictions. The original image can be found online (under AP art history): https://smarthistory.org/courses-and-syllabi/

Excavation site of the Apollo 11 stones (photo: Jutta Vogel Stiftung)

On the cave walls, belonging to the Later Stone Age period, rock paintings were discovered depicting white and red zigzags, two handprints, three geometric images, and traces of color. And on the banks of the riverbed just upstream from the cave, engravings of a variety of animals, some with zigzag lines leading upwards, were found and dated to less than 2000 years ago.

The Apollo 11 Cave Stones But the most well-known of the rock shelter’s finds, and the most enigmatic, remain the Apollo 11 cave stones (image above). On the cleavage face of what was once a complete slab, an unidentified animal form was drawn resembling a feline in appearance but with human hind legs that were probably added later. Barely visible on the head of the animal are two slightly-curved horns likely belonging to an Oryx, a large grazing antelope; on the animal’s underbelly, possibly the sexual organ of a bovid. [What is a bovid? The Bovidae are the biological family of mammals that includes bison, African buffalo, water buffalo, antelopes, gazelles, sheep, goats, muskoxen, and domestic cattle.]

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Perhaps we have some kind of supernatural creature—a therianthrope, part human and part animal? If so, this may suggest a complex system of shamanistic belief. Taken together with the later rock paintings and the engravings, Apollo 11 becomes more than just a cave offering shelter from the elements. It becomes a site of ritual significance used by many over thousands of years.

The global origins of art In the Middle Stone Age period in southern Africa prehistoric man was a hunter-gatherer, moving from place to place in search of food and shelter. But this modern human also drew an animal form with charcoal—a form as much imagined as it was observed. This is what makes the Apollo 11 cave stones find so interesting: the stones offer evidence that Homo sapiens in the Middle Stone Age—us, some 25,000 years ago—were not only anatomically modern, but behaviorally modern as well. That is to say, these early humans possessed the new and unique capacity for modern symbolic thought, “the human capacity,” long before what was previously understood.

The cave stones are what archaeologists term art mobilier—small-scale prehistoric art that is moveable. But mobile art, and rock art generally, is not unique to Africa. Rock art is a global phenomenon that can be found across the World—in Europe, Asia, Australia, and North and South America. While we cannot know for certain what these early humans intended by the things that they made, by focusing on art as the product of humanity’s creativity and imagination we can begin to explore where, and hypothesize why, art began.

Additional resources:

Introduction to Prehistoric Art on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

Apollo 11 and Wonderwerk Cave Stones on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

African Rock Art on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

“Africa: Continent of Origins,” lecture was delivered by Dr. Ian Tattersall at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on the occasion of the symposium “Genesis: Exploration of Origins” on March 7, 2003.

“Homo Sapiens,” from Becoming Human

British Museum – Rock Art and the Origins of Art in Africa

Namibia from the TARA, the Trust for African Rock Art

Bradshaw Foundation – Africa Rock Art Archive

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John Masson, “Apollo 11 Cave in Southwest Namibia: Some Observations on the Site and its Rock Art,” The South African Archaeological Bulletin 61, no. 183 (2006), pp. 76–-89.

Ralf Vogelsang, “The Rock-Shelter “Apollo 11” – Evidence of Early Modern Humans in South-Western Namibia,” in Heritage and Cultures in Modern Namibia – In-depth Views of the Country, edited by Cornelia Limpricht and Megan Biesele (Göttingen, Windhoek- Namibia: Klaus Hess Publishers, 2008), pp. 183–96.

W. E. Wendt, “‘Art Mobilier’ from the Apollo 11 Cave, South West Africa: Africa’s Oldest Dated Works of Art,” The South African Archaeological Bulletin vol. 31, no. 121/122 (1976), pp. 5–11.

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Appendix A.2: Anthropomorphic Stele

Anthropomorphic Stele by NATHALIE HAGER Published December 31, 2015 Word Count: 1,055

Anthropomorphic stele, El-Maakir-Qaryat al-kaafa near Ha’il, Saudi Arabia, 4th millennium B.C.E. (4000-3000 B.C.E.), sandstone, 92 x 21 cm (National Museum, Riyadh) (photo: Explicit CC BY-SA 4.0).

An anthropomorphic stele from Ha’il This stele is tall, measuring approximately three feet high. But it is not just vertical height that makes this free-standing stone sculpture appear human, or anthropomorphic. While both sides are sculpted, emphasis is on the front, particularly the face, chest, and waist: a trapezoidal head rests directly on squared shoulders with the outline of a face framing two closely-spaced eyes and a flattened nose; on the robed figure’s torso a necklace hangs with two cords diagonally crossing the body with an awl (a small pointed tool) attached; and at the waist, a double-bladed dagger hangs from a wide belt that continues around to the back. The sculpture is simple, even abstract, but clearly represents a human figure.

[What is a stele? A stele is a vertical stone monument or marker often inscribed with text or relief carving.]

Found in a small village near Ha’il in northwest Saudi Arabia, this anthropomorphic (human- like) stele was one of three discovered in the region. The trio join a corpus of more than sixty low-relief sculptures in human form dating to the fourth millennium B.C.E. and discovered across the Arabian Peninsula in the last four decades. Despite the vast territory in which they were found (some 2,300 kilometers, stretching from Jordan in the north to Yemen in the south) these stelae (the plural of stele or in Latin, stela) share certain features and characteristics. How can this be?

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Map of the Arabian Peninsula

Arabia’s prehistory While today Saudi Arabia is known for its desert sands and oil reserves, in prehistoric times the environment and landscape were dramatically different—more fertile and lush, and readily accessible to humans: early stone petroglyphs depict people hunting ostriches (see below), a flightless bird that hasn’t been able to survive in the region for thousands of years.

[What is a petroglyph? A petroglyph is a rock engraving in which an image has been pecked or cut into the rock.]

It was during the Neolithic period, from the sixth to the fourth millennium B.C.E. when the Arabian Peninsula was more like a savannah than a desert, that small groups of hunter- gatherers gradually shifted their economy from predation to production by domesticating such herd animals as sheep, goats, and cattle, and settling in oases and mountainous regions linked to one another by caravan trails. Due to changing climatic conditions these settlement sites were often only temporary—occupied seasonally but repeatedly, and probably for centuries—yet it was this constant need for movement that stimulated communication between regions and interaction among its societies. But more than just people moved along Arabia’s caravan trails: ideas and objects travelled too.

This image has been removed due to copyright restrictions. The original image can be found online (under AP art history): https://smarthistory.org/courses-and-syllabi/

Rock engraving depicting an ostrich hunt: “Wadi Uqla horsemen and ostrich,” Tayma oasis site in northwestern Saudi Arabia

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Figural representation in pre-Islamic Arabia On a rock wall at Tabuk, close to the Jordan-Saudi Arabia border, two human silhouettes dating to the late Neolithic period show the same cord, awl, and double-bladed dagger as the Ha’il stele. In Riqseh, in southern Jordan, a broken stele has been found with a similar awl and dagger. While in Southern Arabia stelae are considerably smaller than in the north (some reach only 40 centimeters high), examples from Rawk in Yemen display the same characteristic lack of detail as the Ha’il stele. This evidence of stylistic influence, coupled with the presence of exogenous materials (materials that originated elsewhere), confirm that during the Neolithic period objects were circulated and exchanged across wide swathes of territory.

This image has been removed due to copyright restrictions. The original image can be found online (under AP art history): https://smarthistory.org/courses-and-syllabi/

Three anthropomorphic stelae dating to the 4th millennium B.C.E. found in northwest Saudi Arabia, near Ha’il and in Tayma (photo: © Haupt & Binder)

What is just as interesting as this common visual repertoire is the shared anthropomorphism: each stele represents an upright male figure carved in stone—remarkable, for it is figural representation in a land thought for so long to have none. Indeed, for many, the history of the Arabian Peninsula began with the rise of Islam in the seventh century C.E. when artistic expression was focused on the written word and human form was largely absent. But what the Ha’il stele reveals—what the full corpus of anthropomorphic stelae show us—is the existence of a pre-Islamic Arabia in which the human figure dominates.

Arabia: an open peninsula at the crossroads of trade Archaeology is a relatively new field of study on the Arabian Peninsula: surprisingly, it is only within the last forty years or so that scientists have been able to shed light on Saudi Arabia’s early material culture to recognize a historical and cultural past largely ignored and previously believed to hold no importance at all.

Before Arabia traded in incense, before Islam (when Muslims traveled in pilgrimage to Mecca), during the Neolithic period early caravan trails expanded into an intra-regional network that eventually spread externally into contact between Eastern Arabia and Mesopotamia. It was this early contact that positioned the Peninsula, in the Bronze Age and through Antiquity, as the center of an active and interconnected Ancient World—a commercial and cultural crossroads bridging East and West—linking trade and pilgrimage routes that reached from India and China, to the Mediterranean and Egypt, Yemen and East Africa to Syria, Iran and Mesopotamia.

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Interpreting the Ha’il stele Despite apparent visual similarities it would be a serious error to assume that the meanings and symbols of each stele were everywhere the same—each region, village, and tribe is believed to differ in custom and to have developed strong local traditions. To avoid the risk of assigning generalized meanings to distinct anthropomorphic stelae excavated across the Arabian Peninsula, scholars have increasingly focused on local culture in their analysis of material history. In other words, they have looked beyond what appears to be a common style to conduct a fine-grained analysis of each stone’s unique context of local social and ritual practices. With this in mind, how are we to interpret the Ha’il stele, one of the Arabian Peninsula’s earliest known artifacts?

Archaeologists believe that the Ha’il stele was probably associated with religious or burial practices, and was likely used as a grave marker in an open-air sanctuary. While we do not know who produced the stele (just imagine a specialist stone carver working among mobile pastoral herders), we continue to be intrigued by the quality of the carving and its minimalist, yet expressive, representation of the human figure.

Postscript: the global phenomenon of the stele While carved or inscribed stone stelae were used primarily as grave markers, they were also used for dedication, commemoration, and demarcation. Stele is the term used most often in the Mediterranean World, yet similar objects called by other names and dating to most periods have been found throughout the world including the Ancient Near East, Ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, China, Islamic lands, and Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica and South America.

Some Smarthistory examples:

Victory Stele of Naram-Sim, Akkadian (2254–2218 B.C.E.)

Law code of Hammurabi, Babylonian (1792–1750 B.C.E.)

Grave Stele of Hegeso, Classical (c. 410 B.C.E.)

Stele of Buddha Maitreya, Tang Dynasty (618–907)

Additional resources:

“Stela” – Britannica Encyclopedia Online

The Arabian Rock Heritage Project

‘Roads of Arabia’ exhibition at the Louvre – New York Times

Covington, Richard. “Roads of Arabia,” Aramco World—includes map of pilgrimage and trade routes

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Rémy Crassard and Philipp Drechsler, “Towards New Paradigms: Multiple Pathways for the Arabian Neolithic.” Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy 24 (2013), pp. 3–8.

Ute Franke, “Early Stelae in Stone,” Roads of Arabia: The Archaeological Treasures of Saudi Arabia, edited by Ute Franke and Joachim Gierlichs (Tubingen: Wasmuth Verlag, 2011), pp. 68–71.

Tara Steimer-Herbert, “Three Funerary Stelae from the 4th Millennium BC,” in Roads of Arabia: Archaeology and History of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, edited by Ibrahim Al- Ghabban, Béatrice André-Salvini, Françoise Demange, Carine Juvin, and Marianne Cotty (Paris: Somogy Art Publishers: 2010), pp. 166–9.

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Appendix A.3: Running Horned Woman

Running Horned Woman by NATHALIE HAGER Published April 30, 2016 Word Count: 1,565

This image has been removed due to copyright restrictions. The original image can be found online (under AP art history): https://smarthistory.org/courses-and-syllabi/

Running Horned Woman, 6,000–4,000 B.C.E., pigment on rock, Tassili n’Ajjer, Algeria

“Discovery” Between 1933 and 1940, camel-corps officer Lieutenant Brenans of the French Foreign Legion completed a series of small sketches and hand- written notes detailing his discovery of dozens of rock art sites deep within the canyons of the Tassili n’Ajjer. Tassili n’Ajjer is a difficult to access plateau in the Algerian section of the Sahara Desert near the borders of Libya and Niger in northern Africa (see map below). Brenans donated hundreds of his sketches to the Bardo Museum in Algiers, alerting the scientific community to one of the richest rock art concentrations on Earth and prompting site visits that included fellow Frenchman and archaeologist Henri Lhote.

Lhote recognized the importance of the region and returned again and again, most notably in 1956 with a team of copyists for a 16-month expedition to map and study the rock art of the Tassili. Two years later Lhote published A la découverte des fresques du Tassili. The book became an instant best--seller, and today is one of the most popular texts on archaeological discovery.

Sand and rocks, Tassili n’Ajjer, Algeria (photo: Akli Salah, CC BY-SA 4.0)

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Lhote made African rock art famous by bringing some of the estimated 15,000 human figure and animal paintings and engravings found on the rock walls of the Tassili’s many gorges and shelters it to the wider public. Yet contrary to the impression left by the title of his book, neither Lhote nor his team could lay claim to having discovered Central Saharan rock art: long before Lhote, and even before Brenans, in the late nineteenth century a number of travelers from Germany, Switzerland, and France had noted the existence of “strange” and “important” rock sculptures in Ghat, Tadrart Acacus, and Upper Tassili. But it was the Tuareg—the indigenous peoples of the region, many of whom served as guides to these early European explorers—who long knew of the paintings and engravings covering the rock faces of the Tassili.

This image has been removed due to copyright restrictions. The original image can be found online (under AP art history): https://smarthistory.org/courses-and-syllabi/

Tassili n’Ajjer is a Tamahaq name meaning “plateau” of the Ajjer people (the Kel Ajjer is group of tribes whose traditional territory was here). Much of the 1,500–2,100 meter-high plateau is protected by an 80,000 square kilometer National Park.

The “Horned Goddess” Lhote published not only reproductions of the paintings and engravings he found on the rock walls of the Tassili, but also his observations. In one excerpt he reported that with a can of water and a sponge in hand he set out to investigate a “curious figure” spotted by a member of his team in an isolated rock shelter located within a compact group of mountains known as the Aouanrhet massif, the highest of all the “rock cities” on the Tassili. Lhote swabbed the wall with water to reveal a figure he called the “Horned Goddess”:

On the damp rock -surface stood out the gracious silhouette of a woman running. One of her legs, slightly flexed, just touched the ground, while the other was raised in the air as high as it would normally go. From the knees, the belt and the widely outstretched arms fell fine fringes. From either side of the head and above two horns that spread out horizontally was an extensive dotted area resembling a cloud of grain falling from a wheat field. Although the whole assemblage was skillfully and carefully composed there was something free and easy about it…

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Visible in this reproduction of the original rock painting are two groupings in red ochre of small human figures superimposed onto the horned goddess.

The Running Horned Woman, the title by which the painting is commonly known today, was found in a massif so secluded and so difficult to access that Lhote’s team concluded that the collection of shelters was likely a sanctuary and the female figure—“the most beautiful, the most finished and the most original”—a goddess:

Perhaps we have here the figure of a priestess of some agricultural religion or the picture of a goddess of such a cult who foreshadow—or is derived from—the goddess Isis, to whom, in Egypt, was attributed the discovery of agriculture.

Lhote’s suggestion that the painting’s source was Egyptian was influenced by a recently published hypothesis by his mentor, the French anthropologist Henri Breuil, the then undisputed authority on prehistoric rock art who was renowned for his work on Paleolithic cave art in Europe. In an essay titled, “The White Lady of Brandberg, South-West Africa, Her Companions and Her Guards,” Breuil famously claimed that a painting discovered in a small rock shelter in Namibia showed influences of Classical antiquity and was not African in origin, but possibly the work of Phoenician travellers from the Mediterranean. Lhote, equally convinced of outside influence, linked the Tassili painting’s provenance with Breuil’s ideas and revised the title to the ‘White Lady’ of Aouanrhet:

In other paintings found a few days later in the same massif we were able to discern, from some characteristic features, an indication of Egyptian influence. Some features are, no doubt, not very marked in our ‘White Lady’; still, all the same, some details as the curve of the breasts, led us to think that the picture may have been executed at a time when Egyptian traditions were beginning to be felt in the Tassili.

Foreign influence? Time and scholarship would reveal that the assignment of Egyptian influence on the Running Horned Woman was erroneous, and Lhote the victim of a hoax: French members of his team made “copies” of Egyptionized figures, passing them off as faithful reproductions of authentic Tassili rock wall paintings. These fakes were accepted by Lhote (if indeed he knew nothing of the forgeries), and falsely sustained his belief in the possibility of foreign influence on Central Saharan rock art. Breuil’s theories were likewise discredited: the myth of the “White Lady” was rejected by every archaeologist of repute, and his promotion of foreign influence viewed as racist.

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The Tassili plateau, hailed as “the greatest center of prehistoric art in the world”: undercuts at cliff bases have created rock shelters with smooth walls ideal for painting and engraving. The Tassili’s unique geological formations of eroded sandstone rock pillars and arches— “forests of stone”—resemble a lunar landscape. (photo: Marina & Enrique, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Yet Breuil and Lhote were not alone in finding it hard to believe that ancient Africans discovered how to make art on their own, or to have developed artistic sensibilities. Until quite recently many Europeans maintained that art “spread” or was “taken” into Africa, and, aiming to prove this thesis, anointed many works with Classical- sounding names and sought out similarities with early rock art in Europe. Although such vestiges of colonial thinking are today facing a reckoning, cases such as the “White Lady” (both of Namibia and of Tassili) remind us of the perils of imposing cultural values from the outside.

Chronology While we have yet to learn how, and in what places, the practice of rock art began, no firm evidence has been found to show that African rock art—some ten million images across the continent—was anything other than a spontaneous initiative by early Africans. Scholars have estimated the earliest art to date to 12,000 or more years ago, yet despite the use of both direct and indirect dating techniques very few firm dates exist (“direct dating” uses measurable physical and chemical analysis, such as radiocarbon dating, while “indirect dating” primarily uses associations from the archaeological context). In the north, where rock art tends to be quite diverse, research has focused on providing detailed descriptions of the art and placing works in chronological sequence based on style and content. This ordering approach results in useful classification and dating systems, dividing the Tassili paintings and engravings into periods of concurrent and overlapping traditions (the Running Horned Woman is estimated to date to approximately 6,000 to 4,000 B.C.E.—placing it within the “Round Head Period”), but offers little in the way of interpretation of the painting itself.

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This image has been removed due to copyright restrictions. The original image can be found online (under AP art history): https://smarthistory.org/courses-and-syllabi/

Running Horned Woman (detail) (photo: FJ Expeditions)

Advancing an interpretation of the Running Horned Woman Who was the Running Horned Woman? Was she indeed a goddess, and her rock shelter some sort of sanctuary? What does the image mean? And why did the artist make it? For so long the search for meaning in rock art was considered inappropriate and unachievable—only recently have scholars endeavored to move beyond the mere description of images and styles, and, using a variety of interdisciplinary methods, make serious attempts to interpret the rock art of the Central Sahara.

Lhote recounted that the Running Horned Woman was found on an isolated rock whose base was hollowed out into a number of small shelters that could not have been used as dwellings. This remote location, coupled with an image of marked pictorial quality—depicting a female with two horns on her head, dots on her body probably representing scarification, and wearing such attributes of the dance as armlets and garters—suggested to him that the site, and the subject of the painting, fell outside of the everyday. More recent scholarship has supported Lhote’s belief in the painting’s symbolic, rather than literal, representation: it is unlikely that hunter-gatherer peoples in the Neolithic age in the Central Sahara would have worn horns or painted their bodies during their ordinary activities. Rather, this female horned figure, her body adorned and decorated, found in one of the highest massifs in the Tassili—a region is believed to hold special status due to its elevation and unique topology—suggests ritual, rite, or ceremony.

Archers, Tassili n'Ajjer (photo: Patrick Gruban, CC BY-SA 2.0)

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But there is further work to be done to advance an interpretation of the Running Horned Woman. Increasingly scholars have studied rock shelter sites as a whole, rather than isolating individual depictions, and the shelter’s location relative to the overall landscape and nearby water courses, in order to learn the significance of various “rock cities” in both image-making and image-viewing.

Archaeological data from decorated pottery, which is a dated artistic tradition, is key in suggesting that the concept of art was firmly established in the Central Sahara at the time of Tassili rock art production. Comparative studies with other rock art complexes, specifically the search for similarities in fundamental concepts in African religious beliefs, might yield the most fruitful approaches to interpretation. In other words, just as southern African rock studies have benefitted from tracing the beliefs and practices of the San people, so too may a study of Tuareg ethnography shed light on the ancient rock art sites of the Tassili.

Afterword: the threatened rock art of the Central Sahara Tassili’s rock walls were commonly sponged with water in order to enhance the reproduction of its images, either in trace, sketch, or photograph. This washing of the rock face has had a devastating effect on the art, upsetting the physical, chemical, and biological balance of the images and their rock supports. Many of the region’s subsequent visitors—tourists, collectors, photographers, and the next generation of researchers—all captivated by Lhote’s “discovery”—have continued the practice of moistening the paintings in order to reveal them. Today scholars report paintings that are severely faded while some have simply disappeared. In addition, others have suffered from irreversible damage caused by outright vandalism: art looted or stolen as souvenirs. In order to protect this valuable center of African rock art heritage, Tassili N’Ajjer was declared a National Park in 1972. It was classified as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1982 and a Biosphere Reserve in 1986.

Additional Resources

African Rock Art: Tassili-n-Ajjer on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

Tassili n’Ajjer – African World Heritage Sites

TARA – Trust for African Rock Art: Algeria and TARA Interactive Rock Art Map

Coulson, David and Alec Campbell. African Rock Art: Paintings and Engravings on Stone. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2001.

Coulson, David and Alec Campbell. “Rock Art of the Tassili n Ajjer, Algeria.” Adoranten, no. 1 (2010), pp. 1–15.

Keenan, Jeremy H. “The Lesser Gods of the Sahara.” Public Archaeology 2, no. 3 (2002), pp. 131–50.

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Lajoux, Jean-Dominque. The Rock Paintings of Tassili. Translated by G. D. Liversage. London: Thames and Hudson, 1963.

Lhote, Henri. The Search for the Tassili Frescoes. Translated by Alan Houghton Brodrick. London: Hutchinson & Co., 1959.

Soukopova, Jitka. “The Earliest Rock Paintings of the Central Sahara: Approaching Interpretation.” Time and Mind: The Journal of Archaeology, Consciousness and Culture 4, no. 2 (2011), pp. 193–216.

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